Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  From his early militia career, Henry had shifted into banking. In March 1816, his bank collapsed. The rich members of the family, Edward, and Mrs Austen’s brother, James Leigh-Perrot, had been Henry’s guarantors. They lost £30,000 between them. James and Frank Austen lost money, so too did Cassandra and Jane – smaller sums, but significant to them. The whole clan had to tighten their belts. The death of Uncle Leigh-Perrot, in March 1817, could have mended matters. Years before, he’d inherited from his Perrot connections; his wife was a West Indian heiress, though not on a grand scale; in 1808 he waived any rights to the Leigh family estate of Stoneleigh in return for a lump sum of £24,000 and a substantial annuity which would continue to be paid to his widow. He had no children of his own. But he made no immediate provision for his nieces and nephews, and none at all for his sister.i It’s the old, familiar story of primogeniture, but it was no less painful for all that, and, since even James Austen’s inheritance waited on another death, it meant that financial anxiety continued for the entire family.

  Given all this, what they did after Jane’s death is rather odd.

  They arranged for her to be buried in Winchester, in the cathedral, beneath the soaring roof where Mary I married Philip of Spain, alongside the carved bone boxes containing the jumbled remains of Anglo-Saxon kings and queens. And they selected a vast tombstone for her – larger than any other member of the family has.

  Why? There was a trend during the early nineteenth century for lavish, showy funerals, among the upper classes, at least. But a country clergyman’s daughter, an unmarried spinster, didn’t require a lavish funeral – no one would have been expecting one. It wasn’t something that the wider family tended to do, even for its richer and more important members. Take Uncle Leigh-Perrot, who died in the same year as Jane – his will stipulates that he should be buried in a private and inexpensive manner.

  It wasn’t common, at this point, for unmarried women to be buried away from their families, or even to have their own gravestones; by far the most usual thing, in such a situation, was for a daughter’s name to be added to her parents’ tombstone. This may have been part of the problem for the Austens, of course. Jane’s father had died, and been buried, in Bath, and her mother was still living. Jane may have spent most of her life in Hampshire, but her father’s family had come from Kent, her mother’s from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. They weren’t really long-settled anywhere.

  The obvious choice would have been to bury Jane at Chawton. Even allowing for the practicalities of removing the body, it could easily have been made into the more economical option, too. Winchester cathedral was a high-status burial place, with proportionately higher burial fees. There was, too, greater social pressure involved, the – perceived – requirement for a larger, grander gravestone than would be necessary in a small rural churchyard.

  It was July when Jane died, but the journey to Chawton, where she had been living and worshipping, or to Steventon, where she had grown up and where her brother James was vicar, was, even by the standards of 1817, hardly any distance at all, only a matter of, at the very most, three or four hours. And it would have been more natural, somehow. When Cassandra died, three decades later, her body was transported twice as far, from Portsmouth back to her home. There were, of course, trains by then; maybe travel had come to be seen as less difficult. Perhaps there were concerns about how Jane’s body would appear after being jolted about in a cart, but no corpse is improved from lying in a coffin for days in summer, in a city, which is what ended up happening. The funeral, though it seems to have been arranged quite quickly, didn’t take place until Thursday 24th July, almost a full week after Jane had died. It was an early-morning affair, before the daily round of services began.

  Jane’s will, written in April of the year she died, left everything to her sister, except for two individual legacies – £50 to her brother Henry, and the same sum to his old French servant, Madame Bigeon. The widespread financial disaster resulting from Henry’s bankruptcy was still, we can see, very much on her mind. The will also instructed, as was standard, that her funeral should be paid for from her own money. So every penny of the funeral expenses, over and above what was necessary or decent, was, effectively, a decision to reduce Cassandra’s inheritance.

  We know that Jane’s funeral costs amounted to £92. This sum presumably included the piece of mourning jewellery that Jane had wanted to arrange for her niece Fanny, which would have been likely to cost something in the region of five guineas (a little over £5). But there appear to have been very few of the pricey extras which undertakers so delighted in adding. It seems that Cassandra laid her sister out herself; it’s unlikely that watchers were paid to sit with the corpse or mourners hired. There was no funeral carriage, no plumed horses; the cathedral was, after all, only the shortest of walks away. Cassandra anticipated that there ‘would be nothing to keep us here afterwards’, suggesting that we shouldn’t imagine anything resembling a wake, no drinks or distribution of special funeral biscuits, as sometimes happened in the period. ‘Everything’, wrote Cassandra, ‘was conducted with the greatest tranquility’ – such tranquillity, in fact, that she almost missed seeing the ‘little mournful procession’ leave; middle-class women generally didn’t attend funerals. It was a quiet affair.

  The lion’s share of that £92, then, went on the cathedral burial fees and the tombstone. This is at a time when £50 would keep you for a year. Quiet Jane’s funeral may have been; it wasn’t cheap. Was it really sensible, or necessary, to spend so much money on burying Jane in a prominent position, with an expensive gravestone?

