Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  By the age of seventeen Jane was attending the balls held at the Basingstoke Assembly Rooms over the town hall, where all the local families gathered, paying a small subscription. Even here there was no great formality: as we have seen, there were no minuets. On 14 November 1793, a month before Jane’s eighteenth birthday, there was a ball at the Assembly Rooms at which the new Mrs. Chute met many of her neighbours. Cassandra and Jane were likely to have been there with Frank, home from the Far East after five years, nineteen, and a fine sunburnt figure in his lieutenant’s uniform. A few days later he was invited to a large dinner party given by the Lefroys for the Chutes, but his sisters were not; of course he was a useful single man. Nor were the Austen girls at the Chutes’ dance on 5 December, at which eight or nine couples enjoyed a cold supper, and kept going until after two, among them the Lefroys, the Harwoods and the Biggs.

  In fact Cassandra and Jane were preparing for a visit to a Kentish cousin, planned by Mrs. Austen, no doubt, in which the girls would make themselves useful and at the same time have the opportunity to meet a wider circle. Elizabeth Austen from Tonbridge had married money and moved to Southampton, where her husband was now Sheriff; and she was about to have a baby. So the girls helped out, and were also taken to the Assembly Ball at the Dolphin Inn for the company and the dancing. Jane stood godmother to the new baby, and stayed for the christening; Cassandra returned to Steventon, and she and Henry attended the next Basingstoke ball together, when Henry danced his six dances with Mrs. Chute; Alethea and Harriet Bigg were there, the Lefroys, a Terry brother and sister, Coulson Wallop (Lord Portsmouth’s brother) and Charles Powlett. Mrs. Austen wrote a verse account of the occasion for Jane’s entertainment. It began:

  I send you here a list of all

  The company who graced the ball

  Last Thursday night at Basingstoke;

  There were but six and thirty folk,

  Altho’ the Evening was so fine.

  First then, the couple from the Vine;

  Next, Squire Hicks and his fair spouse—

  They came from Mr. Bramston’s house,

  With Madam and her maiden Sister;

  (Had she been absent, who’d have missed her?)2

  Mrs. Austen had a sharp tongue for neighbours, appreciated by her daughter and passed on to her.

  Dancing, as the new year of 1794 came in, was not the major preoccupation in Hampshire. The county was busy with plans to augment the militia and raise more cavalry regiments. They were wanted to fight the French, now on the offensive and sunk into infamy of every kind: terror reigned, the Queen as well as the King had been guillotined, the Christian religion thrown out and an entirely new calendar, in which a week lasted ten days, invented. The militia was also needed to suppress seditious gatherings at home in England, where some sympathy with French ideas could still be found among radical thinkers and the discontented poor. Basingstoke felt the full effects. The little town buzzed with officers of the 84th; Colonel Rolle and Captain Rodd and so many more of them were quartered there that they made “a great fracas” later in the year.3 Henry Austen’s regiment was kept busy guarding French naval prisoners at Portsmouth; he managed to be stationed at Petersfield, which meant he could get home easily.4 Eliza was nowhere to be seen; when news of the death of her husband reached England, she retreated to the north and spent the rest of the year with friends on the borders of Northumberland and County Durham. Meanwhile all the furniture from the Marais was sold up, without the least regard to her or her son’s claims upon it. 5

  Four of the Austen brothers were now concerned in one way or another with the war; remotely in the case of James, whose father-in-law, the General, had him appointed to a military chaplaincy. It was intended simply to bring him a useful income, and asked nothing of him but the appointment of a deputy to do his work for a fraction of his pay; this was the accepted jobbery of the time. Mr. Austen also did his utmost for Frank, corresponding assiduously with Warren Hastings about his promotion prospects, and suggesting the names of the contacts who might further them, lords and admirals right up to Chat-ham, First Lord of the Admiralty.6 Hastings was still officially on trial, but the momentum had gone out of the prosecution, and Mr. Austen was probably right in thinking he had influence in these quarters. For the moment Frank was kept in home waters, helping to evacuate British troops from Holland. Charles, who had finished his schooling at Portsmouth, had his introduction to life at sea taking part in a similar exercise off East Friesland, “in support of British Army then retreating”; he got badly frostbitten.7

