Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  At Steventon the days went quietly by, with Jane ordering the household and giving what time she could to writing. From a passing pedlar she bought herself six shifts and four pairs of stockings. Mrs. Austen supplied sixteen shillings for a subscription to a new Basingstoke library, which Jane put in Cassandra’s name. Her father worried about his sheep and his falling tithes, bought a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and prepared to take a special service of Thanksgiving for Lord Nelson’s victory on the Nile; in the evening he read Cowper aloud, to which Jane listened “when I can.” Mrs. Austen lay in bed, working up tremendous symptoms which did not always tally with Dr. Lyford’s diagnoses. Digweeds and Harwoods called, there were problems with servants—a new washerwoman “does not look as if anything she touched would ever be clean, but who knows?” and Mary, heavily pregnant, took on a young girl at Deane “to be her Scrub,” whom James feared might not be strong enough. A new maid arrived at Steventon too, who cooked well, sewed well and would learn the work in the dairy. Jane unpacked some books returned from Winchester, where they had been bound. Two local women died in childbirth, a piece of news kept carefully from Mary. Mrs. Austen did not propose to repeat her feat of walking through the night to attend the birth; this time she asked to be told nothing until it was over; and soon it was. James and Mary had a son, and all was well.

  The baby, James-Edward, had large, dark eyes and became a favourite nephew. Jane judged his mother “not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin,” comparing Mary unfavourably with Elizabeth at Godmersham, “really a pretty object with her nice clean cap put on so tidily and her dress so uniformly white and orderly.” It was obviously unfair to hold up the rich land-owner’s lady as a model for the country parson’s wife; but Jane was imagining herself with a baby, as she made clear. Mary did not “manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself.” Surrounded by pregnant sisters-in-law and neighbours, she allowed herself moments when she dreamt of being in their place, with a husband, a home of her own, and a baby. Why not? She was only twenty-two.

  In December, Mrs. Austen recovered enough to appear downstairs. “My mother made her entrée into the dressing-room through crowds of admiring spectators yesterday afternoon.” She still, however, complained sometimes of “an Asthma, a Dropsy, Water in her Chest & Liver Disorder,” as well as unsettled bowels. Hypochondria on such a heroic scale could be greeted only with delight. “Gouty swelling & sensation about the ancles” were the next symptoms; they did not interfere with her mother’s good spirits, or with Jane’s. Nor did they prevent Jane from spending a few days at Manydown with Catherine Bigg, and attending a ball at which she danced every one of the twenty dances. “In cold weather & with few couples I fancy I could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour.” She also discovered the pleasure of walking alone. “I enjoyed the hard black Frosts of last week very much, & one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself.—I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before,” she told Cass, a most surprising remark when you think of the way she makes Elizabeth Bennet scramble unescorted about the countryside. Now that Jane had begun, she must have often walked alone along the lanes made passable by the frost, her feet clinking in their pattens, her imagination working.

  In Kent, Cassandra was also going to balls, including one graced by Prince William, the King’s nephew. Jane spent a quiet Christmas Day at Deane with the Harwoods, entertained the Digweeds and James at home two days later—“We shall be a nice silent party I suppose”—and saw the registration of her new nephew’s christening at Deane on New Year’s Day, 1799. The news of Frank’s promotion brought many congratulations, and there were more parties, and a grand ball given by the Dorchesters at Kempshott Park. Eliza Chute noted it as a good one, with soup and sandwiches, and stayed till three; Jane left much earlier, going back to her brother James’s house, where she and Martha Lloyd lay talking companionably until two in the morning in the new nursery bed, nurse and baby evicted on to the floor.

  In January she was able to revive the regular comic feature of the letters: “It began to occur to me . . . that I had been somewhat silent as to my mother’s health for some time, but I thought you could have no difficulty in divining its exact state—you, who have guessed so much stranger things. She is tolerably well . . . She would tell you herself that she has a very dreadful cold in her head at present . . . &c.” As it happened, Edward was also suffering ill health at Godmersham. He had his mother’s gift for interesting symptoms, including “glow in his hands and feet” and “Bowel complaints, Faintnesses & Sicknesses”; and he was making a plan to go to Bath in the spring with Elizabeth and their two eldest, and to invite his mother and Jane to join them.