  Only a handful of people were buried in Winchester cathedral in 1817, indicating, we might think, that you would need to make an argument for burying a visitor, a stranger, there, and that you might have to look for a sympathetic ear. The second requirement wouldn’t have been particularly problematic: the Austen family had personal connections to more than one member of the ‘chapter’, the senior cathedral clergy. The late husband of Jane’s old friend Mrs Heathcote had belonged to the chapter; another chapter member had married a cousin of James Austen’s first wife. And Henry Austen was personally acquainted with the Bishop of Winchester, Brownlow North. After his catastrophic failure as a banker, Henry had decided that perhaps he would, after all, reconsider the career his father had wanted for him – that of a clergyman. He wrote to Brownlow North, and went to be examined by him; by the end of 1816 he was already serving as a curate at Chawton. Still, requesting the burial would have used up a fair amount of the good-will available towards the Austens, and they weren’t, in 1817, in any position to squander good-will recklessly.

  So why do it? Why bury Jane in Winchester cathedral, when there were cheaper and easier options readily available? Why spend so much money on the grave of an unmarried sister, a spinster aunt, at a time when money was tight? Did someone, or several someones, in the family view it as an investment? Did they anticipate, perhaps, that Jane’s books would help to repair the family fortunes or at least provide a nest-egg for Cassandra? Jane was – at last – flying pretty high in her career when she died. She’d recently moved to John Murray who was a dynamic, successful publisher. She’d been invited to dedicate a novel to the Prince Regent, who had professed himself, through his librarian, a fan of her work. The influential literary magazine, the Critical Review, had published the long and altogether very positive essay on Emma, mentioning both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice with approval, and comparing Jane’s work to that of the most-admired – and best-paid – writers of the day.

  If part of the reason for choosing Winchester was as an investment, though, it looks very much as if there were those in the family who didn’t agree. The inscription on Jane’s tombstone is long, abnormally so, especially for an unmarried woman, but it doesn’t include any indication as to why it’s so long. It never identifies Jane as a writer, still less does it name her novels. Instead the inscription talks at length about Jane’s family, her ‘in
timate connections’, about their ‘warmest love’, ‘their grief’, ‘their loss’, ‘their deepest affliction’, their consolation. Jane herself is barely present, obscured beneath a thick varnish of the acceptable womanly virtues (‘patience’, ‘benevolence’, ‘sweetness’, ‘charity, devotion, faith and purity’). There’s only one solitary phrase which suggests that the woman whose memorial this is was in any way remarkable – a reference to ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’.

  We don’t know who composed the inscription. For me, though, it has the flavour of a text written by committee, an attempt at combining two very different ideas about how Jane should be remembered. It’s an inevitably infelicitous compromise between publicity-seeking and decent obscurity.

  There are strong indications that there was disagreement within the family as to whether Jane’s identity as a writer ought to be acknowledged.

  The fact that Jane was an author was, by the time she died, an increasingly open secret. As early as 1813, remember, we found her sighing over Henry’s tendency to boast about his little sister’s literary achievements. Locally, in Hampshire, there were so many routes for the gossip to have taken that it must have been close to becoming common knowledge.

  But the obituaries that appeared in the local newspapers on Monday 21st July make no reference to her novels.j They’re short and uninformative. They’re also all worded slightly differently – one mentions Jane’s father, another where she lived, though not her Christian name, which, given the prevailing naming conventions, could well have led acquaintances to think that it was Cassandra who’d died rather than Jane. Yet another varies the spelling of ‘Austen’ and ‘Chawton’.k Perhaps they were penned by different writers. Perhaps they were written hurriedly, or dictated, by one person. But they’re all of them conventional.

  The obituary that appeared in the London Courier and Evening Gazette, on Tuesday 22nd July, on the other hand, is rather remarkable:

  On the 18th inst. at Winchester, Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Rev. George Austen, rector of Steventon, in Hampshire, and the Authoress of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Her manners were most gentle; her affections ardent; her candor was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.l

  It mentions Jane’s novels; it talks about her as a person, kindly, proudly. It looks, on the surface, like the perfect text to have used on Jane’s gravestone.

  And the first line and a half is very similar to what actually does appear on the gravestone. The last couple of lines, though, contain some potentially problematic phrases. Harmless enough, to talk about Jane’s ‘most gentle’ manners, but there’s a quality of fierceness to the word ‘ardent’ – it means, after all, burning, flammable, fiery. It can be dangerous. Among the characters in Jane’s novels who are described as behaving in ‘ardent’ ways are the unstable Marianne Dashwood, the sexual predators Willoughby and Henry Crawford, and Mr Elton, in his unwelcome proposal to Emma Woodhouse. ‘Candor’, too, has troubling elements. The word meant either freedom from malice or ‘impartiality, open-mindedness’, frankness, outspokenness, even. Jane Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, is praised at one point for the first sort of candour, her ‘candour without ostentation or design — to take the good of every body’s character, and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad’.

  Jane Austen’s candour, though, was the other sort, less Pollyannaish, more incisive. We’ve seen her rising to outspokenness, to a most ungentle frankness – in her foolhardy letter to Crosby in April 1809; when she attacked the hypocrisy of the clergy in Mansfield Park. We’ve seen her criticise primogeniture and suggest that change, voluntarily undertaken, may be the only safeguard against revolution. We’ve seen her mention to her readers the drug that could stop childbed becoming a deathbed. In Emma she exposed the damage wrought by enclosure. In Persuasion she confronted the possibility that there was no orderly progress to history, no grand plan. It wasn’t in Jane’s nature to ‘say nothing of the bad’ or to ignore what was difficult, or unwelcome.