  Early in 1795 some soldiers in Henry’s regiment joined with the half-starved poor around Newhaven in rioting for food. Henry had been allowed leave in Oxford to work for his degree; in the crisis he was urgently summoned back. He sent a message to say he was sick, and got away with it. The rioting was brutally put down and the mutineers condemned to the severest punishments; Henry was back with his regiment in time to see the men executed by firing squad by their fellow soldiers before the whole Brighton garrison, 10,000 strong. Then in September he marched his men to winter quarters in Chelmsford before resuming his studies in Oxford. It was an odd way of life, divided between cloistered scholarship and the camp, where the young officers under their colonel, Charles Spencer, kept up a cheerful social round while maintaining an unrelentingly harsh discipline over the men.8

  Henry had something else on his mind. In February 1795 Eliza de Feuillide had been widowed for a year; and in April, when her godfather was finally acquitted of all the charges brought against him, Henry wrote from St. John’s College to congratulate him: “Dear Sir, An humble, and hitherto a silent spectator of national concerns, permit me at the present interesting moment to transgress the strictness of propriety, and though without permission, I hope without offence to offer you the warm & respectful congratulations of a heart deeply impressed with a sense of all you have done & suffered. Permit me to congratulate my country & myself as an Englishman.” He went on to allude to “many instances of your kindness shown to me.”9 We don’t know what these kindnesses were: presumably either introductions or money. Henry’s tone reads stickily, but he wanted Warren Hastings to approve of him.

  It was eight years since he and Hastings’s god-daughter had acted together at Steventon, Henry as a boy of sixteen, Eliza a flirtatious matron of twenty-six. Now she was free, and he was fully grown; and at some point this year he asked her formally to become his wife. There was no reason why they should not marry: it was common for first cousins to do so, she was loved by his family and reciprocated their love; he was earning something as a lieutenant, and she had an independent fortune, and possibly further expectations. But she turned him down: ambitious Henry, resplendent in his red officer’s coat, was sent away with his tail between his legs. Perhaps she thought they knew each other too well; perhaps she cherished her independence. Perhaps she expected a longer wooing; but if she regretted her refusal, Henry was too proud to be kept dangling. He does not appear to have informed his family of his plans, and that was that.

  Eliza’s other male admirer among the Austens had been James, now of course married and father of a baby daughter. That May of 1795, when Anna was two and his wife Anne not yet forty, she was taken suddenly unwell after dinner one day, and died, inexplicably, within hours. James, left to deal with his own and his child’s shock and grief, naturally turned to his family for comfort and help, and Anna was taken from Deane to Steventon to be cared for by her grandmother and aunts. James, mourning but free, began to think of his widowed cousin again, while Anna became a dearly loved part of the Steventon family, and the nearest thing to a child of their own for Cassandra and Jane. Jane’s acute observation of children must have sprung first from this little niece; when the small Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice express joy in purely physical fashion, “over their whole bodies, in a variety of capers and frisks,” we are surely seeing Anna at a happy moment.

  Anna in turn stored up her impressions of the rectory at Steventon,
and years afterwards wrote an account of the two rooms Jane and Cassandra shared upstairs, the inner bedroom, the outer called “the Dressing room,” but actually more like a private sitting room, with its blue wallpaper and striped blue curtains.