  Jane had been to Bath once before, staying with Uncle and Aunt Leigh-Perrot during a wet and gloomy November, and she had a good reason to want to go back, since much of the action of the book on which she was working (Northanger Abbey) took place there. Cass returned from Kent in March to take charge of the household, and Jane and her mother prepared to set off westwards in May.

  Bath was still the most famous resort town in England, a modern city that had been expanding around its Roman remains and fifteenthcentury Abbey church for the past sixty years, blessed with planners and architects who seemed incapable of getting things wrong as they raised its new streets and terraces in steep, spectacular patterns above the loop of the River Avon. It had the best communications—the London–Bath road was the most perfectly maintained in the country— and it was the place to which everyone who wanted to see and be seen came. Cheltenham and Brighton would both seek to eclipse it, but never quite succeed. People came to take the waters and receive the ministrations of the many doctors who settled there, as Uncle Leigh-Perrot did for his gout, and Edward intended to do for whatever he was suffering from; he would drink and bathe in the waters, and even try the new electrical treatment, administered either as a spark or through an alarming-sounding flesh-brush.

  You could also rely on the best available entertainment in Bath. London actors and actresses loved to appear in the theatre. There were concerts, indoor and outdoor, often accompanied by fireworks. There were public breakfasts and carefully organized dances in the two separate Assembly Rooms. There were libraries in which you could gossip as you read the newspapers; above all there were the other people, their fashionable clothes, their outrageous hats, their curricles, their horses, their conversation, their shopping and their symptoms. Bath represented an acme of civilized urban life in which men and women of sufficient means could enjoy themselves and entertain one another in an agreeable setting, very little distracted by the presence of the poor for whom they were responsible at home on their estates; a few beggars and a few pickpockets were less troubling.

  Mrs. Austen knew the city well from before her marriage, and her brother Leigh-Perrot now came regularly with his wife, and had taken No. 1, the Paragon, an imposing terraced house with views over the countryside. Like many Bath terraces, the Paragon had no private gardens but faced on to a public one; but then the attraction of the city lay chiefly in public activity, public gardens and parties, rather than in domestic pleasures. There was something theatrical about the lay-out of the whole town; everyone was on show, and aware of it. Literature paid its tribute to Bath as much as life. Jane knew it from many sources: in Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline, it was a city in which you could be anonymous, hiding in lodgings during an indiscreet pregnancy. Charlotte Lennox’s heroine Arabella, in The Female Quixote, caused a stir by appearing veiled in the Pump Room, and another by being rude to the Bath beaux. Sheridan had eloped from Bath with his first wife, and then made it the scene for The Rivals; and she had already sent characters of her own on jaunts to Bath. “The unmeaning Luxuries of Bath” were warned against in Love and Freindship ; she also made it the home of “Mr. Clifford,” characterized as owner of a magnificent collection of vehicles and horses, and not much else—a c
lear prediction of the man who was about to sell Edward a pair of carriage horses for sixty guineas, and who “has all his life thought more of Horses than of anything else.”

  The Edward Austens and their party found lodgings in a corner house in Queen Square, within easy reach of the Pump Room, the Upper Assembly Rooms and the Paragon. Mrs. Austen and her daughter had connecting bedrooms on the second floor, “two very nice sized rooms, with dirty Quilts and everything comfortable”; a kitten ran about the staircase and the landlady was “a fat woman in mourning.” Jane acted as a good aunt to Fanny and Edward, helping them to write letters. Elizabeth kindly presented Jane with a hat; perhaps she had noticed the twin bonnets. They planned to attend a gala evening in Sydney Gardens, although Jane’s enthusiasm for the music was oddly expressed: “the Concert will have more than its’ usual charm with me, as the Gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound.” Uncle Leigh-Perrot overwalked himself and had to rest, but Jane enjoyed some rambles into the country with new acquaintances, one of whom at least lived up to her best hopes, for it was here she met Mr. Gould, a very young man who had “just entered of Oxford, wears Spectacles, & has heard that Evelina was written by Dr. Johnson.”3

