Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  All the Austen children were affected by it. The fact that every one of them who was absent and could possibly return to Steventon—Edward, Henry, Frank and Charles—made a point of doing so before their parents left—“while Steventon is ours,” as Jane put it—suggests how much they felt it as the closing of a door on their childhood and the end of a way of life. Cassandra destroyed several letters Jane wrote to her immediately after hearing her parents’ decision, which suggests they made her uncomfortable, too full of raw feeling and even anger. Jane’s spirits were not helped by the obvious keenness of both her parents and her brother and sister-in-law to get the move organized as fast as possible. In January she told Cassandra that she was invited by James and Mary to a party for their wedding anniversary—with Tom Chute, Mary’s sister Elizabeth Fowle and her husband—but had turned them down. No explanation was offered or needed: “I was asked, but declined it.”

  She made it clear she felt the James Austens showed too much eagerness to take over Steventon, telling Cass that one of the Steventon horses—the brown mare—due to go to James after their departure “has not had the patience to wait for that, & has settled herself even now at Deane . . . & everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner.” Since both her parents were agreeable to all this seizing, Jane herself was powerless. She could only watch. “As to our Pictures . . . all the old heterogenous, miscellany, manuscript, Scriptoral peices dispersed over the House are to be given to James.” Her sadness about the family pictures, valued not for their beauty but for their familiarity, will be understood by anyone who has lived with such an odd, random collection in which each picture connects with a memory of family life. She resisted her mother’s (and Cassandra’s) suggestion that she should give away one of her indubitably personal possessions: “as I do not chuse to have Generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.”

  She and Martha set to steady work sorting her father’s library of 500 volumes, which he intended to sell, along with most of the furniture, the piano on which Jane had learnt, practised and played over the years, and “a large collection of music.” The old painted theatre-sets were to go too: James had evidently lost his taste for theatricals entirely. Jane hoped to persuade him to buy her father’s books for a guinea a volume; he may have taken most of them, for what price we don’t know, since only 200 reached the sale. Jane expressed further anxiety to know what “my books” fetched at the sale, and was indignant that her father’s were valued at only £70: “the whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another.”2 No need to spell out who was being enriched and who impoverished.

  She strained to keep up the easy, gossipy note in her letters, but the jokes to Cass often feel forced. “We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood, the Basingstoke Balls are certainly on the decline . . . It must not be generally known however that I am not sacrificing a great deal in quitting the Country—or I can expect to inspire no tenderness, no interest in those we leave behind.” She did look forward to “summers by the Sea or in Wales”; and she relaxed when she discussed some of her mother’s hopes and plans for Bath, falling into the established comic tone for Mrs. Austen. “My Mother looks forward with as much certainty as you can do, to our keeping two Maids—my father is the only one not in the secret.—We plan having a steady Cook, & a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former & sweetheart to the latter.—No Children of course to be allowed on either side.” Mrs. Austen’s health naturally remained “quite stout” through all the excitements, for the good reason that “she wishes not to be obliged by any relapse to alter her arrangements.”

  Mrs. Austen believed that Bath would be good for her uncertain health, and for her husband’s too; he had now reached seventy. The proximity to her brother Leigh-Perrot, rich, friendly and hospitable, was also important to her; apart from the obvious advantages of living near a wealthy relative, it would allow her to keep an eye on his expected bequest to James. Mr. Austen was pleased with the idea that they could easily travel on from Bath into Devon and Wales for holidays, which he felt the girls would enjoy; and here he was right. This was the one aspect of the plan that did appeal to Jane; it interested her mother much less, so that when she got to Bath she maintained she would rather stay put than go travelling further, and had to be coerced by the rest of the family.

  There is briskness and brightness in Jane’s letters at this time, much keeping up of spirits, but no enthusiasm. She is doing what she has to do, making the best of a situation over which she has no control, watching the breaking up of everything familiar and seeing what was left eagerly taken over; fitting in with plans in which she has no say, losing what she loves for the prospect of an urban life in a house not yet found; no centre, no peace, and the loss of an infinite number of things hard to list, impossible to explain. She had enjoyed Bath as a visitor and used it as a writer, but she had no wish at all to live there. In February she fled from her parents, leaving them to get on with the dismantling of the house, while she went to stay with Alethea and Catherine Bigg at Manydown, where nothing was changed. Then Cassandra came home, Edward and Elizabeth made their last visit, and Frank got leave from the Mediterranean for his; after which he and his father set off for London together, going on to Godmersham, and the three women went to Ibthorpe at the beginning of May. Cass was to remain for a few weeks with the Lloyds, while Jane and her mother travelled on together to Bath, where the Leigh-Perrots, fully restored to their dull dignity, were expecting them at the Paragon. From there they were to look for a rented house.