  I remember the common-looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some portions of furniture. A painted press, with shelves above for books, that stood with its back to the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the fireplace; my Aunt Jane’s Pianoforte— & above all, on a table between the windows, above which hung a looking-glass, 2 Tonbridge-ware work boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk, yard measures, etc.10

  Anna was enamoured of the work boxes with their neat fittings, and mentioned neither Cassandra’s paints and pencils, nor a small mahogany writing desk that may have held Jane’s pens and paper.11

  During that autumn of 1795 the war reached further into the sisters’ lives when Cassandra’s fiancé Tom Fowle agreed to act as chaplain to a regiment bound for the West Indies to fight the French. This was nothing like James’s sinecure. Tom had to sail with the soldiers; the chaplaincy was offered by the colonel of the regiment, Baron Craven, his distant cousin, who was also going out. Tom’s acceptance was a bold step intended to secure his future with Cassandra, because Lord Craven promised him a good living in Shropshire once the military expedition was over. But Tom, discreet as Cassandra, did not mention his engagement to his patron; only, with admirable prudence, he made his will before setting off. He was due to sail some time at the end of the year.

  Another severe winter threatened; the Prime Minister, Pitt, recommended the poor to eat meat instead of bread, the price of which kept rising, with disastrous consequences for those who depended on it. Pitt’s advice sounds dangerously like Marie Antoinette’s, and in Berkshire the magistrates were so anxious at the prospect of riots they resolved to raise poor relief out of the rates; other counties felt it wise to follow suit. In October a mob of self-styled democrats attacked the King as he went through St. James’s Park on his way to Parliament, breaking the windows of the state coach, hissing, hooting and shouting, “Give us peace and bread!,” “No King!” and “No War!” The crowd was dispersed, and the next day the King, who never lacked courage, went out again, with the Queen and princesses, to Covent Garden Theatre; this time there was no trouble.12 Pitt decided to raise money from the middle classes by putting an individual tax on hair powder; the result was effectively to end its use. A few held out, like Edward and Elizabeth Austen—and no doubt George Austen continued to wear his old-fashioned powdered wig—but more followed Frank and Charles, who simply had their dark hair cropped short. The result is that they both look entirely modern in their portraits, inhabitants of a different world from their brothers James and Edward, who were both immortalized as men of an ancien régime.

  So much for the world and the family. Another world and another family occupied Jane’s mind all through 1795. Some time after she had finished Lady Susan she started work on a new story planned on a larger scale. Elinor and Marianne was the name given to the first version of Sense and Sensibility, and Cassandra remembered that it was read to the family before 1796, and that at this stage it was written in the form of letters, like Lady Susan. Since all the manuscripts are lost, there is no way of knowing how much of Elinor and Marianne survived into the published book; we can at least be sure that it centred on two sisters with contrasting characters, an elder sensible and discreet, a younger ready to live less decorously and more dangerously.

  10

  The Doll And the Poker

  Biographers soon learn that there is no such thing as a reliable description or portrait, so it is not surprising to find Jane Austen remembered as “fair and handsome” by one observer, and by another as having “a clear brown complexion” with “darkish brown” hair and hazel eyes. A third witness writes of her having a “complexion of that rather rare sort which seems the peculiar property of light brunettes—A mottled skin, not fair, but perfectly clear & healthy in hue . . . fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark”; while a fourth gives her “large dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long, long black hair down to her knees.”1

  These are only the beginning. The silhouette that surfaced in 1944 (tucked inside an 1816 edition of Mansfield Park), labelled “l’aimable Jane” and approved by the greatest of all Austen scholars, R. W. Chapman, shows someone with a large nose and a small mouth; yet her nose was described by Anna as small. Long narrow noses and dark-seeming eyes appear in her father, her Aunt Hancock and Cousin Eliza, and in all her brothers, as far as can be made out from miniatures; but we are told that Mr. Austen had hazel eyes, and that both Henry and Jane inherited them. She certainly did not have her mother’s aquiline nose, a source of pride to Mrs. Austen, who considered it a mark of aristocratic blood.2