  Edward had to be home at the beginning of July for the Godmersham rent day, but Mrs. Austen was eager for more travels. She wanted to make a grand progress, visiting her Leigh cousins in Adlestrop, her nephew Edward Cooper now installed at Harpsden in her childhood home, and yet another cousin, Mrs. Cooke, at Great Bookham in Surrey. Jane was not enthusiastic, and told Cassandra she would prefer to have Martha Lloyd to spend the summer with them at home instead. She may have found the prospect of her Aunt Cooke particularly difficult, because she had just published a novel; and although it was anonymous, the family was expected to read it. Battleridge, an Historical Tale Founded on Facts was set during the interregnum; the plot turns on a missing document which will restore an estate to its rightful, royalist owners, and is revealed through a dream in its hiding place, a false-bottomed chest. There are other dramatic moments: a young woman is abducted from her “favourite haunt, the Grotto” on a moonlit night by two horsemen who imprison her in a tower, where she has to sleep in an old ebony bed carved with frightful faces. Mrs. Cooke was using established Gothic conventions, and particularly admired Mrs. Radcliffe (“Queen of the tremendous”); but her false-bottomed chest and lost document prompt a suspicion that Jane, who was working on a first draft of Northanger Abbey when Battleridge appeared, may have seized on these details with some glee. There could be an element of family teasing in her mockery of Gothic fictional clichés.

  She did, however, give way to her mother’s wishes, and accompanied her on the cousinly visits. While they were travelling, disaster befell the Leigh-Perrots. Rich Aunt Jane was accused of shoplifting and, almost unimaginably, taken to prison. She was accused of stealing a piece of lace by a Bath shopkeeper. The assistant ran after her after she had left the shop with a purchase, and the “stolen” lace was found either in her parcel or her pocket—it is not clear which—and she said it must have been put there by mistake when she was served in the shop. The shopkeeper asked for the Leigh-Perrots’ address, which they gave, and four days later a constable appeared at the Paragon with a warrant. Mrs. Leigh-Perrot, in her mid-fifties and childless, was committed to prison on the sworn depositions of the shop people, accused of a crime that could carry a death sentence, since the lace was worth more than a shilling. In practice, were she found guilty, she would be likely to be transported to Australia for fourteen years; in effect, the equivalent of a capital sentence to a woman of her age and habits.

  Her husband supported her with unswerving devotion, insisting on remaining with her in the house of the prison keeper, Mr. Scadding, at Somerset County Gaol in Ilchester, to which she was now sent; prison cell and prison garb she was spared, given her social standing and income. But the Scaddings’ house was not what she was used to: “Vulgarity, Dirt, Noise from Morning till Night. The People, not conscious that this can be Objectionable to anybody, fancy we are very happy, and to do them justice they mean to make us so.” 3 The Miss Scaddings sometimes entertained them with music, but the little Scaddings put pieces of toast on Mr. Leigh-Perrot’s venerable knees and trickled beer down his sleeves; their mother cleaned a knife by licking the fried onions off it; two dogs and three cats disputed the food, the smoke went everywhere but up the chimney, and the children’s bedroom, next to the Leigh-Perrots’, was as noisy as Bedlam. It must be said that, in this extremity, Mrs. Leigh-Perrot not only found descriptive powers almost matching the brush of Hogarth, she also behaved with the greatest dignity. When Mrs. Austen offered to send one or both of her daughters to share her miseries, she refused to allow “these Elegant young women” to suffer alongside her.4 Whatever Jane thought of her mother’s offer, she was no doubt grateful to her aunt for the refusal.

