Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Tom may have reappeared in Hampshire once or twice, although kept carefully away from the Austens, for a “young nephew” was taken by the Lefroys to a grand dinner given by the Chutes for the Dorchesters in December 1797, at the point Jane was returning from a visit to Bath. Her bleak remembrance, and persistent interest in him, is sufficiently demonstrated in a letter written in November 1798, nearly three years after their brief romance. She described how Mrs. Lefroy called but said nothing of her nephew, “and I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.” The “gone back” suggests he had been in Hampshire once again, sent smartly back to London perhaps before Jane returned from a stay in Kent. Mr. Austen is the hero of this little anecdote, a model of sensitivity and paternal tenderness in putting to Mrs. Lefroy the inquiry Jane longed to but could not make.

  So Jane never saw Tom Lefroy again after his Christmas visit of 1795; and from 1798 he was settled in Ireland. That December, Jane told Cassandra that “the third Miss Irish Lefroy is going to be married, ” but after that she remained silent on the subject. A year later Mr. Irish Lefroy himself married a Wexford heiress, the sister of a college friend. He continued to work hard at the Bar, fathered seven children and, as the years went by, became extremely successful and deeply pious at the same time. He sat for eleven years in Parliament as a Tory; he opposed Catholic emancipation and founded a society to send missionaries into traditional Roman Catholic areas; and in 1852, in the aftermath of the Famine, was appointed Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Had she lived to see all this, it might have pleased Jane Austen’s sense of irony that the oppressed Catholic Irish should have justice meted out to them by one whose forebears had fled from just such cruel religious oppression in France.

  A small experience, perhaps, but a painful one for Jane Austen, this brush with young Tom Lefroy. What she distilled from it was something else again. From now on she carried in her own flesh and blood, and not just gleaned from books and plays, the knowledge of sexual vulnerability; of what it is to be entranced by the dangerous stranger; to hope, and to feel the blood warm; to wince, to withdraw; to long for what you are not going to have and had better not mention. Her writing becomes informed by this knowledge, running like a dark undercurrent beneath the comedy.

  Writing is what she increasingly turned to now. During the summer after Tom’s departure, life at Steventon was transformed by Mr. and Mrs. Austen’s decision to give up taking pupils. It meant that the household was reduced to four adults and little Anna, bringing not only freedom from teaching for Mr. Austen, but the easing of all the work involved in the planning and preparation of meals, laundry, cleaning and bedmaking, the province of his womenfolk. Greater leisure and privacy undoubtedly played their part in allowing Jane to be more ambitious both in planning and writing her work. Her output suggests just how much; it became phenomenal. In October 1796 she began on First Impressions; this was completed in about nine months, by the following summer. Then around November 1797 she returned to Elinor and Marianne , having decided that the letter form did not suit her purposes well enough. The change to direct narrative required fundamental restructuring and rewriting, which she carried out over the winter and spring of 1798, renaming the work Sense and Sensibility. She went on between 1798 and 1799 to produce a first draft of the book that would become Northanger Abbey, at this stage called Susan. So in four years three major novels were under way; and she was not yet twenty-four.

  The tradition of reading her work aloud to the family was well established. You can imagine her at work in the blue-papered dressing room upstairs before coming down for dinner at three thirty, or after tea at six thirty, testing her dialogue first on her own ear, cutting and amending whatever embarrassed her or struck a false note in the dialogue, as you do if you are going to be reading aloud to others; and marking her text in the neat hand she had developed, paper being always expensive. By whatever process of inner composition or redrafting, her characters rarely fail to speak to one another like real people, not in set speeches but as though they are actually exchanging information, exploring or undermining one another’s views or feelings, putting one another down, flirting, deceiving, or simply expressing the life with which she has endowed them; whether it is rich Mrs. John Dashwood voicing her envy of her penniless sister-in-laws’ breakfast china (“twice as handsome as what belongs to this house. A great deal too handsome, in my opinion, for any place they can ever afford to live in. But, however, so it is.”), or good Mrs. Jennings offering olives, round games and Constantia wine ineffectually one after another for Marianne’s broken heart. There is no knowing whether the listening Austens made suggestions or criticisms; what we do know is that father, mother and sister all had the wit to appreciate what she wrote, and to see that the promise of her early sketches was flowering into something still more exceptional.

  Mr. Austen indeed thought so well of First Impressions that he wrote to the publisher Thomas Cadell in London in November 1797, asking if he would consider it. This Cadell had only recently inherited his business from an eminent father, the publisher of Gibbon and friend of Dr. Johnson, and with such a pedigree Mr. Austen felt it appropriate to use the sort of flattering words he knew so well how to deploy: “As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make it’s first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you.” He did not name an author but simply indicated that he had “in my possession a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols. about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina,” and asked what would be the expense of publishing it “at the Author’s risk; & what you will venture to advance for the Property of it, if on a perusal, it is approved of?” Thus he was generously prepared to put up money for it if necessary. His letter was posted on 1 November and answered with unusual rapidity for a publisher: “Declined by Return of Post” is written across the top.3

  You can see why Cadell might not want to bother to look at a novel by an unknown Hampshire clergyman. As publishing blunders go it was still one of the worst ever made through laziness. It meant that First Impressions was reworked into Pride and Prejudice, but if you believe, as I do, that First Impressions was pretty good already—from what we know of her later juvenile writing, and to have pleased her father so much—you may also believe that, with publication and success in 1798, Austen might have written another equally good novel before 1800. But whether Mr. Austen told his daughter about his letter to Cadell or not, he did not repeat the attempt.

