Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  This was her considered voice, whether the passage was written in the 1790s or added in 1803. In her letters she may comment on the fact that ladies are wearing fruit on their hats, and that it seems more natural to have flowers growing out of the head, and be precise about the colour she requires for dress material; but the impression we get is that, had she lived two hundred years later, she would have rejoiced in the freedom of a pair of old trousers, with a tweed skirt for church, and one decent dress kept for evening.

  About her figure there is general agreement: “slight and elegant,” “tall and slight, but not drooping”; “a tall thin spare person”; even “a thin upright piece of wood or iron” makes the same point.9 This casts more doubt on the silhouette, whose bosom is not that of a spare person. Henry called her stature “that of true elegance. It could not have been increased without exceeding the middle height,” a very elegant, brotherly formulation. Her nephew James-Edward described her figure as “rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation.” 10 Anna also testified to her quick, decisive step.11

  From this jumble of accounts, what emerges? She was tall and thin, with curly hair that was closer to dark than fair. One lock of Jane’s hair survives although it is now bronze colour; hair is known to fade with time, and the curls that can be seen emerging from her cap in Cassandra’s portrait sketch are certainly dark.12 Her eyes were not large and not blue, but possibly hazel and possibly dark; they were bright, although she had a tendency to eye trouble, which must have affected them at times. Nose and mouth on the small side. Round, doll-like cheeks, likely to glow into high colour with exercise or emotion. Not a beauty, but attractive to those who knew her best and responded to the animation, responsiveness and intelligence of her expression. And of course, like most people, she had looks that changed. When she was at ease and happy among those she loved, she sparkled joyously. When she was bored or mistrustful, her features tightened and her face closed up; no doubt she did then become as alarming as an unfriendly witness, Mary Mitford, made her sound when she likened her to a poker, perpendicular, precise and taciturn.

  11

  A Letter

  The earliest of Jane Austen’s letters to survive was addressed to Cassandra, wishing her a happy birthday. Jane wrote it sitting at home in her father’s parsonage on Saturday, 9 January 1796, and it is a remarkable document. Everyone in the family turned out a good letter, and her pen must have flown along neatly and fluently, as much for the sheer enjoyment of writing as from any sense of duty towards her dear sister. Because the letter was not intended for any eyes but those of the recipient, it takes a little decoding, but then it becomes as enjoyable as the first page of a novel, a familiar type of novel in which two young women will exchange news of their adventures and flirtations and gradually work their way towards the crowning point of their lives: which is marriage. As it happened, just such a novel in letters as Jane Austen herself had been writing—a fact which must have amused her.1

  Cassandra was away from home for the Christmas of 1795, staying with her future in-laws the Fowles in Berkshire. She was there to cheer them and be cheered in turn, for Tom was now at Falmouth, waiting to sail for the West Indies; there was always danger when young men sailed halfway across the world, but enough Austens had survived such trips to give them confidence, and there was no question of Tom being away for as long as Francis. So there was no display of sympathy, only a teasing reference to the odd name of Tom Fowle’s ship—it was called the Ponsborne —tucked in at the end of the page. Another Fowle brother, Charles, is also mentioned, who has rather boldly promised to get hold of some silk stockings for Jane; and she says she has spent so much on white gloves (for dancing) and pink silk (for underwear) that she has no money left for the stockings.

  The main theme for Jane’s letter was to be a description of the ball attended the night before, at Manydown House, with the Biggs; but alongside this topic she was signalling something more important, and more intimate. Her second sentence reads, “Mr. Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday, so that you are very near of an age.” Another Tom, and in truth, almost the same age as Jane herself, both of them just twenty. This dazzling stranger was from Ireland: Tom Lefroy was a visitor to Hampshire, not one of the dancing partners she and Cassandra had known most of their lives, but someone quite new. He was fair-haired and good-looking, clever and charming; he had completed a degree in Dublin and was about to study for the Bar in London, and was just taking a few weeks’ holiday over Christmas with his Uncle and Aunt Lefroy at Ashe parsonage. After this first mention, Tom Lefroy keeps putting in more appearances in Jane’s letter. In fact she can’t keep him out, this “gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man,” as she covers the sheet of paper so cheerfully, dipping her well-sharpened pen into the little ink bottle at her side.

  That Jane has just reached the age at which Cassandra became engaged to her Tom is something both are well aware of: these are things young women notice. Jane’s letter plunges on into talk about the ball of the night before: who was there and what happened, together with what plans are being made for more festivities. There is plenty of gossip to pass on to Cassandra, and the list of guests is so familiar to her that it needs no explaining. There are neighbours and neighbours’ friends and relatives, cousins, ex-pupils of their father and their sisters, and Oxford friends of James and Henry. Both these brothers are present, although she mentions only James among the dancers. There is no reference to his recent bereavement, only to “the very great improvement which has lately taken place in his dancing.” This is Jane’s tough streak; perhaps his sisters encouraged him to improve his skills on the dance floor as a means towards courting a new wife.

