Memoir of Jane Austen

by Austen-Leigh, James Edward; Sutherland, Kathryn;

  Speculation and Context

  To the mind and sensibilities of the modern biographer, ‘sanctuaries of individual feeling’ can seem like caves of repression. Areas once out of bounds to ethical enquiry have become compelling sites of exploration to the clinically charged post-Freudian enquirer. Our validation is that by probing we rescue and in some way restore the life of the biographee now in our charge. In recent times this rescue-work has been seen as a special trust laid upon the female or feminist biographer by her female subject. So, for example, Claire Tomalin examines the Memoir account (p. 39) of Mrs Austen’s system of child-rearing for clues to explain what she diagnoses as Jane Austen’s emotional defensiveness in adult life. It was Mrs Austen’s practice to breast-feed each of her numerous babies for the first three or four months of life and then foster-out the baby to a woman in the village for the next year or longer (until she/he was able to walk). In Austen’s adult letters we encounter, by Tomalin’s reading, not the passionate confidante of Brabourne’s description, but ‘someone who does not open her heart’, a woman potentially traumatized by very early weaning and associated emotional withdrawal. Tomalin concludes that ‘in the adult who avoids intimacy you sense the child who was uncertain where to expect love or to look for security, and armoured herself against rejection’. The early severance of a maternal bond will account not only for a subsequent guardedness in matters of feeling (the absence of acknowledged romantic attachment), and for the formality in Jane Austen’s relations with her mother, but also for the intensity of her feelings for her elder sister; there may have been something infantilizing in Cassandra’s influence. Tomalin suggests that their relationship was not unlike that of many couples (‘sisters can become couples’), while Terry Castle’s sensationalized review of the letters, proclaimed ‘the primitive adhesiveness—and underlying eros—of the sister-sister bond’, provoking heated discussion and rejection of the dual charges of incest and lesbianism. The details of what strikes the modern reader as an odd practice (fostering-out) can be made to yield far-reaching consequences. But it is also worth considering how far biographers, too, might carry baggage from one project to another: is it possible that Tomalin’s reading of Jane Austen’s early life is in any way influenced by her earlier reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s jealous pursuit of the love her mother denied her?24

  One moment of suspected intense repressed emotion has proved irresistible to all biographers. It is when Jane Austen hears the news that she is to lose her natal home, Steventon rectory, and be uprooted to Bath. The event must have occurred late in November or early in December 1800. Austen-Leigh provides the first public statement. He writes:

  The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling and lively imagination; and Jane was exceedingly unhappy when she was told that her father, now seventy years of age, had determined to resign his duties to his eldest son, who was to be his successor in the Rectory of Steventon, and to remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. Jane had been absent from home when this resolution was taken; and, as her father was always rapid both in forming his resolutions and acting on them, she had little time to reconcile herself to the change. (p. 50)

  His account is brisk but compassionate, and a little distant. He hints at his subject’s strength of attachment, her exclusion from the decision-making process, and her powerlessness to reverse it, but he also notes that such is ‘generally’ the feeling of imaginative ‘young persons’. It is perhaps worth remembering that the home from which the sensitive young Jane Austen was so swiftly exiled was also that to which the baby James Edward (aged 2 years) was, by the same decision, introduced. But after this brief paragraph he leaves the matter. His source was his younger sister Caroline, not then born, but subsequently in receipt of the details from their mother Mary Lloyd Austen ‘who was present’. Caroline wrote to James Edward:

  My Aunt was very sorry to leave her native home, as I have heard my Mother relate —My Aunts had been away a little while, and were met in the Hall ∧on their return∧ by their Mother who told them it was all settled, and they were going to live at Bath. My Mother who was present.[sic] said my Aunt Jane was greatly distressed—All things were done in a hurry by Mr. Austen & of course that is not a fact to be written and printed —but you have authority for saying she did mind it—if you think it worth while—(p. 185)

  Caroline’s disjointed, repetitive note-making unintentionally raises the painfulness of the story, but the raw elements of her version, smoothed out in her brother’s more circumspect delivery, also convey the rush, the shock, and the distress of the event in a wholly convincing way. We almost hear Mrs Austen delivering her great news in the hall (to Jane and Martha Lloyd, the two aunts who had been away, and not to Jane and Cassandra, as is here implied). There was also another version, recorded by Fanny Caroline Lefroy in her manuscript ‘Family History’; she got it from her mother Anna Lefroy, aged 7 at the time of the incident.

