Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  If you want to stay with the novels and the Jane Austen you already know, then you should stop reading now. If you want to read Jane as she wanted to be read – if you want to know her – then read on.

  Footnotes

  a The novels carry the date of 1818 on their title page, but were published in the final week of 1817.

  b As we’ll see in the next chapter, we can be very nearly sure that Susan is Northanger Abbey and not Lady Susan. Lady Susan is short – nowhere near two volumes long – and is not at all the sort of work which a publisher would have been likely to accept.

  c Captain Wentworth’s clergyman brother is a partial exception but we never actually meet him.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘The Anxieties of Common Life’

  Northanger Abbey

  Summer 1799, the pleasure gardens at Bath.a

  Trumpets sound. Fireworks explode against the night sky.

  One gentleman, who has been squinting frowningly at the crowd, reaches a decision. He thrusts the watch away and looks about him for his sister. She is standing with a group of their Bath acquaintance, smiling and laughing, and it takes some little time to extricate her.

  Would Jane be so obliging as to come with him to find his wife? He wouldn’t ask, only Elizabeth has been gone these twenty minutes or more. He is concerned that she might have been taken ill.

  Jane takes her brother Edward’s arm and allows him to escort her along the avenue, between high hedges hung about with lanterns. They pass a couple murmuring and sighing in the shadows as the drifting light of a rocket reveals a bosom barer than even the most outlandish fashion is ever likely to approve.

  Edward mutters something under his breath and hurries Jane on. She starts to giggle, and is still giggling as she skips up the steps and into the ladies’ retiring room. She stops only when she sees Elizabeth. Elizabeth is sitting on a chair, a basin on her lap, her face green. Jane, who has been drinking rack punch all the evening, feels her own stomach turn.

  Is it something Elizabeth has eaten? Jane asks. Or a bilious attack? Jane knows all about bilious attacks; half her family suffers from them.

  No, replies Elizabeth, with what seems unwarranted ill-temper, not something that she’s eaten, and she would have thought Jane knew enough of the world by now – she jerks forward and retches painfully into the bowl.

  Jane, sobering, demands a cloth from one of the attendants and hesitantly – for she has never been close to her sister-in-law – sets about helping her.

  And all she can think, all the while, is that William, the baby, is scarce nine months old, and that women aren’t even sick straight away, and how could Edward—

  Let’s begin with Northanger Abbey, though I’m not altogether sure it’s what Jane would have wanted.

  The novel wasn’t published until after her death in 1817, when it appeared together with Persuasion, but it belongs much earlier, to the beginning of her career as an ‘authoress’. We’ve almost certainly had a glimpse of it already. Unless exactly the same fate befell two of her books independently, we can be confident that it’s a version of Susan, the two-volume novel sold to the publisher Crosby in 1803. And unless yet another manuscript has gone missing altogether, we can also be fairly confident in identifying Susan/Northanger Abbey with the novel which, in one of her letters, Jane calls ‘Miss Catherine’.b

  But, whatever you want to call it, it wasn’t a work which Jane could be confident about. It had been her first taste of success as a writer – £10, all of her own, her novel advertised in the press – but that success had turned into humiliating, inexplicable failure. For years the novel had sat on a shelf or in a drawer in Crosby’s publishing house, tantalisingly out of her reach, utterly beyond her control.

  Aside from its pre-publication history, and the fact that it’s the shortest of Jane’s six novels – even shorter than Persuasion – there’s not, on the surface, much that’s remarkable about Northanger Abbey. Few people ever name it as their favourite Jane Austen novel. Few people hate the book, either; it tends not to evoke particularly strong feelings from readers. And you can see why.

