Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Grandison is full of discussions about the place and condition of women, and of love, marriage and eroticism. There is even a mannish Miss Barnevelt, who makes a distinct pass at Harriet Byron, telling her that she “wished twenty times, as I sat by her, that I had been man for her sake . . . if I had, I should have caught her up, popt her under one of my arms, and run away with her.” Sir Charles objects to love at first sight because it is too sexual: “a tindery fit,” “an indelicate paroxysm,” dangerous to women especially. The question of lifelong constancy to a lost love is debated, and “constant nymphs” are ruled against: “Must a woman sit down, cry herself blind, and become useless to the principal end of her being, as to this life, and to all family connections, when, probably, she has not lived one third of her time?” Another discussion concerns itself with “girls of slender fortunes,” comparing their “peculiarly unprovided & helpless” state as single women with that of men, who “can rise in a profession, and if he acquires wealth in a trade, can get above it and be respected.” These were all subjects likely to interest Austen; and some were later raised in her own work. In Grandison, a respected old lady suggests that “women of large and independent fortunes, who have the hearts and understanding to use them as they ought” may do better not to marry, but poor women do not have the same freedom of choice. On the whole, the older women take the view that young girls should not be too romantic in expecting love as well as a decent husband. Harriet Byron, who does achieve both, asks, “Is not marriage the highest state of friendship that mortals can know?,” a view all Austen’s principal heroines would support.

  Important as all these points were to her, the characterization of Charlotte was, I believe, most useful to Austen’s purposes. Here was an outspoken young woman, very often wrong in her judgements and behaviour, yet always captivating, brilliantly lively and wholly human, whether speaking for herself or presented through the eyes of others. With her sisterly love and loyalty, her teasing, her articulacy, her repartee, her “archness rising to the eye that makes one both love and fear her,” Charlotte Grandison was surely an early inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet.17

  There is another witty young woman in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia , Lady Honoria Pemberton, who teases Cecilia and her humourless lover so mercilessly that you wish she were allotted more than the few pages she gets in that extraordinary book. Nearly a thousand pages long, it too must have filled many winter evenings by the fire at Steventon and taken its toll on Jane’s eyes, which at times became tired and troublesome. She admired Burney’s comic monsters and her dialogue, but most of what she learnt from her was negative: to be short, to sharpen, to vary, to exclude. Also, to prefer the imperfect and human heroine to the nearly flawless one. What Burney had demonstrated with her first book—concise as none of the later ones were—was that there was a public for social comedy finely observed through female eyes. After Evelina, a man such as Mr. Austen could feel it not unreasonable or disreputable for his daughter to try her hand at fiction.

  7

  Weddings And Funerals

  At the end of the 1780s, when Jane was in her mid-teens, the Austen clan was changing its shape, scattering, spreading here, diminishing there, some of its members prospering serenely, others beginning to be overshadowed by political events. As yet Mrs. Hancock and Eliza did not appear much troubled by the slow spreading effects of the French Revolution. They came to England in 1790 on one of their regular trips; at this stage nobody was prevented from travelling, and few thought themselves in any personal danger in Paris. They spent some time in the summer of 1790 at Steventon, and this is when Jane dedicated Love and Freindship to Eliza. It was the longest story she had written so far, and the strongest proof of her attachment to her cousin. But although she and Eliza were the best of friends, relations between Henry and Eliza were ruffled; a coolness arose between them, which Eliza at any rate blamed on him.1 Since they had been flirting for several years, and since Henry was now no Cherubino but a fully grown nineteen-year-old, it looks like a power struggle. How far did such flirtations go? A grass widow with a husband for whom she feels no love, but with an appetite for life and an active young admirer, may put on a performance of switching between hot and cold and then express surprise at the effects of such behaviour; a young man may rage, protest or sulk. Evidently there was a quarrel. Henry went back to Oxford.

  Eliza also returned to Paris with Mrs. Hancock and Hastings, but was soon in England again; her husband went south to his swamp-draining projects. He was a fervent royalist, as was to be expected of one who held his land from the King; so she stated in 1791, adding that he had already “joined, in his heart, the royalist clan in Piedmont and Turin,” where some of the French princes were gathered in exile.2 The revolution rolled on, becoming fiercer, more doctrinaire and bloodier; and the English, together with other unreformed European powers, began to feel threatened. Life in Paris became difficult for someone who loved to call herself Madame la Comtesse, and early in 1791 she brought her son and mother to England again, this time with no immediate plans to return to France. After a stay at Margate, where the sea bathing was recommended for Hastings, they settled in their old house in Orchard Street, near Portman Square; and Mrs. Hancock succeeded in teaching her grandson his letters.

  Jane Austen’s father as a young man, dark eyed, precise of feature, neatly wigged: the hardworking orphan who achieved an Oxford fellowship. He left Oxford upon marrying Cassandra Leigh, niece of the Master of Balliol, and became a country clergyman.

  The only known image of Jane’s mother, showing the aristocratic nose of which she was proud. Mrs. Austen ran her large family and household on tough, practical lines; she was also a reader, and in her few leisure moments wrote accomplished light verse.

  A view of Steventon village, a straggle of labourers’ cottages set along a lane in a remote part of north Hampshire. There was no shop, no public house, no school, no doctor, and church and rectory stood at some distance. In one of these cottages Mrs. Austen put out her babies to be cared for by a village woman until they reached the age of reason.

  James, the eldest Austen son and his mother’s favourite, inherited her aptitude for verse and saw himself as the writer of the family. A good scholar, he went up to Oxford at fourteen, when Jane was only four; he wrote serious poetry and dramatic prologues for the plays he put on with his brothers at home, and founded a magazine, The Loiterer, for which he wrote most of the contributions. His other passion was hunting.

  There is no picture of the second Austen son, George, handicapped from birth. The third, Edward, was the lucky one: a pleasant, easy-going boy, he took the fancy of some distant cousins of his father, and when they proved childless they asked to adopt him. Mr. Austen resisted the idea at first, but Mrs. Austen urged letting him go; and he became heir to a fortune and large estates.

  This staid portrait, done after Jane’s death, conveys none of the panache of her fourth brother, Henry. “Oh, what a Henry!” she once wrote; he was the charmer of the family, witty, dashing and not always reliable, but his father’s favourite and hers. He took his Oxford degree while serving as an officer in the militia, made a romantic and advantageous marriage, and on leaving the army set up as a banker, living in high style in London. Later the bank crashed and he fell back on the Church for his final profession. He took the keenest interest in Jane’s writing, and dealt with publishers on her behalf both during her lifetime and afterwards.

  Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister and closest companion, was a beauty; but after the death of her fiancé she retreated into voluntary spinsterhood and sadly premature middle age. She described Jane memorably as “the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.”

  Francis, known as Frank, closest in age to Jane, an energetic and enterprising boy who saved up to buy himself a hunting pony at seven, left home at twelve for the Royal Navy Academy in Portsmouth, and went to sea for a fiveyear stint in the Far East at fourteen. He ended his career as Admiral o
f the Fleet.

  The only member of the Austen family to have no formal portrait, apart from her handicapped brother George, was Jane. This sketch by Cassandra was regarded as inadequate and unflattering by those who remembered her, but it is the single image of her face drawn from life.

  Charles, the sweet-natured baby of the Austen family, followed Frank into the navy. He was devoted to Jane, and read all her books as they came out, Emma three times in quick succession. “I am delighted with her,” he wrote, “more so I think than even with my favourite Pride and Prejudice.”

  Steventon rectory was pulled down in 1824, and this is one of several drawings done from somewhat hazy memory by James Austen’s elder daughter, Anna. It shows the front, with the windows of the garrett rooms where Mr. Austen’s pupils slept. His study was at the back, looking over the flower garden and strawberry bed; there was also a vegetable garden, yard and outhouses, where Mrs. Austen kept poultry and a cow.

  A silhouette showing young Edward Austen being formally presented by his father for adoption into the wealthy Kentish family of Thomas Knight of Godmersham. After this, Edward spent his holidays in Kent but continued to be educated at Steventon by his father before being sent on the Grand Tour. Although his circumstances were transformed, he always maintained close contacts with his natural family.

  Philadelphia Austen, sister of Jane’s father, orphaned as a child and poor like him, travelled alone to India at the age of twenty-one to find a husband and made a loveless match to Tysoe Saul Hancock.

  Warren Hastings, painted by Reynolds as a successful young officer of the East India Company, well on his way to becoming Governor-General and fabulously rich. He was Hancock’s patron, and a young widower when Philadelphia met him.

  The wistful face of little Betsy— later Eliza—Hancock, Phila’s only child, goddaughter and probably also natural daughter of Warren Hastings, who settled £10,000 on her. Clever and affectionate, she became warmly attached to her cousin Jane; she also enjoyed flirting with her male cousins.

  The Château de Jourdan, near Nérac, to which Eliza Hancock’s French husband, Jean François Capot de Feuillide, took her with her mother in 1784, and where he spent a good part of their money on land-drainage schemes, by which he hoped to make his own fortune.

  Among the Austens’ neighbours were (above left) Norfolk-born William Chute, MP, who inherited The Vyne, one of the great houses of Hampshire. His younger brother Thomas (above right) was a good friend of James and Henry Austen and dancing partner of Cassandra and Jane. Possession of The Vyne made William Chute a most eligible bachelor, but he was more interested in hunting than in any other form of social life, and he chose his bride, Eliza (opposite page top, in a late portrait sketch), the daughter of a fellow fox-hunting MP, in London. Eliza Chute had no children; she read, gardened, did charitable work among the rural poor and kept a diary, in which the Austens often appear; and her niece married James Austen’s son.

  John Portal (opposite page below), another hunting neighbour, was from a French immigrant family that became rich printing notes for the Bank of England at their paper mills on the River Test. They built a mansion at Laverstoke in the 1790s, visited by Jane Austen in 1815; and Mrs. Portal was one of her last visitors. Two of Edward’s sons married Portal daughters.

  The Hon. Newton (above) and Coulson Wallop (below), the handsome younger sons of the second Earl of Portsmouth, were well known to Jane; she quoted with amusement Coulson’s “delicate language” for a pregnancy—“in for it!” Their elder brother, Lord Lymington, who became the third Earl, was one of the Revd. George Austen’s earliest pupils. His pathetic and sometimes terrifying eccentricity as an adult, and the efforts of the family and others to control him, led to dark and horrible scandals in the neighbourhood.

  The Hon. Newton (above) and Coulson Wallop (below), the handsome younger sons of the second Earl of Portsmouth, were well known to Jane; she quoted with amusement Coulson’s “delicate language” for a pregnancy—“in for it!” Their elder brother, Lord Lymington, who became the third Earl, was one of the Revd. George Austen’s earliest pupils. His pathetic and sometimes terrifying eccentricity as an adult, and the efforts of the family and others to control him, led to dark and horrible scandals in the neighbourhood.

  The Revd. William Heathcote (with his father and the Master of the Hounds), who figures in Jane’s letters and married her close friend Elizabeth Bigg of Manydown. After Heathcote’s early death, Elizabeth moved to Winchester, and it was she who found lodgings there for Jane in the last weeks of her life.

  The tiny, isolated and peaceful thirteenth-century church of St. Nicholas at Steventon, where the Revd. George Austen officiated for over thirty years, and where Jane was christened. In the churchyard is a nine-hundred-year-old yew tree with a hollow trunk in which the key of the church door was kept. One of the three bells dates from 1470, and they have always been rung in the entrance porch, reached through a simple arch with a man’s head carved on one side, a woman’s on the other. Below left is a page of the parish register in which Jane Austen was allowed by her father to scribble, and where she tried out the names of imaginary husbands: Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam of London, Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool and—in another mood—Jack Smith.

  At this point the Austens were full of the engagement of Edward: he was to marry a baronet’s daughter, Elizabeth Bridges of Goodnestone Park in Kent.3 The bride was eighteen, younger than Cassandra, and only two years older than Jane; the marriage was approved by Bridges, Knights and—rather distantly—Austens, and would take place at the end of the year. All the Bridges girls were elegant and pretty. They had been educated at the smartest of girls’ boarding schools in Queen Square in London; and two of Elizabeth’s sisters became engaged at the same time. The world was set on marriage, it seemed. Even Jane dreamt of future husbands. She took a page of her father’s parish register and tried out names for these fictitious beings: “Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam, of London,” “Edmund Arthur William Mortimer, of Liverpool.” There is nothing surprising about the fantasy until the bottom of the page, when a populist note is struck with “Jack Smith,” to be married to “Jane Smith late Austen.” For a moment the Tory parson’s daughter seems to be letting her imagination travel in an unusual direction: one would like to know more about that particular dream.

  However much she lived in her imagination, in books and stories, she had to make the transition from child who observes adult life to woman who experiences it. Mrs. Austen was in her fifties before Jane reached fourteen, a wide gap between mother and daughter; once again Cassandra is likely to have taken over most of the maternal role in giving help and advice to Jane as she grew up. Menstruation started late for most girls in the eighteenth century, at fifteen or sixteen; they had to learn to deal with an awkward and unpleasant process just when they were being told to prepare for the crucial years in which they were expected to attract admirers and most wanted to appear elegant and imperturbable.4 Imagine coping without running water or indoor plumbing, and being obliged to conceal, wash and dry your napkins, while a lot of teenage boys thundered about the house. This is another piece of lost, unrecorded history; but even in the most brisk and practical families, girls must have felt themselves vulnerable, and at a disadvantage, in the cumbersome arrangements they were obliged to make.

  Friendships with other girls became more important. Jane Cooper was in and out of Steventon, and then two new families with daughters arrived in the district. Martha and Mary Lloyd came in the spring of 1789; Mrs. Lloyd was the widow of a clergyman, with aristocratic connections of the kind Mrs. Austen herself boasted, and she made them welcome as a congenial addition to local society. They were cousins of the Fowles, who had been pupils at Steventon, and a third Lloyd daughter had married the eldest Fowle. James Austen went to his friend’s wedding and got to know them all, and soon after this Mrs. Lloyd rented Deane parsonage from Mr. Austen. Mary was Mrs. Austen’s favourite; but, although she was cl
ose to her in age, Jane never liked her. She preferred Martha, nearly ten years older but with a sense of humour. Stories and poems were dedicated to Martha, and she and Jane were happy to share a bed when necessary; they would lie talking and laughing until two in the morning.5 From now on the Lloyds were a constant part of the Austens’ lives.

  In the same year a family with three unmarried daughters, Catherine, Elizabeth and Alethea Bigg, inherited Manydown, a large manor house four miles beyond Deane. Mr. Bigg, or Bigg-Wither, was a well-to-do land-owner and they were heiresses in a small way, but this did not prevent a real friendship developing with the penniless Austen sisters; the Biggs were clever too, and they found they had similar tastes. There was now a community of young women with whom Jane could talk about shared experiences, exchange and discuss books, compare clothes, practise dance steps and music, take walks, drive into Basingstoke for shopping, and gossip about their own families and their neighbours.

  James had left Oxford to take up a curacy and was installed in the vicarage at Overton, not far from home. He cultivated good company and even hunted alongside visiting royalty; and he met a young woman who fulfilled all the dreams of an aspiring curate.6 Anne Mathew was the daughter of a general and the granddaughter of a duke; she had good financial prospects; she was slim and dark, with beautiful eyes; and, at thirty-two, she was on the shelf. James saw his chance, took it, and was accepted by Anne, and welcomed by her family, despite being a mere curate. Her father promised her an allowance of £100 a year; it meant that, together with James’s income, they could furnish a house and keep a carriage and a pack of hounds.