  Repeating the story in 1913 in Life and Letters, Austen-Leigh’s son and grandson transform it into drama and embellish it with what will become a familiar psychological coda—the mystery of the non-existent letters. This is their version:

  Tradition says that when Jane returned home accompanied by Martha Lloyd, the news was abruptly announced by her mother, who thus greeted them: ‘Well, girls, it is all settled; we have decided to leave Steventon in such a week, and go to Bath’; and that the shock of the intelligence was so great to Jane that she fainted away. Unfortunately, there is no further direct evidence to show how far Jane’s feelings resembled those she attributed to Marianne Dashwood on leaving Norland; but we have the negative evidence arising from the fact that none of her letters are preserved between November 30, 1800, and January 3, 1801, although Cassandra was at Godmersham during the whole of the intervening month. Silence on the part of Jane to Cassandra for so long a period of absence is unheard of: and according to the rule acted on by Cassandra, destruction of her sister’s letters was a proof of their emotional interest.25

  What is new in 1913 is the melodrama—the fainting and the association of Jane Austen’s behaviour with that of her hysterical heroine Marianne Dashwood (whose sorrows and joys, her narrator tells, ‘could have no moderation’) from the yet-to-be-published Sense and Sensibility26 Summing up the family traditions in 1948, R. W. Chapman presses them yet further:

  Jane made the best of it Jane’s local attachments were of extraordinary strength; they were no small part of her genius. We cannot doubt that the loss of her native county, and of the multitude of associations which made up her girlish experience, was exquisitely painful. Her feelings cannot have been less acute than Marianne’s on leaving Norland, or Anne’s on leaving Kellynch. Her return to her own country, eight years later, was the long-delayed return of an exile.27

  Jane’s love of the local Hampshire countryside is partly drawn from Fanny Caroline’s account, but Chapman takes it on himself to strengthen the relationship of equivalence between author and fictions by extending the link, arbitrarily made to Austen’s first heroine by later generations of Austen-Leighs, to incorporate her final heroine, Anne Elliot from Persuasion. It is, of course, the kind of recognition a certain sort of biography delights in, where fiction offers clues back to its author or demonstrably derives directly from personal experience. In his opening chapter Austen-Leigh had been at some pains to point out that if ‘Cassandra’s character might indeed represent the “sense” of Elinor’, ‘Jane’s had little in common with the “sensibility” of Marianne’ (p. 19). But Lord Brabourne played up the romance of a more susceptible Aunt Jane, as did Austen-Leigh’s descendants. Now Chapman adds the finishing touch, and Austen transforms from Marianne Dashwood into Anne Elliot, enacting the whole gamut of emotions from hysteria to settled melancholy. Implicitly, we are told, Jane Austen’s total achievement as a writer is to be explained in terms of the loss of Steventon. The trajectory of her fiction is determined by her need for reconnection with her nat
al environment. The suppression of those letters (which if they ever did exist can only be allowed, in the interests of biographical consistency, to witness to dispossession and a loss of self) and the equally apocryphal transformation of great distress into something greater, a temporary loss of consciousness (she fainted), provide the kind of discontinuities the biographer can turn to some purpose.

