Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  This was the last burst of theatrical activity, because James was turning his attention to something more ambitious. It was clear at this point that he was the writer of the family, with serious poetry to his credit as well as his prologues; and now he turned to prose, and to editing.9 In January 1789 he produced the first issue of his own weekly magazine. There was nothing amateur about it; it was printed, published and sold to the public for threepence. He called it The Loiterer, and it was modelled on Dr. Johnson’s great periodicals, the Rambler and the Idler, each number consisting of a single anonymous essay or story. Contributions were solicited, and two contributors are known, one being his brother Henry, the other Benjamin Portal, who was at Oxford with them; but the largest number of essays was his. The Loiterer was distributed in London, Birmingham, Bath and Reading as well as Oxford; it lasted for fourteen months and was admired enough to receive an accolade which must have delighted James, when one of his own essays was reprinted in the Annual Register for 1791.

  The essay chosen for reprinting was an urbane sketch narrated by a young Fellow of an Oxford college on the subject of his friends’ marriages. One, a land-owner, has married the daughter of a tenant “with no charm excepting a little health and freshness, and no acquirements beyond those of a country boarding-school,” to find his cara sposa, as he calls her, transformed into a vulgar and expensive termagant. His brother has married a Scottish noblewoman who prides herself so much on her relations that she has brought half a dozen to live permanently with them. A third claimed to have done better; but when the narrator goes to stay with him, he overhears, through a thin partition wall, the wife scolding the husband for bringing a friend when there is not much for dinner, and the servants are all busy ironing; the guest cannot be given the chintz room because of his dirty boots, and will have to make do with the curtainless green garret. This is enough for the Oxford man, who makes an excuse and returns to his bachelor fireside in college, thinking with “peculiar complacency” of his escape from the green garret.

  Writer’s privilege allowed James to laugh at land-owner and nobility in his magazine, although he was in truth a penniless and landless young fellow who was beginning to feel he needed a wife himself. The questions of how to marry money, and how to get a good Church living, were raised in several humourous pieces; there was also a steady tone of mild misogyny which was probably standard at Oxford, even among men with sisters. The claim has been made that Jane Austen was the “Sophia Sentiment” who wrote to The Loiterer for 28 March 1789—two months after its first issue—complaining that it did not cater for women readers, and recommending that they should run “some nice, affecting stories” about lovers with “very pretty names” who are separated, or lost at sea, or involved in duels, or run mad. The trouble with attributing this to her is that the letter is not an encouragement to The Loiterer to address women readers so much as a mockery of women’s poor taste in literature. “Sophia Sentiment” is more likely to have been a transvestite, Henry or James. 10

  The best of James’s stories describes the attempt by a curate to collect money for a village Sunday school. Sir Charles Courtley suggests he should apply to the Bishop, and offers to drop him off in his carriage at the Palace. A rich maiden lady lectures him on the bad consequences of encouraging learning among the common people. Another feels she has already paid so much to the poor rate that she cannot be expected to give any more. Finally Mr. Humphrey Discount, to whom the curate urges that a little money spent on the school would save him from mischievous youths breaking into his garden, gives his answer by pointing out of the window to two steel traps already installed there: “I warrant the young rascals will keep clear of my premises by the time I have broken two or three of their legs.” Mantraps figure in both James’s and his sister’s stories, and both were obviously appalled by them; though she makes hers into a joke, while his becomes part of a political argument. If the rest of The Loiterer were as good as this, it would be a fine periodical; but few of the other numbers come near it. There are some knockabout essays on the difference between the French and the English (“the English might grow gay, and the French grave; the English might learn to talk, the French to hold their tongues”). There is a story of a household driven to distraction when the children see some strolling players and are inspired to put on plays themselves, which could be an allusion to the theatricals at Steventon. There is a sage piece on how curates can better themselves by learning to ride and shoot well. There is one on Oxford types, the man with plastered hair and large buckles, the scholar with beard and dirty shirt, the “Knowing Man” and those who try “to appear more idle, uninformed and ignorant than we really are.” From Henry there is a breezy account of a ballroom in a country town hall, where a particularly energetic dancer turns round to reveal herself, shockingly, as old enough to be someone’s mother; a couple who appear mutually devoted have just agreed to a divorce; and a reluctant male dancer looks at his partner “as if he wished it had been his hunter.” All taken from life, no doubt, at the Basingstoke Assembly Room balls.