  And as for those three final words in the obituary, which look so neutral to most modern readers, they may well have been the most problematic of all. Throughout Jane’s life, the phrase ‘a humble Christian’ had been strongly associated with writers who questioned Church of England orthodoxy, with Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, and evangelicals of all persuasions. It appeared in texts with titles like The Evangelical Preacher and Practical Discourses on Regeneration – spiritual rebirth, that is – and in the work of theologians such as the Baptist John Fawcett and William Dalgliesh, a (to some heretical) minister of the Church of Scotland.m It wasn’t neutral at all.

  Do we have, here, the explanation for Henry Austen’s peculiar insistence, in his Biographical Notice, on stating that Jane’s ‘opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’?

  And who wrote this obituary, with its lightly-veiled suggestions of religious unorthodoxy, its hints at fiery outspokenness? Who sent it to a publication based in London, which would have a wider readership? Henry would be the likeliest candidate, if it weren’t for his protests in the Biographical Notice. Cassandra?

  We do have a copy of the text of the obituary, probably written in Cassandra’s handwriting; that doesn’t of course mean that she composed it. Who else? Did Jane perhaps write it herself? Was sending off the obituary perhaps the ‘errand’ that she was so ‘anxious about’, the errand which took Cassandra away from her sister the day before Jane died, that she didn’t want to specify, even in a letter to her own niece?

  Well, as with so much of Jane’s life, we have no way of knowing.

  What we can say, with confidence, is that Jane’s opinions really didn’t accord anything like as strictly with ‘those of our Established Church’ as Henry claimed. Her novels offer ample proof of her reservations. And even in her final sickness, living next to Winchester cathedral, she remained scornful about the failings of the Church she’d been raised in, and the Anglican clergy whose ranks had included her own father and – now – two of her brothers.

  I mentioned before that in the last letter we have of Jane’s she jokes about applying to the ‘Dean and chapter’ of the cathedral if Dr Lyford failed to cure her. She talks about ‘drawing up a Memorial’, and laying it before them. She had, she remarked, ‘no doubt of redress from that Pious, Learned & disinterested Body’.

  Some biographers have tried to read this as an expression of orthodox Anglican piety, in line with what Jane’s family wanted everyone to believe. This doesn’t work, not if you spend any time at all delving into the identities of the men who made up the cathedral chapter in 1817 – information which Jane herself would surely have known, given her friendship with Mrs Heathcote.

  The Dean of Winchester, who had earlier been rector of Alton, the market town nearest to Chawton, was Thomas Rennell. His son, also Thomas, worked closely with Henry Handley Norris, helping to edit the British Critic, the literary magazine that reviewed every one of Jane’s novels save for the one which urged its readers towards thinking about slavery and featured a character who shared Norris’ name, his facile philanthropy, and his hypocrisy: Mansfield Park. Not so ‘disinterested’, then. And the cathedral clergy were not particularly ‘pious’ or ‘learned’, either.

  In fact, the Winchester cathedral chapter in 1817 is a telling illustration of how nepotistic the Church of England was, and of how closely, how intimately, its interests were allied to the interests of Britain’s political and economic elite.

  The Bishop of Winchester was Brownlow North. North’s father had been a senior courtier, his half-brother had been prime minister. North progressed rapidly in his career, and was appointed to a number of lucrative positions in the Church. He married a West Indian heiress and preached before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which, as we saw in Chapter 5, was the slave-owning arm of the Church of England. Among the twelve members of the chapter were men who
had married into West Indian slaving families, men who had connections to the royal household, and, as well, two of the bishop’s sons, his nephew, two of his sons-in-law, his niece’s husband, and his wife’s brother-in-law.n

  These are the men that Jane is talking about, men born with silver spoons in their mouths, men who’ve been given jobs not because they’ve earned them but because of who they are, men who own slaves. She’s being sarcastic.

  Thinking back to Jane’s letter to Crosby, in which she adopted the identity of ‘Mrs Ashton Dennis’ purely to declare herself ‘M.A.D.’, remembering the recklessness which peeks out time and again in her writing, it’s not impossible to imagine her ‘drawing up a Memorial’, similar to the text of the obituary, and having it sent to the cathedral officials. Jane, in her wilder moments, could have delighted in getting the title of her anti-Church, anti-slavery novel into a cathedral run by slave-owners. Maybe Jane was buried in Winchester cathedral because she wished to be. Maybe it was intended as a private joke; a joke which failed, because the text on her tombstone carefully avoids ever mentioning her writing.

  It would be ironic if, in death, Jane finally found readers who understood exactly the point she was trying to make.

  The gravestone inscription is, undoubtedly, odd. It was thought odd as early as 1817, the year Jane died, when the author of a book about Winchester cathedral felt the need to include a paragraph explaining who on earth Jane was: