Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  ‘Nobody asked me the first two dances,' she wrote mournfully. ‘The next two I danced with Mr Crawford - and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr Granville, Mrs Granville’s son -whom my dear friend Miss Armstrong offered to introduce to me - or with a new, odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last without any introduction asked me if I meant to dance again.’ Jane could only account for such shocking familiarity by guessing he might be Irish. She suspected him of being connected with the son and son’s wife of an Irish viscount, ‘bold, queer-looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme’. Irish Tom Lefroy had not been bold enough to please her. Now she took offence at a man’s attention which she sneered at as a typically Irish breach of good manners.

  She is equally acid about Miss Armstrong, whom she regarded coolly even though Miss Armstrong imagined herself to be a ‘dear friend’. Miss Armstrong seemed to like people rather too easily Jane perceived in her ‘no wit or genius’ though Jane allowed her to have sense and some degree of taste with ‘very engaging’ manners. ‘Like other young ladies, she is considerably genteeler than her parents; Mrs Armstrong sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of my visit.’ Jane begged Cassandra not to mention this to their mother for fear that she might do the same. Later she softened towards Miss Armstrong, who gently reproached her for coolness. Jane realized the girl was lonely and regretted her own bad manners.

  Although she loved the seaside Jane never learned to swim. There were no swimming pools and sea-bathing was a new pastime. Men swam in ponds and rivers but ladies did not. Bathing was done from the bathing machine, a little cabin on wheels drawn by a horse into the water. Sea-bathing, even in winter, was prescribed as a remedy for various complaints - asthma, cancer, consumption, deafness, ruptures, rheumatism and madness. Jane found sea-bathing so delightful and Molly so pressing with her to enjoy herself that she stayed in rather too long and grew tired. Jane had few opportunities for pleasure. Despite parties and dances and tea-drinking her life was a dull one and she frequently expressed boredom and irritation.

  The lease on the house at 4 Sydney Place in Bath had expired and the Austens did not renew it. When the household reassembled in Bath it was in 27 Green Park Buildings, which they had considered unsuitable when they viewed it in 1801.

  Bad news arrived that December. Mrs Lefroy, sister of Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges and friend of Jane Austen’s youth, was killed at the age of fifty-five when her horse threw her. Meeting James Austen in Overton that morning, she had complained that the animal was so stupid and lazy that she could not get him to canter. Something startled him and he bolted. Mrs Lefroy’s servant caught at the bridle but missed his hold and Mrs Lefroy was fatally injured. She was by all accounts charming and gracious and her death was a great shock to Jane, who missed her badly. The accident happened on Jane’s twenty-ninth birthday, while the Austens were in Bath. Later Jane wrote a poem to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Madam Leftoy’s death. Thirteen stanzas long, it begins:

  The day returns again, my natal day;

  What mixed emotions with the thought arise!

  Beloved friend, four years have passed away

  Since thou wert snatched forever from our eyes.

  The day, commemorative of my birth

  Bestowing life and light and hope on me,

  Brings back the hour which was thy last on earth.

  Oh! bitter pang of torturing memory.

  Angelic woman! past my powers to praise

  In language meet, thy talents, temper, mind,

  Thy solid worth, thy captivating grace!

  Thou friend and ornament of humankind.

  Worse was to come. A month after Anne Lefroy’s death, on 21 January 1805, Jane had to write giving Frank the news that their father had died at the age of seventy-three after a forty-eight-hour illness. She wrote in fact two letters, the second on the following day when she realized that Frank would have reached Portsmouth. She assured her brother that Mr Austen had not suffered much and had gone almost in his sleep. She was of course going to write to Edward at Godmersham and to Henry at Brompton. ‘His tenderness as a father, who can do justice to?’ she wrote. She informed Frank that James was due to arrive the next day and that the funeral would be on the following Saturday, at the church on the site of the one in which Mr Austen had been married forty years earlier. Charles was at Halifax, Nova Scotia, aboard HMS Indian and could not come home for the funeral. Henry was at Godmersham and left at once for Bath, though Edward could not come.