  The eldest of the Fowle sons, who knew Jane from her early childhood, insisted that she was pretty: “certainly pretty—bright & a good deal of colour in her face—like a doll—no that would not give at all the idea for she had so much expression—she was like a child—quite a child very lively & full of humour.” It is the most attractive of all descriptions of her, because you feel he has searched his memory and come up with a real vision, inspired but not distorted by affection. Another witness, who was her neighbour later in her life, makes her “a tall thin spare person, with very high cheek bones great colour— sparkling Eyes not large but joyous & intelligent,” and criticizes the engraving made for the 1870 Memoir as making her face too broad and plump. The very high cheekbones fail to appear in Cassandra’s sketch, and others thought her real cheeks were “a little too full,” and that her face was round. Her niece Anna, who loved her aunt dearly, ends her description with the words, “One hardly understands how with all these advantages she could yet fail of being a decidedly handsome woman”: a convoluted phrase which I take to mean she was not generally considered handsome.3 Anna pronounced Cassandra’s sketch to be “hideously unlike” her aunt and it was not shown during Cass’s lifetime.4 But one cannot help noticing that the only two Austen children for whom there is neither formal portrait nor silhouette are George and Jane.

  Cousin Phila Walter’s pronouncement that Jane was not pretty as a child has already been given. Eliza called Jane and Cassandra “two of the prettiest girls in England,” but this is Eliza’s good nature running over into gush. Henry praised his sister’s complexion, and the character that shone through her separately good features, without suggesting they added up to conventional beauty. Adapting John Donne, he said her eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek, a lovely phrase which suggests a blushing pink or even red; and others noticed her high or brilliant colour.5 Her nephew James-Edward described her in his Memoir as “very attractive . . . a clear brunette with a rich colour . . . full round cheeks with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face . . . not so regularly handsome as her sister.” And he adds, “she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required; and . . . were scarcely sufficiently regardful of the fashionable, or the becoming.”6 Jane chose to have her curls cut short at the front, leaving only the hair at the back to pin up, tucking it into a cap when she felt like it, and making the whole process quicker and simpler; she had no need of curl papers. “My hair was at least tidy, which was all my ambition,” she wrote after a ball at Lord Portsmouth’s, suggesting she was unwilling to be too much bothered. 7 On another occasion she expected Cassandra and Edward to be amused by the news that her hair has been dressed by Nanny Littlewart, one of the village family who served the Austens in many capacities, and unlikely to be skilled hairdressers; impossible to imagine Jane with the swept-up and powdered creations of Mrs. Lefroy or her sister-in-law Elizabeth.

  She was never scarred by smallpox, the ruin of so many faces in her generation, and so often used as a threat an
d a warning against the perils of vanity. Jane Austen was not vain. She struggled to concern herself with fashion and dress design—which seems to have interested Cassandra more, for it is clear from Jane’s replies that she raised the subject regularly in her letters—but Jane does not write about them as though they held real interest for her: “I hate describing such things,” she says of an ultra-fashionable borrowed cap she is to wear at a ball; and “I have got over the dreadful epocha of Mantuamaking much better than I expected.” 8

  This is not the voice of someone prepared to devote much time and trouble to her appearance. “I cannot determine what to do about my new Gown; I wish such things were to be bought ready made” (in a letter of 1798) confirms this unwillingness. Many years later, when she was persuaded to have her hair done to the latest fashion in London (in 1813), she “thought it looked hideous,” and regretted her concealing cap. At the same period she wrote to Cassandra to tell her she was trimming a dress with ribbon: “With this addition it will be a very useful gown, happy to go anywhere.” A useful gown, happy to go anywhere, is not what someone who cares for fashion wants to be seen in.

  Nor did she concern herself with clothes in the novels: in Northanger Abbey, Mrs. Allen’s obsessive interest in fashion—“dress was her passion”—is roundly mocked, both by the author and by the most sensible voice in the book, Henry Tilney’s. “There goes a strange-looking woman! What an odd gown she has got on!—How old-fashioned it is! Look at the back”: this is Mrs. Allen’s tedious level of interest in other people. And in a famous passage in which the young heroine, Catherine Morland, worries about what to wear to a dance, the author interpolates her own comment: “Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.”