  The main male character, Henry Tilney, definitely belongs to the second tier of heroes; he’s not a Darcy, or a Wentworth. He is ‘rather tall’, has ‘a pleasing countenance’ and ‘a very intelligent and lively eye’, but he is ‘not quite handsome’. Firmly under the paternal thumb for most of the novel, he dominates where he can, lecturing the women in his life about anything and everything. At times this is teasing, it can even be flirtatious; over time, one suspects, it would grow wearisome. We’re told that Henry’s love for Catherine, the heroine, ‘originated in nothing better than gratitude’, that ‘a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought’. It’s hardly a romance to echo down the ages.

  Catherine has none of Lizzy Bennet’s impatient intelligence, none of Fanny Price’s panicky fastidiousness. She isn’t self-consciously unconventional like Marianne, or complacent like Emma. Comparing her to Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, published alongside Northanger Abbey and, like Northanger, set partly in Bath, shows how far Jane matured as a novelist between her twenties and her early forties. Anne is clever, she is good, but she’s also fully psychologically real.

  Catherine is … well, nothing very much. She’s neither intelligent nor dim; ‘often inattentive and occasionally stupid’, she nevertheless learns to recite ‘the fable of “The Hare and Many Friends” as quickly as any girl in England’. On her best days, in the first flush of her youthful bloom, she is ‘almost pretty’. Even her virtues are vague, weak, described by not being faults: ‘she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny.’

  What she is, is malleable, impressible. As a child with three older brothers she’s ‘fond of all boy’s plays’ – ‘cricket, base ball, riding on horseback and running about the country’. With the onset of puberty, she adapts herself with great docility to the business of becoming a young woman. She begins to ‘curl her hair and long for balls’. She develops ‘an inclination for finery’. In matters of gender conformity, of fashion, of flirtation, in her own conception of herself, Catherine is easily swayed. She retains a tendency to run rather than walk, and she has moments of resistance and independent thought, but they’re few and far between, and readers of a pessimistic disposition may worry that marriage to Henry will do very little to encourage her to think for herself.

  Catherine isn’t much of a heroine. It’s the point that Jane makes over and over again. She’s a heroine whom ‘no one’ would imagine ‘born to be a heroine’. Everything is against her; ‘her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition’. Her mind is ‘unpropitious for heroism’. Even her artistic skills fall ‘miserably short of the true heroic height’. She has ‘by nature nothing heroic about her’. It’s something she has to work at, to be ‘in training for’.

  Her training takes the form of reading. ‘From fifteen to seventeen’, Catherine ploughs through ‘all such works as heroines must read’. The reading itself isn’t a new pastime for her; it’s only the ‘works’, the texts, which have changed. Reading is the sole pleasure which survives from Catherine’s childhood, the only occupation she’s been allowed to pursue throughout her life. The horse-riding, the cricket, the ‘rolling down the green slope at the back of the house’, she’s had to abandon all of these. Even as a tomboyish child, though, she liked to read, ‘she never objected to books at all’.

  But she does it wrong, doesn’t she? Everyone knows that’s what Northanger Abbey is about – Catherine’s inability to read properly, her inability to interpret texts correctly, to separate fiction and reality. Excited, and rapidly obsessed by Gothic novels, she convinces herself that they present an accurate picture of the world around her. When the modern appearance of Northanger Abbey disappoints her fevered expect
ations, she invents a Gothic plot for herself – a secret chamber, a wife murdered or imprisoned by her husband. Henry discovers her suspicions, shows her how absurd they are, and she obligingly abandons the ‘alarms of romance’ for ‘the anxieties of common life’. That’s what happens; that’s the point, the moral. Silly girls shouldn’t read silly novels.

  Are we sure, though, that we’re reading properly?

  Northanger Abbey, after all, is the book which includes a lengthy passage defending the novel, as a genre, against its critics. ‘I will not’, Jane begins, ‘adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding.’ She’s addressing (ostensibly at least) not her readers, but other novelists. ‘Let us not desert one another,’ she pleads, ‘we are an injured body.’ Novelists shouldn’t join in with the ‘threadbare’ complaints of ‘the reviewers’, Jane says. Rather than censuring or abusing novels, Jane praises them – and in grandiose terms. ‘Our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world’, she declares. Novels have ‘genius, wit, and taste’; they display the ‘greatest powers of the mind’. In them, ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language’. The novels she mentions by name – Cecilia, Camilla, Belinda – aren’t just named for women, they’re written by them too.