  During the late 1790s the Austen children went through major upheavals. Some can be glimpsed through Jane’s letters, most not at all. Only twenty-eight letters exist for the five years 1796 to 1801, and none at all for the very important year of 1797, because Cassandra took particular care to destroy personal family material. The first letter about Tom Lefroy can have survived only by mistake.

  Cassandra’s culling, made for her own good reasons, leaves the impression that her sister was dedicated to trivia. The letters rattle on, sometimes almost like a comedian’s patter. Not much feeling, warmth or sorrow has been allowed through. They never pause or meditate but hurry, as though she is moving her mind as fast as possible from one subject to the next. You have to keep reminding yourself how little they represent of her real life, how much they are an edited and contrived version. What is left is mostly her attempt to entertain Cass with an account of what’s been happening, usually to other people. She leaves out the empty spaces, the moments of solitude and imagination, the time spent thinking, dreaming and writing. Even the weather is always connected to social activity; there is none of Eliza Chute’s frost like diamonds, or falling stars.

  What you do pick up from the letters of the 1790s is the sisters’ great reliance on one another for information and understanding that could not be expected from anyone else. When, for instance, Jane made a summer trip to Kent to stay with Edward and
Elizabeth at Rowling in 1796, she felt she could ask Cassandra’s advice about tipping servants more easily by letter than by asking her brother or sister-in -law. She could grumble to Cassandra that she was stuck there until one of their brothers chose to move her, because she could not, of course, travel alone. “I am very happy here,” she explained in September, “though I should be glad to get home by the end of the month.” Meanwhile, she earned her keep in Kent by helping the other ladies to make her brother’s shirts; and “I am proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party.” Jane did not resent having to sew, as some clever women did; but she did notice that, while the ladies of the house were at their sewing, the men went shooting. This inspired her to: “They say that there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps I may kill a few.”

  Was she really telling Cassandra she wanted to go out with a gun? Women’s rights were a topic of the brilliantly amusing novel Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not that appeared that year, and of which Jane owned a copy. Robert Bage, the enlightened author, spoke up for democracy and women’s rights, and expressed his admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft, who had already claimed for her sex the right to take up farming, the law and other male pursuits. So why should Jane not shoot birds? Two weeks later she was joking about the possibility of becoming a medical student, a lawyer or an officer, should she find herself stranded in London on her journey home. Either that, or she might fall into the hands of a fat woman who would make her drunk, and set her off on a more conventionally womanly career.

  There were plenty of jokes for Cassandra. On arriving in London, “Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted.” She turned her cutting edge against Edward: “Farmer Clarinbould died this morning, & I fancy Edward means to get some of his Farm if he can cheat Sir Brook enough in the agrement.” Dear Edward swindle his own brother-in-law? No wonder she relied on her letters being cut up: “Seize upon the Scissors as soon as you possibly can on the receipt of this,” she wrote after blackening another reputation. As it turned out, Edward did not swindle Sir Brook, if only for lack of a spare £500 or £600; and “What amiable Young Men!” wrote Jane sweetly when he and brother Frank, on leave, walked in from their shooting with two and a half brace of birds.

  The jokes are well built, the sentence structure doing the work that makes the reader smile: “Mr. Richard Harvey is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, & only known to half the Neighbourhood, you must not mention it.” Perfect timing. The letters gossip, and describe simple dances given by Edward’s Kentish in-laws and friends, one at Goodnestone, the Bridges’ beautiful house, where country dances were accompanied by various ladies on the piano, and Jane opened the ball. No doubt they kept going late into that night with the table pushed aside in the long dining room, its doors open through into the oval hall, and the hall doors open on to the terrace; and after supper the Rowling party walked home in the dark and the rain, a mile across country, under two umbrellas. The rain was welcome that exceptionally hot summer, when people were dropping in the streets of London with the heat, and the walk in the fresh, damp night air must have been delectable. The heat continued, and Jane put down one of her best-known remarks a few days later: “What dreadful Hot weather we have!—It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance.” Elegance required the denial of most of the physical facts of life, like sweat, blood and tears; every young lady who aspired to take her place in society was required to defend herself perpetually against them.

  In one letter she says a Kentish friend supposes that Cassandra is making her wedding clothes, which was no doubt true. Only now the sequence of letters ends, and in the gap between their ending and resumption came the ending of Cassandra’s happiness and hopes. In the spring of 1797 the news of the death of Tom Fowle came from the West Indies. He was expected back from St. Domingo in May 1797, “but alas instead of his arrival news were received of his death.”4 He had died of fever in February, and this is Eliza de Feuillide writing, informed by Jane. The whole family was afflicted around her, for Tom was James’s close friend as well as Cassandra’s intended husband. James wrote of his grief years later, imagining the body of Tom lying

  . . . where Ocean ceaseless pours

  His restless waves ’gainst Western India’s shores;

  Friend of my Soul, & Brother of my heart! . . .