  Clergymen outnumbered all other kinds of men at the dance, almost as though Hampshire were a special breeding ground for the Church; but there were also local land-owners, a baronet and the widow of another baronet—he had also been a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral—who brought along three daughters and a son in her carriage, for the fun, the exercise, the small dramas of the dance floor, and the chance to extend the limited social circles of country life.2 Jane records the presence of a son of the Basingstoke doctor, John Lyford, whom she considered bad news, and her relief at avoiding him as a partner; she was better pleased by John Portal, whose handsome cousin Benjamin had called at Steventon the day before.

  The Bigg sisters, encouraged perhaps by their fifteen-year-old brother Harris, had persuaded their father to illuminate the Manydown greenhouse to add to the splendour of their occasion. James Austen danced with Alethea Bigg, Cassandra would be pleased to hear; and she would be even more entertained by her account of the behaviour of Elizabeth Bigg, who was at the interesting stage of rejecting one suitor and encouraging another. She opened the ball with the Revd. William Heathcote, a good-looking, lively, well-to-do, fox-hunting sort of clergyman, and by the end of the evening everyone knew Heathcote had cut out John Harwood, a lesser land-owner’s son, who would dearly have liked to marry Elizabeth. The Harwoods had given last week’s ball, but the attractiveness of Deane House had not softened Elizabeth’s heart towards their son.

  Jane wrote, “Mr. H [Heathcote] began with Elizabeth, and afterwards danced with her again; but they do not know how to be particular . I flatter myself, however, that they will profit by the three successive lessons which I have given them.” She means her behaviour with Tom Lefroy. She calls him “my Irish friend” and teases Cassandra, who has already scolded her about her behaviour in a letter, by telling her to imagine “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” Her delight in announcing this shines out unashamedly, but she goes on to explain that “I can expose myself . . . only once more,” as Tom Lefroy will be leaving the country soon after the next ball. They have had only three balls in which to get to know one another, and he is being “laughed at about me” by his uncle and aunt, the Lefroys, so much that he is “ashamed
of coming to Steventon” and “ran away” when Jane last called at Ashe. The next ball, however, is to be held at Ashe itself, in the Lefroys’ rectory, on the following Friday, 15 January.

  Here the letter breaks off. She takes it up again later with more about her Irish friend, who has just called. It is a polite custom for gentlemen to call on ladies they have partnered on the day after the dance, so there is nothing special about the visit, and in any case Tom comes chaperoned by his thirteen-year-old cousin, George. “The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other [i.e., Tom], he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded.”

  The reference to Fielding’s Tom Jones is another provocative remark. Jane is making clear that she doesn’t mind talking about a novel which deals candidly and comically with sexual attraction, fornication, bastard children and the oily hypocrisy of parsons, and roundly states that the sins of the flesh are of little account, and much to be preferred to the meanness of spirit of sober, prudent people. By telling Cassandra she and Tom Lefroy have talked about the book together, she lets her know just how free and even bold their conversation has been. She also lines herself up with its badly behaved hero—another shocking and profligate creature—against the correct and discreet characters who are his enemies in the book, and might be hers in the world outside it; for some would be displeased to hear of the daughter of a clergyman reading such a bawdy story. With this flourish, she puts down her pen until the next day.3

  Who else was in the house at Steventon as she sat writing this letter? She does not mention her father, who might be reading, or dozing, or thinking about tomorrow’s sermon in his study at the back of the house, overlooking the garden; or talking with his bailiff John Bond in the yard. There were undoubtedly servants in the kitchen and the outhouses, but they do not at this moment in Jane’s life seem worth a mention in a letter; later they will. Of her brothers, only Henry was at home. He had brought a friend to stay, John Warren, known to them from his schooldays with their father, and so quite accustomed to sleeping in one of the attic rooms, even though he was now a Fellow of Oriel College. He and Jane were good friends too, and he was one of her dancing partners the night before; but they had left him at the inn on the main road after the ball, to catch an early coach to town. He was back in Hampshire a few days later, when Jane discounted the idea that he might be in love with her, on the grounds that he presented her with a portrait of Tom Lefroy, drawn by himself; a gesture that made it quite clear that the flirtation had attracted attention and become common knowledge.

  Henry was also due to set off towards Oxford the next day to collect his Master’s degree before returning to his regiment in Chelmsford. He was not entirely committed to the militia; sometimes he thought of joining a new regiment which might be sent to the Cape of Good Hope. ( Jane: “I heartily hope that he will, as usual, be disappointed in this scheme.”) Much as she loved Henry, she was clear-sighted about his not always realistic ambitions and his vacillations; although even she may not have known that he was simultaneously pursuing a quite different plan to become a clergyman at nearby Chawton.4 He was also engaged in complicated financial dealings, and was about to pay off a debt to his father and borrow a very much larger sum from Eliza.5 At the same time, he was pursuing a young woman who might be expected to bring him a dowry, since her father was Sir Richard Pearson, in charge of the Naval Hospital at Greenwich. “Oh, what a Henry!” as Jane exclaimed on another occasion.6

  Mrs. Austen is given only a passing reference in her daughter’s letter, as the creator of some old paper hats “we” have trimmed up and given away, probably to some neighbouring children; this sounds like a way of amusing Anna on a midwinter afternoon. Of her other brothers, she refers only to Charles, now sixteen and serving as a midshipman at Portsmouth under the command of Cousin Jane Williams’s husband; Jane Williams’s brother, with wife and children, is expected at Steventon in a few days. Frank is at sea with the home fleet, keeping discipline among his sailors, a subject he probably does not discuss much with his sisters; his log entry during the week of this letter of Jane’s reads: “Punished sixteen seamen with one dozen lashes each for neglect of duty in being off the deck in their watch.”7 Frank is a good, steady officer who knows how to do his duty.