  James at once urged his mother to come and live with him and Mary at Steventon but she wanted to stay near her brother in Bath. Mr Austen’s income died with him and Mrs Austen had only £140 a year. Even those modest payments were sometimes delayed. The daughters had no money of their own, apart from the interest on Cassandra’s legacy. Jane was totally dependent. Edward, who had not supported his mother when his father was alive, offered a subsidy of £100 a year. With nine children of his own already he could hardly spare more. James, Henry and Frank each chipped in £50. Frank offered £100 but Mrs Austen would accept only half that sum. Frank wanted his generosity to be kept secret but Henry, characteristically officious, overruled him. Charles, only twenty-five years old and with his way to make, was not expected to help. Mrs Austen wrote to Mrs Leigh-Perrot that her sons were ‘good to her. But the widow and her daughters were far from comfortably off. ‘My mother will have a good £400 per annum,’ wrote Henry to Frank. Later he remembered that with Cassandra’s income, this would come to £450. But three people had to live on that. Henry expected his mother to take furnished lodgings and reduce her establishment to just one female servant. This was living uncomfortably near the bone.

  Jane forwarded to Frank a compass and sundial in a black shagreen (artificially roughened leather) case which had been their father’s, together with a pair of scissors. Soon Henry was able to congratulate Frank on his command of the Canopus, an eighty-gun ship, which Henry the banker calculated would be worth £500 a year.

  James wrote to Frank about their mother: ‘Her future plans are not quite settled, but I believe her summers will be spent in the country amongst her relations and chiefly I trust among her children - the winters she will spend in comfortable lodgings in Bath. It is a just satisfaction to know that her circumstances will be easy … You will I am sure forgive Henry for not having entirely complied with your request for secrecy…’ Henry was a blabbermouth, later revealing the authorship of his sister’s novels although they were published anonymously.

  On 25 March 1805 the three women moved out of the house in Green Park Buildings and into lodgings at 25 Gay Street. This was halfway up the hill leading to the Circus and not far from the Royal Crescent. They were neither happy nor comfortable. Even Mrs Austen wanted to leave.

  Cassandra left almost immediately for Ibthorpe to stay with Martha Lloyd and her mother, though she was indisposed herself. Old Mrs Lloyd was sinking and Jane’s letter expressed the hope that her end would be as peaceful and easy as their own father’s had been. Jane was sure that Cassandra’s support would be invaluable to Martha and Mary, who was with them.

  Jane told her sister that she and her mother were much in demand for quiet evenings drinking tea and that this would benefit them economically ‘Our tea and sugar will last a great while. I think we are just the kind of people and party to be treated about among our relations; we cannot be supposed to be very rich.’ Jane and her mother had been to ‘see Miss Chamberlayne look hot on horseback’. Seven years and four months ago they had been to the same riding house to see Miss Lefroy’s performance. ‘What a different set we are now moving in!’ wrote Jane sadly. Bath had two riding schools where horses could also be hired: Ryles’s in Monmouth Street, and Dash’s in Montpelier Row, which also boasted a court on which to play real (royal) tennis.

  The weather was bright and hot, and the walk in the Crescent had been curtailed. They went into the field nearby and passed Stephen Terry, part of the noi
sy family at one of the balls Jane attended in 1799, and his fiancée Miss Seymer. Her elegance was famed, but neither her dress nor her air had anything of the dash or stylishness people had talked of: quite the contrary, in fact. She looked very quiet and her dress was not even smart, Jane commented. The Austen women at this low point in Jane’s life could not rise to being smart themselves, either in dress or in lifestyle. They were destitute.

  An affectionate and entertaining letter had come from Henry. That it was enjoyable to read was no credit to him, Jane said, as in her fond eyes he could not help being amusing. He was grateful for a screen Jane had embroidered and did not know which delighted him more, the idea or the execution. His wife Eliza ‘of course goes halves in all this’ and sent a message of warm acknowledgment of the sisters’ gift of a brooch. Henry had mentioned having sent a letter to Frank, who was in Gibraltar, from his fiancée, Mary Gibson, via General Tilson, then waiting at Spithead. Jane wondered whether it might be possible to reach Frank through another intermediary. Henry also proposed to meet his sisters on the coast, an expedition Jane looked forward to as ‘desirable and delightful’. ‘He talks of the rambles we took together last summer with pleasing affection,’ she added.