  There were some who believed that Mrs. Leigh-Perrot was guilty, and her own counsel gossiped maliciously about her being a kleptomaniac, mocking James Leigh-Perrot’s uxoriousness for good measure. There is another story of her attempting to steal a plant from a gardener’s greenhouse to lend credence to the first accusation, but it may be no more than tattle; it also allegedly happened in Bath, a few years later, in 1804.5 The more general opinion was that her accusers had been trying to entrap and blackmail her, even though they set about it very inefficiently if that was their object. After seven months with the Ilchester prison keepers, she came to trial at Taunton assizes. Mrs. Austen again offered her daughters for the trial, and again Mrs. Leigh-Perrot expressed the view that a court room was an unsuitable place for young ladies. She herself had no choice, and stood up in front of what must have seemed a quite terrifying packed court room. She spoke for herself, briefly but to great effect; and after this many testimonials to her character were read out in court. The judge summed up and the jurors found her “not guilty” in ten minutes; there was much weeping and kissing. The Leigh-Perrots were free, although their expenses came to nearly £2,000, and nobody subsequently prosecuted the shopkeeper, who continued to flourish; but “I stand some chance of being killed by Popularity,” wrote Mrs. Leigh-Perrot drily.

  Dr. Johnson, so much admired by Jane, had written magisterially in the Rambler against the sentencing laws of England, particularly the imposition of the same punishment of death for petty theft as for murder; and a story like Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s underlines their cruelty and absurdity. Even if she were guilty, nobody could think it right for an elderly woman committing such a misdemeanour to be imprisoned, let alone threatened with hanging or transportation to Botany Bay. In this century, women in her situation have committed suicide after being prosecuted for shoplifting. It was just as well that Jane Leigh-Perrot was a tough old bird with a supremely loyal husband. Jane never referred to the case—no doubt it became an unmentionable subject in the family—but it did not make her love her aunt any better. She found her irritating, as a penniless niece is likely to find a rich, sometimes overbearing and ungenerous old aunt.

  James Austen, expected heir to the Leigh-Perrot fortune, had promised to be at his aunt’s trial with his wife. Instead, he fell and broke his leg in the heavy snow of February 1800, and could not get out at all. Eliza Chute recorded his absence from church, and Charles Powlett took his services for him. She was busy making broth to feed her villagers. Times were very hard for the poor, and getting worse. At Deane, Mrs. Lefroy had set up a “Straw Manufactory” to enable the women and children of the district to earn a few pence by making mats and other small objects. But such charity could do very little. Eliza Chute wrote to a friend expressing her sympathy with the Hampshire labourers:

  The poor are dissatisfied & with reason: I much fear that wheat will not be cheap this year: & every other necessary of life enormously dear: the poor man cannot purchase those comforts he ought to have: beer, bacon, cheese. Can one wonder that discontents lurk in their bosoms: I cannot think their wages sufficient,
& the pride of a poor man (& why shd we [not] allow him some pride) is hurt, when he is obliged to apply to the parish for relief, & too often receives harsh answers from the overseers. I own I think our political horizon still lowers.6

  This is a remarkably intelligent and sympathetic letter for the wife of a fox-hunting Tory; she did not always see eye to eye with Chute. In the same letter she expresses herself no less cogently on the position of wives.

  Mr. Chute . . . seems to think it strange that I should absent myself from him for four & twenty hours when he is at home, tho’ it appears in the natural order of things that he should quit me for business or pleasure, such is the difference between husbands & wives. The latter are sort of tame animals, whom the men always expect to find at home ready to receive them: the former are lords of the creation free to go where they please.

  A woman with an ironic and independent voice like this sounds a neighbour worth knowing. But there was still no meeting of minds between Eliza Chute and Jane Austen. Jane may have made up her mind to see condescension where Eliza was really shy; she may have found Jane alarming. A case of pride and prejudice, even. The Chutes did of course live very much grander lives; for instance, they attended the great music meeting at Winchester in October 1800, when Haydn’s Creation was given in the cathedral before 500 county families—Sheridan was among them—and followed by a ball. The Austens could not aspire to such entertainments. In 1800 they were not having an easy time. The farm brought in less than £300, and tithes were affected by the general depression. Like Mrs. Chute, Jane writes of distress in the neighbourhood, of bailiffs and seizures of houses, and of taking clothes to the village. And although they were trying to improve the Steventon garden, turfing and planting, and even spending something on new tables for the house, Mr. and Mrs. Austen were both tired. In November a storm brought down two of their elm trees close to the house with a great crash, and broke the maypole that had borne the weathercock ever since the children could remember. It was a gloomy winter for everyone.