  The last paragraph of the letter, added on Sunday, is chat about Cassandra’s date of return and the bits and pieces of news she has sent from Berkshire. The death of a child and losses and gains at card games are mentioned in the same sentence, a juxtaposition brought about by limited space, but also by a brisk attitude towards mortality. She signs off, “. . . and am ever yours, J.A.”

  The fact that the manuscript Elinor and Marianne was lying completed somewhere in the house as she wrote gives this first letter an extra resonance. But there is more to it than that: it is also the only surviving letter in which Jane is clearly writing as the heroine of her own youthful story, living for herself the short period of power, excitement and adventure that might come to a young woman when she was thinking of choosing a husband; just for a brief time she is enacting instead of imagining. We can’t help knowing that her personal story will not go in the direction she is imagining in the letter; that, as it turned out, it was not Tom Lefroy, or anyone like him, who became her adventure, but the manuscript upstairs. Not marriage but art: and in her art she made this short period in a young woman’s life carry such wit and human understanding as few writers have managed to cram into solemn volumes three times the size. But just at that moment, in January 1796, you feel she might quite cheerfully have exchanged her genius for the prospect of being married to Tom Lefroy one day, and living in unknown Ireland, with a large family of children to bring up.

  Then, if you turn back to the very beginning of the letter, you find its opening sentence suggests there was some thought of the future in her mind as she wrote: “In the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer.” The birthday greeting takes them through another twenty-three years to 1819, when she will be forty-three and Cassandra forty-six. What they had to expect was that both would be living in other parts of the country, under different names, with husbands and troops of children. They would be following a pattern laid down for them by their mother, childbirth and child-rearing, housekeeping, gardening, supervising the dairy and poultry yard, charitable work for the poor, visits paid and received among a circle of neighbours. In all likelihood they would be planning marriages for their own daughters. They would still be writing to one another, the sort of cheerful informative letters their mother wrote to her friends and relations; but the significant adventure of their lives—the brief, high moment which set a young woman at the centre of the stage and saw her determine her future by her actions—would have been accomplished long since and passed into history. Eighteen-nineteen: the date in another century was almost unimaginable, conjured out of the air by Jane’s pen.

  12

  Defence Systems

  Don’t think a young Man of 20 is a harmless being,” wrote Eliza Chute’s mother to her that Christmas of 1795, warning her against the dangers of ballroom flirtations in words that could have been meant for Jane. Thomas Langlois Lefroy was not a harmless being, but Jane had her system of defences, and even before his departure she started putting them up. In her second letter to Cassandra she joked about her other admirers and contradicted herself with apparent gaiety: “I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care sixpence.” Then she adopted the solemnity of one of her own most absurd creations to announce that “the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over—My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.” It’s a joke, yes, but made with the intention of misleading her sister; the joke is undermined when you look back at the letter of the week before, with i
ts unequivocal message that she was in love.

  Tom Lefroy was also in love with her, even if he was not yet making proposals of marriage. He confessed as much to a nephew when he was an old man: “he said in so many words that he was in love with her, although he qualifies his confession by saying it was boyish love.”1 Boyish love is after all the most passionate love there is, and the qualification, far from diminishing the remembered flame, makes it blaze up brighter. There must have been something more than dancing and sitting out together: kisses, at least, a stirring of the blood, a quickening of the breath. But however he admired Tom Jones, he was no Jones himself when it came to the point, any more than Jane was a Sophia Western; both were of the wrong class, and brought up to the wrong habits to sacrifice family approval in the name of love. Since the Lefroys were Huguenots, they had to make their way diligently in their adopted country. Tom’s father, who had been an army officer and made an unwise marriage himself, was now retired in Ireland, with many mouths to feed; five daughters preceded Tom, the eldest son, and he was dependent on a great-uncle who had already put him through college in Dublin and was now financing his law studies in London. The expectations of the whole family were clearly laid on him, and he could not be allowed to risk his future by entangling himself in a love affair with a penniless girl.

  He knew it as well as they did, and whether he was sent away by the Hampshire Lefroys to protect Jane from his philandering, or to protect him from her hopes of a declaration, is uncertain. Mrs. Lefroy was too worldly-wise not to see that any prospect of marriage between them was out of the question. Her sons—one of them the George who called on Jane with Tom—said later that their mother sent Tom packing so “that no more mischief might be done,” and that she blamed him “because he had behaved so ill to Jane”: the implication is clear that Jane took his attentions seriously.2 No doubt Mrs. Lefroy offered her sensible advice of the kind Mrs. Gardiner gave Lizzy when she saw she was in love with Wickham.