  Why does this one distressing moment matter and why do subsequent biographers embellish it so enthusiastically?28 It marks an end, but it might also mark a new beginning—the move to Bath and a wider social scene, with more variety and incident to fuel the aspiring novelist’s imagination. But one purpose the moment has consistently served has been to foreclose on the future. The secret of, or clue to, Jane Austen’s creativity lies, we are told, like DNA coding, in her original script. Though he would not recognize it presented in these terms, this is Austen-Leigh’s view, and it explains his erasure of even the idea of struggle from his account of her writing life. ‘Whatever she produced’, he asserts, ‘was a genuine home-made article’ (p. 90). An intermittent subtext to his account links the careers of Jane Austen and her contemporary Walter Scott. Not only was Scott the best-selling novelist of the early nineteenth century, but the standards he set for the production of fiction—as saleable commodity and as large-scale social panorama—continued to shape the novel far into the century, and in so doing to overshadow Austen’s different contribution. The identity of artistic effort with economic worth, by which Scott laboured so vigorously to give significant value to the work of the novelist, is just as vigorously denied in Austen-Leigh’s account of his aunt’s unremarked (and little-remunerated) writings. Instead, what he does emphasize is that, settled in Chawton after the disruptions of the Bath and Southampton years, her habits of composition assumed identity with those he conjectures for the Steventon years, ‘so that the last five years of her life produced the same number of novels with those which had been written in her early youth’ (p. 81). The structure Austen-Leigh imposes here has been of profound significance for how critics have viewed Jane Austen’s creative life. He suggests that the novels as we know them were the products of two distinct and matching creative periods—roughly Austen’s early twenties and her late thirties—and that these were divided by a largely fallow interlude. But another interpretation of the same evidence and dates, one which has found less favour, might be that, with the exception of Northanger Abbey (sold, under the title of ‘Susan’, to a London publisher in 1803), all the finished novels were the products of the mature Chawton years, and that this intense burst of creativity between 1809 and 1817 was not necessarily the consequence of a return to emotional or environmental origins but the culmination of some twenty years of uninterrupted fictional experimentation. A case can be made for linking Northanger Abbey, possibly in a second drafting, The Watsons, and Lady Susan with the disrupted Bath and Southampton years, but there may also have been other draftings or revisions at this time. Given the hard critical gaze Austen turns upon homes and families in her fictions, can it be that they are exclusively the products of home and rootedness? In other words, what intervened between Steventon and Chawton may not have been just one long swoon of unconsciousness, a syncope of around eight years, from which she only recovered when time and events conspired to restore as nearly as possible those primal scenes.

  The structuring device of home, and of Hampshire homes in particular, sustains Austen-Leigh’s account, with its emphasis on well-regulated domesticity and family harmony. The Austens were a close-knit and talented family. ‘[U]ncommon abilities . . . seem to have been bestowed, tho’ in a different way upon each member of this family’, wrote their cousin Eliza de Feuillide in 1792.29 Their closeness, strengthened by marriages between cousins and within a small circle of long-time friends, and by the recurrence across generations of the same Christian names, can disorientate the reader attempting to separate the various threads of connection. It also impresses on our modern sensibilities an apprehension of confinement, of too much accord and correspondence. Austen-Leigh contributes much to this. Quoting from Anna Lefroy’s manuscripts, Constance Hill, one of the earliest non-family biographers, writes that Henry, Jane’s fourth brother, ‘was the handsomest of the family, and, in the opinion of his own father, the most talented. There were others who formed a different estimate, but, for the most part, he was greatly admired.’30 At last we glimpse a chink in the family’s public presentation. But in the Memoir this other Henry’s story is not told. Here he is the brother who ‘cannot help being amusing’ (p. 63), who acts informally and generously as his sister’s literary agent, entertains her in London, and in the autumn of 1815 is nursed by her through a serious illness. That he was also an unsuccessful opportunist who managed to entangle various members of his family in debt, that his eventual bankruptcy may have had profound consequences for Jane’s late publication plans and the course of her final illness—none of this is conveyed by Austen-Leigh’s preliminary sketch, in which Henry ‘had perhaps less steadiness of purpose, certainly less success in life, than his brothers’ (p. 16). But hints in Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s ‘Family History’ suggest that Anna, fiercely attached to her aunt, handed down within the family a more critical account, certainly of the bankruptcy and its effects on the family and Jane’s health.