  It wouldn’t make all that much sense for Jane to go from celebrating women’s novels to openly deriding a particular subset of novels – Gothic ones – which were also largely female-authored. In fact, the first reference to Gothic novels comes immediately after this impassioned defence of novels and novelists. It’s true that Jane invites us to sneer at the ‘literary taste’ which Catherine and her new friend, the vapid Isabella Thorpe display, their desire for ‘horrid’ novels. A little later, though, she tells us that both Henry Tilney and his altogether admirable sister Eleanor enjoy Gothic authors.

  We’re missing something.

  And this – it seems – was precisely what Jane worried about.

  As we’ve seen, the publishing firm Crosby, having bought Susan in 1803, did nothing with it. Shortly before she moved from Southampton to Chawton, Jane wrote to them, in an attempt to force their hand. The attempt failed. We have no really reliable record of how and when she regained the rights,c but around 1816 or the beginning of 1817 she seems to have devoted some time to looking over the manuscript, and to thinking about finally publishing it. In the eight years that had passed since her run-in with Crosby in 1809 Jane had published four novels, had seen favourable reviews – some very favourable – and had been invited to dedicate one of her books to the Prince Regent. None of this had done away with her resentment. She composed a short, acidic ‘advertisement’, apparently intended as some sort of foreword to the book, and explaining what had happened to it. Most of the advertisement is a complaint about Crosby, though the firm is never named. It indicates how bruising the encounter had been, how sore a point the refusal to publish still was for her.

  And perhaps her feelings were justified, because so far as Jane was concerned the delay in publication created endless – perhaps insurmountable – issues for her readers. The thirteen years that had passed since Crosby had accepted the book, the ‘many more years’ before then that she had worked on it, had, as she explains in the advertisement, made ‘parts of the work … comparatively obsolete’. Not only ‘places’, but ‘manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes’.

  If we believe Jane – and who else should we believe? – this tells us that we should be looking for the beginnings of the novel to a period ‘many’ years before 1803 – that is, to Jane’s early twenties, somewhere in the mid-to-late 1790s.

  We have a few of Jane’s letters from this period. Several describe a visit to Bath in 1799 with her mother, her brother Edward and his wife Elizabeth. Edward rented a house in Queen Square, an area which, in Persuasion, the Musgrove sisters think undesirable, but which Jane liked, even if the house was number 13. It was ‘chearful’, and the view from the drawing room window was ‘rather picturesque’. She enjoyed travelling with her rich brother – the ‘comfortable rooms’ at the inn in Devizes, the ‘asparagus, & lobster’ and ‘cheesecakes’ they had for dinner.1 She enjoyed the Bath shops – so much so that at times an underlying kinship with Northanger Abbey’s fashion-obsessed chaperone Mrs Allen becomes apparent, with Jane sketching the pattern of some lace in the margin of a letter and announcing that, ‘I saw some Gauzes in a shop in Bath Street yesterday at only 4s a yard, but they were not so good or so pretty as mine’.2

  Like Catherine Morland, Jane was caught up in the social whirl of Bath. She saw an evening concert and fireworks display in the pleasure gardens; ‘the Fire-works … were really beautiful, & surpassing my expectation; – the illuminations too were very pretty’, she writes. Like Catherine, she attended a ball at the Assembly Rooms, promenaded in the Pump Room, and arranged to go to the theatre, which we know was showing The Birthday and Blue Beard.3

  The Birthday, or The Reconciliation, is a sentimental comedy adapted from a German original by August von Kotzebue. Kotzebue also wrote the original German version of Lovers’ Vows, which Jane has her characters plan to perform in Mansfield Park.