  On 16 April, while Cassandra was still at Ibthorpe, old Mrs Lloyd died. Martha’s mourning clothes were late being delivered. Mourning black was essential for a respectable appearance. Martha was invited to live with Mrs Austen and her daughters to share expenses. Jane had always been fond of Martha, preferring her to her sister Mary, and what Jane called ‘our partnership with Martha’ seems to have been a success.

  Mrs Stent, who had shared a home with Mrs Lloyd, was an early friend, rather down on her luck. On 21 April 1805 Jane wrote, ‘Poor Mrs Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs Stents ourselves, unequal to anything and unwelcome to everybody.’ Jane was nearly thirty, unmarried, worried about affording tea and sugar and living in rented rooms. Her future did not look promising.

  She filled her letter to Cassandra with chatter about crepe sleeves and a head-dress of crepe and flowers, ‘but I do not think it looked particularly well.’ Her Aunt Leigh-Perrot owed her money but was reluctant to pay in hard cash, offering instead tickets to ‘the Grand Sydney-Garden Breakfast’ which ‘Perrot’ would buy if Jane asked him. Jane felt bound to refuse this grudging offer.

  This incident shows Jane Leigh-Perrot in an unpleasant light, unwilling to pay an impoverished niece a small sum (it was only for a cap) from her own resources and making vague and insincere promises on behalf of her husband. One wonders whether a rich woman capable of such contemptible meanness might not perhaps have been guilty, after all, of stealing lace from a haberdasher’s shop. Jane was so irritated that she made up her mind not to invite her aunt and uncle to any more evening tea-drinking but soon relented. Good manners won, despite tea being so expensive.

  Mrs Austen had boasted to Mrs Leigh-Perrot that a sloop, a vessel of ten to eighteen guns under a commander, was reserved for Charles in the east. Mrs Leigh-Perrot exaggerated this into a frigate, a much larger ship commanded by a captain. Jane was waiting to hear from Charles himself. Although Uncle Leigh-Perrot’s gout was worse he and his wife were planning to go to Scarlets, their house in the country.

  Also in Bath as a visitor was Jane’s godfather, the Revd Samuel Cooke, vicar of Great Bookham in Surrey, and his wife, Cassandra, cousin to Jane’s mother. Their daughter Mary and son George went with Jane on long walks. George was Very kind and talked sense to me every now and then in the intervals of his more animated fooleries with Miss Bendish, who is very young and rather handsome,’ wrote Jane. She had reached the age when she was too old to be flirted with and had to look on while young girls received all the attention. This got under her skin: ‘there was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing, and commonplace nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit; - all that bordered on it, or on sense came from my Cousin George, whom altogether I like very well.'

  Cousin George had a career at Oxford as tutor at Corpus Christi College, where his students included Thomas Arnold, later headmaster of Rugby School and architect of the reformed nineteenth-century public school system with its cult of moral earnestness. Jane sometimes visited the Cookes, who lived not too far from the famous beauty spot Box Hill, the scene in Emma for the heroine’s thoughtless attack on poor Miss Bates. While in Bath Jane Austen started, but did not finish, The Watsons, with characters called Tom Musgrave, Emma Watson and a small boy called Charles, who is saved from humiliation when Emma agrees to dance with him. This motif, with the sexes reversed, was used a decade later in Emma, when Harriet Smith is rescued by Mr Knightley after Mr Elton has rejected her. Jane Austen knew the misery of being at dances and waiting in vain for a partner.

  Although she approved of George (so long as he was not neglecting her to talk frivolously with good-looking young girls) she had less time for his brother, the Revd Theophilus Cooke. When she met him later in London he struck her as having to offer only ‘nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless civility’. We are reminded of Sir Walter Elliot’s eldest daughter Elizabeth in Persuasion, expert at saying ‘the proper nothings’ and exemplifying superficial, meaningless politeness. Miss Elliot’s ‘heartless elegance’ gives ‘a general chill’. In a society which valued polished manners, polite insincerity cannot have been rare but must have been useful as a social lubricant, preferable to the rough manners of the earlier part of the century.

  Jane reported on visits and being visited: ‘When I tell you that we have been visiting a Countess this morning, you will immediately with great justice, but no truth, guess it to be Lady Roden.’ Lady Roden ‘s relatives, the Ordes, had intermarried with the Hampshire Powletts. Her second son, James-Bligh Jocelyn, then fifteen, was in the navy and Charles, currently first lieutenant of the Endymion, had shown kindness to him.

  It was not however Lady Roden but Lady Leven. ‘On receiving a message from Lord and Lady Leven through the Mackays declaring their intention of waiting on us, we thought it right to go to them. I hope we have not done too much, but the friends and admirers of Charles must be attended to.’ The well-born but financially constrained Austen women knew the importance to a man’s career of the right contacts. Lord and Lady Leven were ‘very reasonable, good sort of people, very civil, and full of his [Charles’s] praise’.

  Jane’s account throws interesting light on the manners of the era:

  We were shown at first into an empty drawing room, and presently in came his Lordship, not knowing who we were, to apologize for the servant’s mistake, and tell a lie himself, that Lady Leven was not within. He is a tall, gentlemanlike looking man, with spectacles, and rather deaf; after sitting with him ten minutes we walked away; but Lady L. coming out of the dining parlour as we passed the door, we were obliged to attend her back to it, and pay our visit over again. She is a stout woman, with a very handsome face. By this means we had the pleasure of hearing Charles’s praises twice over… There is a pretty little Lady Marianne of the party, to be shaken hands with and asked if she remembers Mr Austen.

  Marianne had the title ‘Lady’ prefixed to her Christian name because she was the daughter of an earl.

  Tom Chute had fallen from his horse and Jane joked that she was waiting to know how it had happened before she started pitying him as she eould not help suspecting it was in consequence of his taking orders; very likely as he was going to do duty or returning from it’. Her jokes were increasingly forced.

  In June that year Jane and Cassandra had a respite at Godmersham where they played at school with the children. Cassandra was Miss Teachum the governess, Jane Miss Popham the teacher, Aunt Harriot Bridges Sally the housemaid, Miss Anne Sharp, the Godmersham governess, was the dancing master, the apothecary and the sergeant, while Grandmama Austen played Betty Jones the pie-woman, and the children’s mother, Elizabeth, acted the bathing woman. They all dressed in character, and children and adults alike all enjoyed
themselves.

  After dessert they acted a play called Virtue Rewarded. Fanny was the fairy Serena and her cousin Anna the Duchess of St Albans. All this, followed by a bowl of syllabub in the evening! No wonder the children had happy memories of fun with Aunt Jane. As for Miss Sharp the governess, Jane became her friend. Miss Sharp kept in touch with Mrs Austen and Cassandra until the 1820s.

  The children had another jolly day on 30 July. Cassandra, Jane, Fanny and Anna, with Edward’s sons Edward, George, Henry and William, acted The Spoiled Child and Innocence Rewarded. Dancing followed. Possibly at this time Jane dramatized her favourite novel Sir Charles Grandison in collaboration with Anna. Mrs Austen and Anna left Godmersham the next day but Cassandra and Jane stayed on, dining out and attending balls in Canterbury. Henry turned up as well.

  In August Jane was writing from Godmersham to Cassandra who was at Goodnestone with Edward’s in-laws. The Godmersham party had visited Eastwell, where they played cribbage. Eastwell was a controversial new house in bastardized classical style by the architect Joseph Bonomi, who is mentioned in Sense and Sensibility. Bonomi had been commissioned by the Finch-Hatton family in the 1790s to build them a new house. It has been criticized as deliberately improper, in that its immense portico had five columns instead of the correct four or six, there was no frieze on the entablature, and the Ionic columns supported a ‘coarse Michelangelesque cap’. This was Jane’s first visit.

  The Misses Finch had assumed that Cassandra would find it dull at Goodnestone, and Jane wished they could have heard Mr Bridges’s solicitude on the subject and have known all the amusements planned to divert her. Miss Hatton at Eastwell had little to say for herself: her eloquence lay in her fingers, which were ‘most fluently harmonious’.