  Another aspect of the Memoir’s persistent familism is its preoccupation with genealogy. In fact, genealogy seems to have been a favourite Austen family pastime, and the appearance in the novels of names taken from the concealed, maternal line is evidence that Jane shared the pleasure in some degree. The complicated transference and transformation of names within the family—Leigh to Leigh Perrot, Austen to Knight, Austen to Austen-Leigh—would obviously stimulate what was in any case a convention of Victorian biography and a gentle clerical pursuit. Genealogy provides a scaffold for and helps plug the gaps in the record of the individual life. It assists Austen-Leigh in his self-conscious work of ‘book-making’ around the otherwise scanty figure of his aunt; and it also witnesses to his anxiety to secure the status of the Austen family. How else do we account for the ‘very old letter’ from Eliza Brydges to her daughter Mary, Jane Austen’s maternal great-grandmother, included in Chapter 3? Austen-Leigh’s explanation that anything two hundred years old and incorporating domestic details ‘must possess some interest’ (p. 44) is hardly compelling; nor are the letter’s contents. But its circumstances give it significance. It was clearly a cherished family heirloom, handed down through the Leigh and Austen families. Anna Lefroy drew her brother’s attention to its present whereabouts as he was collecting his materials. Not only does the Chandos letter (Mary Brydges was the daughter of James Brydges, eighth Lord of Chandos, and the sister of the first Duke) remind the reader of Jane Austen’s distant aristocratic pretensions, it also gives a favourable gloss to the standing of her more immediate family. As Austen-Leigh is at pains to point out, Mary Brydges’s father was a penniless aristocrat, while her grandmother was the widow of a rich merchant. In registering the periodic adjustments between rank and trade by which English society was secured in the course of the early modern period, he simultaneously underpins the fluid social group, comprising minor gentry, the professions, rentiers, clergymen, and trade, whose membership encompassed the diversely positioned Austen family in the late eighteenth century. Austen-Leigh’s snobbish streak runs fairly wide through the Memoir, a recognizable if unattractive nervousness which at times descends into massive condescension and complacency—when confronting the absence of improvements in domestic arrangements, furniture, meals, and general living conditions during Jane Austen’s lifetime. At such moments he comes perilously close to her own Mr Collins. Less specifically, however, the social anxiety his biography registers offers a valuable insight into a family who were, much like the fictional society of the novels, insecurely positioned in what has been described as ‘pseudo-gentry’—in some cases upwardly mobile and with growing incomes and social prestige, and in others in straitened c
ircumstances, but, in either case, aspiring to the lifestyle of the traditional rural gentry.31

  According to his daughter’s later account, Austen-Leigh began the Memoir on 30 March 1869 and it was finished, in a little over five months, early in September. During that time he made a short visit to Steventon to fix what impressions he could still trace of his own and his aunt’s early home, and he corresponded with his sisters and cousins in the hope of collecting further information. The Memoir was published on 16 December 1869, though dated 1870, in a relatively modest edition of around a thousand copies.32 It is, as its title states, a memoir (‘a record of events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information’: OED, s.v. 3a). To some extent, its discontinuous narrative guarantees authenticity. As Austen-Leigh’s daughter notes: ‘It could not relate that which none of them knew, respecting the details of her earlier life, nor could it describe many facts given in letters not then before him, to which later writers have had access.’ Most importantly, this is Aunt Jane as her nieces and nephew came to know her in the Chawton years. ‘Of her earlier and gayer experiences, he probably knew nothing, and still less likely was it that, in spite of their strong mutual affection, he should have any knowledge of the intimate and private feelings of an aunt whose years, at the time of her death, numbered more than twice his own.’33 In defending the partiality of her father’s ‘life’ of Jane Austen, Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh hoped also to adjust its cultural impact. If the Memoir had the immediate effect of awakening general public interest in an author virtually forgotten outside select critical circles, it had done so, or so it seemed in 1920, on terms too narrow and comfortable. Certainly, Austen-Leigh’s complacent presentation of his aunt had an incalculable influence on the popularization and critical reading of her novels far into the twentieth century. It was not seriously disturbed until 1940, when D. W. Harding, a psychologist rather than a literary critic, detected beneath the cosy domesticity a ‘regulated hatred’, declaring that her ‘books are . . . read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked’.34