  The Birthday features a lovely young woman – seventeen, like Catherine Morland – softening an unpleasant, bullying older man. It’s preoccupied with novels. ‘O dear! You must not read novels’, says the heroine’s sick father, ‘I scarcely know three or four of them that I would put into your hands’. A man with a romantic interest in the heroine tries to seduce her with novels and, when his attempts at seduction fail, blackens her character. But the hero of The Birthday (in as far as there is one) is a doctor who actually writes novels. In addition, there’s a dead mother and a locked chest.

  Blue Beard was a comic operetta, a hugely popular Orientalised version of the fairy tale we’re familiar with, in which a young woman, encouraged to wander freely around the house of an older, tyrannical man, is forbidden access to only one room – which she immediately becomes obsessed with getting into.

  There are several other flashes in the letters from this visit which illuminate Northanger Abbey.

  Driving into Bath, the Austens pass two acquaintances on the street, suggesting that the constant coincidental meetings in Northanger and Persuasion are a reflection of reality and not novelistic contrivance. Edward renews his friendship with a Mr Evelyn, a ‘Yahoo’, according to Jane, who ‘has all his life thought more of Horses than of anything else’. Jane encounters a Mr Gould, who ‘walked home with me after Tea; — he is a very Young Man, just entered of Oxford, wears Spectacles, & has heard that Evelina was written by Dr Johnson’. If we want to, we can find something of these two gentlemen in John Thorpe. He too is obsessed with horses, and he too is an Oxford student with absurd views about novels. Mr Gould thinks that Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina must have been written by a man; John Thorpe doesn’t express an opinion on Evelina, but he dismisses Burney’s Camilla as a ‘stupid book’, ‘the horridest nonsense you can imagine’, adding a touch of mindless racism about the author’s marriage to ‘a French emigrant’ for good measure.

  The references to Burney in Northanger Abbey date to the late 1790s or very early 1800s, certainly no later than 1802 or 1803, since in 1802 Burney travelled to France to assist her French husband in some family business, taking advantage of the short-lived cessation of hostilities between France and Britain. When the war resumed in 1803, she was trapped on the wrong side of the Channel, remaining there for the next ten years. She didn’t return to England until shortly before the publication of her final novel, The Wanderer, in 1814 – a novel which sold poorly. For a reader of 1816 or 1817, Burney’s name would have had a very different meaning to the one it had held
a decade or more earlier.

  One of the books which had ‘undergone considerable changes’ between 1803 and 1816 was Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. In the original version of the novel a reader would have found reference to an inter-racial marriage. They would also have found a heroine who gives serious consideration to marrying a ‘Creole’ character. The term is a notoriously slippery one. At the end of the eighteenth century it denoted – usually – someone born in the West Indies, though whether of European parentage, or African, or of mixed racial heritage, wasn’t ever entirely clear. Edgeworth’s description of her ‘Creole’ character (Mr Vincent) is no more fixed. His ‘aquiline nose’ suggests European ancestry, but he has ‘large dark eyes’ and a ‘manly sunburnt complexion’. Purely European? Well, just like the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre, maybe not. The 1810 edition of the novel, though, excises every suggestion of interracial or possibly interracial relationships.

  It’s the first version of Belinda which Jane holds up as an example of the greatness of the novel, not the second, censored version. Her literary references had taken on a different meaning; they no longer read as she’d originally intended. There was, in the late 1790s, something of a fashion for locked boxes in literature, and not just in Gothic novels. As mentioned above, they appear in Kotzebue’s play The Birthday, in the novel Caleb Williams (written by Mary Shelley’s father, the anarchist philosopher and conservative hate figure William Godwin), and in the play clearly based on Caleb Williams, The Iron Chest. These are the texts which Catherine’s adventures at the abbey ought to be calling to mind.

  The delay in publication separated Northanger Abbey for ever from the readership it had been designed for.