  Henry’s pieces are surprisingly brash, and he seems more anxious than assured when he writes about women. The most awkward of his attempts at comedy is narrated by a man with a cousin who is trying to trap him into marriage; she lets him see too much ankle and bosom, paints her face and wears false hair, drags him off for a walk and talks about The Sorrows of Young Werther. Worst of all, she is older than him. Henry’s conversation must have been more entertaining than this routine stuff, or his own older cousin would hardly have found him as charming as she did.

  Jane’s comic writing was already in another class; and although she did not dedicate anything to Henry for another two years, when she did it was something exceptional. Lesley Castle is told in letters, and each character has an individual voice. Charlotte Lutterell, busy cooking for her sister’s wedding at the start, can hardly take in the news that the bridegroom has been thrown from his horse and is expected to die. She can think only of all the food she has prepared, and her address to her grief-stricken sister is a monologue of Dickensian brilliance. We laugh because this is a situation we all recognize; none of us wants to be distracted from our own pressing concerns, even by the tragedies of friends.

  Dear Eloisa (said I) there’s no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle. (for I was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her) I beg you would not mind it—You see it does not vex me in the least; though perhaps I may suffer most from it after all; for I shall not only be obliged to eat up all the Victuals I have dressed already, but must if Henry should recover (which is however not very likely) dress as much for you again; or should he die (as I suppose he will) I shall still have to prepare a Dinner for you whenever you marry any one else. So you see that tho’ perhaps for the present it may afflict you to think of Henry’s sufferings, Yet I dare say he’ll die soon, and then his pain will be over and you will be easy, whereas my Trouble will last much longer for work as hard as I may, I am certain that the pantry cannot be cleared in less than a fortnight.

  Charlotte is the precursor of a line of obsessed and eloquent women to come from Jane’s pen, among them Mrs. Bennet, Mrs. Norris and Miss Bates; and she is quite as good as they are. When the thought of a visit to London comes to her, she writes, “I always longed particularly to go to Vaux-hall, to see whether the cold Beef there is cut so thin as it is reported, for I have a sly suspicion that few people understand the art of cutting a slice of cold Beef so well as I do.” Any writer would be pleased with lines like these; for a sixteen-year-old they are prodigious.

  These early pieces, composed over several years, were transcribed, in somewhat random order, into three notebooks. Lesley Castle, which seems to have been written between January and April 1792, was copied, unfinished, into the second. At the front of this notebook Jane wrote “Ex dono mei Patris” (“A gift from my Father”). His appreciation and encouragement of his daughter’s skill was admirable. He must have bought her paper f
or her writing, an expensive item. He also supplied Cassandra with drawing paper; and to Cassandra, Jane inscribed her History of England (“by a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian”), and gave the task of illustrating it. It was the only one of her works to have contemporary illustrations.

  The History is full of family matters. There is a tease for her father, when the author claims to be partial to the “roman catholic religion.” There is an allusion to the absent Francis in the prediction that Sir Francis Drake will be surpassed by “one who tho’ now but young, already promises to answer all the ardent and sanguine expectations of his Relations and Freinds.” There is a knowing “sharade” on the word “car-pet” which refers to James I’s favourites, Car and Villiers: “My first is what my second was to King James the 1st, and you tread on my whole.” The Austens went in for verbal games, and the History sounds like Christmas entertainment to be read aloud around the table or the fireside. Jane could rely on her parents to pick up her reference to a novel by Charlotte Smith, a former neighbour, when she likened Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, Essex, to one of Smith’s characters, the romantic Delamere, who throws away his life in a duel. Her interest in history was, as she acknowledged, more to do with romance than with fact and date; and perhaps more still to do with making her family laugh.