  Our friendship soon had known a dearer tie

  Than friendship’s self could ever yet supply,

  And I had lived with confidence to join

  A much loved Sister’s trembling hand to thine.5

  The rhyme of “join” and “thine” startles for a moment as it reminds you about the Austen pronunciation; the feeling rings true, and touches the heart. James never forgot his friend, and for Cassandra the loss was an absolute one. But there was no screaming in agony or refusing to eat; religion, reason and constant employment were Cassandra’s resource. “Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution & propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation,” wrote Eliza to Phila Walter.6 Tom’s legacy of £1,000 became her widow’s portion; and she seems never to have thought of another man, although she was only in her twenties, and beautiful. Later Jane sometimes encouraged her to notice the attentions paid to her by other men, but she turned her face against them, and there were no more of the jokes that had made the younger sister praise her as “the finest comic writer of the present age.” Cassandra hurried into spinsterly middle age, and the attachment to her sister became more important than ever: Jane was at once her child to be protected, her friend to be encouraged, and her sister to be given unconditional love.

  While 1797 brought tragedy to Cassandra, it resolved the comic emotional tangles of two of her brothers and their cousin Eliza. None of them took Cass’s view that you could love only once; Eliza liked to affirm that she was altogether immune to love. Some time in the summer of 1796 she had reappeared at Steventon, and James plucked up his courage to court her. It was a most suitable arrangement, after all, the young widower with a small daughter and his widowed cousin with her poor boy; all the family must approve, and they could live very comfortably together on his income and her fortune. So he danced attendance, riding over from Deane, offering up verse tributes, and whatever took her fancy. Eliza enjoyed being wooed, and toyed with the idea of accepting; then she went back to London to think about it and decided that James had not enough to tempt her, and that she preferred “dear Liberty, & yet dearer flirtation.”7 Being confined all the year round in a country parsonage would not do: sermon writing, hunting, tithe gathering and dinners with the same local squires for him; children, and tea with the squires’ wives for her. She was used to something livelier. She liked to go to Brighton and other resorts: sea bathing for Hastings, with a little flirting with the officers for his mother, made a very acceptable programme. None of the tragedies life threw at Eliza stopped her from treating it as a game to be played for as much rational enjoyment as could be extracted from it, and at thirty-five she still dressed and behaved as a conquering beauty, carrying a pug dog and, when in London, taking her airings in the Park alongside the Princess of Wales. It was hard to see how James could be fitted into this picture.

  James did not allow himself to brood over his cousin’s refusal. The Austens were realists, he knew he must find a wife to run the domestic side of his life, and if one woman said no he must simply find another. He settled on a candidate so obvious that you suspect Mrs. Austen of arranging matters with 26-year-old Mary Lloyd, who was indeed invited over from Ibthorpe to stay at Steventon. Not only were the Lloyds family friends, Mary had already lived in Deane parsonage with her widowed mother; marriage to James for her meant a return to an entirely familiar house. Mrs. Austen expressed her delight at the engagement in a letter welcoming Mary as exactly the daughter-in-law she would have chosen. “Had the Election been mine, you, my dear Mary, are the person I should have chosen for James
’s Wife, Anna’s Mother , and my Daughter, being as certain, as I can be of anything in this uncertain world, that you will greatly increase & promote the happiness of each of the three.”8

  Although Mary, whose face was scarred by smallpox, was jealous of James’s old passion for Eliza, and Jane came to think she ruled his life too unrelentingly, the marriage was a happy one. James accepted that Eliza was never to be invited to the house; nor did any account of his visit to France and the de Feuillide estates survive, either in prose or verse; which is surprising, given his habit of recording the major events of his life, and the careful preservation of letters such as Mrs. Austen’s. Family tradition has it that Mary Austen continued to speak ill of Eliza, whom she long outlived, to the end of her days, so the bad feeling must have run deep. Eliza, all innocent of this—or at least pretending innocence—spoke kindly, if condescendingly, of James’s choice, as “not either rich or handsome, but very sensible & good humoured.”9

  They were married at Hurstbourne Tarrant, near Ibthorpe, where Mrs. Lloyd lived with Martha and Mary, on a snowy day in January. As James put it,

  Cold was the morn, & all around

  Whitened with new fallen snow the ground,

  Yet still the sun with cheering beam,

  Played on the hill, & vale, & stream,

  And almost gave to winter’s face

  Spring’s pleasing cheerfulness & grace.

  Little Anna went home from Steventon to Deane; Mrs. Chute called on the bride and found her “perfectly unaffected, and very pleasant,” and she fitted in well with all the local gentry, including Anna’s grandfather General Mathew, who continued to look favourably on the household. Anna herself was not so pleased, and there were problems between her and her stepmother; and Jane, who was devoted to Anna, failed to warm to Mary as the years went by.