  She dated her History at the end, “Saturday Nov: 26th 1791,” just before her sixteenth birthday. By then The Loiterer had ceased publication; and although James continued to write poetry for his private satisfaction, and Mrs. Austen to produce her occasional verse, Jane’s claim to be considered an aspiring writer now was accepted by the most important member of the family. At the front of her next notebook, Mr. Austen wrote his own graceful tribute: “Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady Consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.”11 He appreciated her work enough to put up with some strong stuff. Lesley Castle has, for instance, an adulterous elopement by a young mother who abandons her baby; later in the story her husband converts to Catholicism, enabling him to get an annulment, and both parties remarry cheerfully. These are quite daring jokes for the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England.

  It is clear too that he gave her uncensored access to his books; for if she was allowed to read Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison as a child, which gives detailed accounts of maternal drunkenness and paternal adultery, and lays out the correct attitude to adopt towards a father’s mistress and illegitimate half-brothers, Mr. Austen cannot have kept much from her. In this as in his unruffled response to her bold stories, he was an exceptional father to his exceptional daughter. According to Henry, her reading started very early, and it was difficult to say “at what age she was not intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of the best essays and novels in the English language.” This pious memorializing does not mean she was reading Dr. Johnson and Samuel Richardson at the age of five, but it does set Henry’s remembrance of a very young and precocious child curled over her books squarely before us. She was, he added, blessed with an enviably “tenacious memory.”12 So their father’s bookshelves were of primary importance in fostering her talent, given that the first impulse to write stories comes from being entertained and excited by other people’s.

  But it is hard to make any very systematic account of her early reading. For one thing, the 500 volumes in Mr. Austen’s library were sold off; and for another, Henry in 1817 was more concerned to stress her piety and respectability than the eclecticism of her taste. He stated in his biographical note that Johnson and Cowper were her favourite “moral writers,” and that she admired Richardson more than Fielding. “She recoiled from every thing gross,” he explained; recoiled, possibly, but read and enjoyed first. She was never prim. She did enjoy Fielding, and not only his farce Tom Thumb, brought to her by her brothers, but Tom Jones too. 13 She was also familiar with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and his Sentimental Journey: again, not mentioned by Henry. He did not name any of the women novelists and playwrights who were important to her, among them Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah Cowley. Plays were after all read in the family, discussed, performed and enjoyed; but Henry may have felt it inappropriate to say so in 1817. Nor did he mention Shakespeare, although Shakespeare was “part of an Englishman’s constitution,” according to Henry Crawford (in Mansfield Park), and Edmund Bertram agrees with him: “one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree . . . from one’s earliest years . . . We all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions.” We can take it that Edmund is speaking for the Austen family as well as for the Bertrams here; Catherine Morland is reared on Shakespeare, and the Dashwoods read Hamlet with Willoughby. Yet it is true that there are only three scant references to his work in her letters.

  With Johnson it is easier to point to direct influence. We know she read Rasselas, and his essays in the Rambler and the Idler. Later in life she called him “my dear Dr. Johnson” in a letter, and read Boswell; and his turn of phrase and thought both appear in her writing. There is a Johnsonian ring, grave and witty at once, about a sentence like “She had nothing against her, but her husband, and her conscience.” This is from an early story, Lady Susan; the same note is heard in the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .”), which could easily be the opening of a Rambler essay.

  Yet looking over her shoulder at what we know her to have read in those early years tells us chiefly how original she was; how she appreciated, took what was useful to her, and kept her own voice and imaginative ground clear. There is no early Austen novel written in the manner of Richardson, or Fanny Burney, or Charlotte Smith, with a heroine of undeviating saintliness and a hero who carries indecisive-ness through five volumes. In her teens she enthused about Charlotte Smith, the Daphne du Maurier of the 1780s and 1790s, and still entertaining today, with her thrilling heroes and gorgeously picturesque scenery—Grasmere, the Welsh mountains, Switzerland, America, the south of France—and her rambling narratives: Emmeline , Ethelinde and The Old Manor House are each four or five volumes long. Austen alludes to Smith several times in her juvenile writings; one of Smith’s characters, the passionate and uncontrollable Frederic Delamere mentioned in her History, caught her fancy particularly. Delamere is driven by feeling, impulsive in all his actions and liable to fits of near-madness when he is thwarted. He is darkly handsome, proud, well-born, tormented, abominably behaved but never dishonourable: having abducted Emmeline with the intention of carrying her off to Scotland, he repents before they reach Barnet. Emmeline did not love him, but he fascinated her, as he did the young Jane Austen.14 Smith’s heroines, tearful innocents prone to fainting and falling off horses, slighted and ill-used by their social superiors, are like nothing in Austen (unless you count Fanny Price, their very distant cousin). But Smith’s romance is vigorous, well written and genuinely imaginative, and you can see why Austen took pleasure in it, and defended it with “if a book is well written, I always find it too short.” 15

  Too short could never apply to Samuel Richardson. “An amazing horrid book,” Austen made Isabella Thorpe call his Sir Charles Grandison in Northanger Abbey, giving herself away in those four words, since it was Austen’s favourite. “Her knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire,” wrote her nephew in his Memoir, going on to say that every incident in it was familiar to her, and every character like a friend.16 A book so important to her, and now so little known, is worth some attention. It is built around a pair of paragons, Sir Charles and the beautiful Harriet Byron. She falls in love with him after he saves her from abduction and likely rape in Volume I, and remains in love throughout seven volumes and 800,000 words; whereas he is divided between her and an Italian lady to whom he has given his word and half his heart, and from whom he extricates himself honourably, but at a snail’s pace. This allows the reader to be entertained by their families and friends; and they are so diverting that you see how the young Jane Austen chose to i
nhabit the book, like a great house with many rooms, corridors and stairs to explore and re-explore.

  “Sir Thomas Grandison and his daughters Caroline and Charlotte,” from Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (first published 1754)

  Richardson is at his best in describing Grandison’s sisters, who become Harriet’s friends, in particular the younger, Charlotte, sharp-witted and fierce, the most interestingly developed character in the book. Charlotte is unwilling to bear fools gladly and averse to getting married; she talks of the “matrimonial noose,” and when she does reluctantly agree to enter the state, she behaves badly at her own wedding, muttering during the service and forbidding her bridegroom to sit beside her in the carriage afterwards. She quarrels with him for intruding on her privacy, and her teasing drives him to such rage that he breaks up her harpsichord with his fists; but he loves her passionately, and when his rage passes tells her never to give up her high spirits, or her teasing.

  The chief cause of Charlotte’s wildness is the behaviour of her father, Sir Thomas Grandison, and a great theme of the book is the bad behaviour of parents and the ways in which the younger generation are affected by it, or try to put it right. After the death of Lady Grandison, when the girls were in their mid-teens, their father invited a Mrs. Oldham, the widow of a friend, to become their governess; when she became his mistress, they refused to have any more dealings with her, and he moved her to a house in another county (Grandison’s main estates are in Hampshire, which must have amused the Austens). During this period Charlotte, neglected by her father, engaged herself to a fortune-hunting army officer. Mrs. Oldham meanwhile bore two sons, but Sir Thomas neither married her nor made any provision for her or them; and when he died, it was left to his legitimate son and heir to treat the lady with kindness, allow her some dignity, give her a pension and see that his half-brothers were given a start in life. There are similar stories involving his uncle, and the mother of an heiress to whom he stands as guardian, each of whom he helps to redeem by acts of good sense and generosity.