  The four letters written during the first weeks in Bath suggest a mind struggling against low spirits. Bath itself was “vapour, shadow, smoke & confusion.” Her uncle and aunt were kind and welcoming, but when some old acquaintances appeared, “we were very happy to meet, & all that”: the “& all that” has the function of denying the happiness. Taken to the Assembly Rooms, she amused herself watching a drunken wife chase her drunken husband round the rooms, and picking out a notorious adulteress. Then: “Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable.” But “I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreable.” This is not a light-hearted remark, like Elizabeth Bennet’s “The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it,” but a desolate, even frightening statement. Her opinion of people was not raised by the “old Toughs ” who came to play whist with her uncle, or by Miss Langley, “like any other short girl with a broad nose & wide mouth, fashionable dress, & exposed bosom.”

  She may have had an extra reason for bitterness if she suspected her parents’ intentions in choosing Bath, which was not only an old people’s pleasure ground but also a place for husband-hunting. Mrs. Austen’s parents, on reaching retirement age, had moved to Bath in just the same way, taking their two unmarried daughters, both in their mid-twenties, with them; and, in Bath, Cassandra Leigh had married George Austen, and Jane Leigh had found her husband too. The younger Jane was more than capable of drawing the parallel, and feeling a stinging sense of humiliation at any idea of being paraded in the marriage market. Perhaps it was this that provoked her to accept an invitation to be driven up and down Kingsdown Hill in a phaeton and four with a man she could not be suspected of setting her cap at, Mr. Evelyn, who was both married and thought more of horses than anything else; he was the man who had sold Edward a pair for his carriage when they were last in Bath. When Cass warned her not to do anything indiscreet with Mr. Evelyn, she assured her that “he is very harmless; people do not seem afraid of him here, and he gets Groundsel for his birds & all that.”

  A Mrs. Chamberlayne prompted another withering response: “As to Agreableness, she is much like other people”; this was after Cassandra had suggested she would make a suitable friend. Cass’s interventions seem peculiarly unhelpful at this point. Jane persevered and went fo
r walks with Mrs. Chamberlayne, and “The Walk was very beautiful as my companion agreed, whenever I made the observation—And so ends our friendship, for the Chamberlaynes leave Bath in a day or two.” This was the likely end of most Bath friendships, she might have added. “We are to have a tiny party here tonight; I hate tiny parties— they force one into constant exertion.” Then she warns Cass, “My aunt has a very bad cough; do not forget to have heard about that when you come.” There are enough varieties of tedium here to drive someone who wanted to be doing something else to despair; the prospect of them continuing for a limitless period must have been intolerable. But Jane was schooled to keep up appearances even if she was screaming inside her head. Then the letters stop, and there are no more at all for the next three and a half years.

  The ejection from Steventon made severe practical difficulties for her; it also depressed her deeply enough to disable her as a writer. Depression may be set off when a bad experience is repeated, and it seems likely that this is what happened here. First as an infant, then as a child of seven, Jane had been sent away from home, frightening and unpleasant experiences over which she had no control and which required periods of recovery; they helped to form the “whimsical” girl Cousin Phila noticed, cautious with strangers, ready to laugh at herself and others, almost always well defended when it came to showing emotion. That she had deep and often painful feelings is not in doubt. She could not have written the novels without them; but feelings were largely excluded from the letters, or conveyed in the form of jokes.

  As a child recovering from the school years, she found the power to entertain her family with her writing. At the same time, through her writing, she was developing a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgements were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. She was pleasing herself at least as much as she was impressing the family circle, and the possibility of reaching a wider audience was a further excitement and spur.

  To remove her from Steventon was to destroy the delicate pattern she had worked out, in which she could take her place within the family but also abstract herself from it when she needed to. She had enjoyed a certain amount of travel, visits to Kent, Bath, London and Ibthorpe; but even before 1801 there are signs of her wanting to protect her time at home, as when she said she preferred the idea of Martha visiting Steventon in the summer of 1799 to joining her mother on her summer tour. So there was both a perfectly good rational basis for wanting to be at home, and a residue of the terrors of infancy and childhood about banishment and exile, ready to spring out when they threatened again. That this new exile was brought about by the same people as before, her parents, against whom she could neither rebel nor complain, must have made it worse.

  Her brother James shared something of her deep emotional attachment to their native place. In one of his poems he said he believed he would fall ill if he were ever “exiled” from Hampshire. When he made a trip away from home, he missed the familiar landscape painfully and experienced a strong sense of relief on returning. He expressed the idea, a little stiffly and solemnly, in his verse:

  It is a feeling to the human heart

  Congenial, and most potent in effect,

  To long, when absent, for the welcome sight

  Of the dear precincts of our native home.3

  There is another, odder poem in which he imagined lying in the Steventon graveyard beside his wife after their deaths; to him, it was a comfortable and consoling vision of the future, so strongly did he feel himself to be an integral part of the place. It sounds more like a Brontë than an Austen, and James’s poetry was intensely personal, with no attempt to deny feelings. He allowed himself to be a romantic as Jane did not; she was nevertheless rooted in Steventon and its surrounding countryside very much as he was. He had suffered no exile to school; hers can only have added to an inborn suspicion of change, and helped to give her a mistrust of strange places and people. The same views from the same windows; the same household routines and daily walks in the garden or to the church or the village; the same sounds and silences, all these samenesses made a secure environment in which her imagination could work.

  Jane never wrote of being depressed in the way Dr. Johnson was when he spoke of his “black dog,” or Boswell with his low spirits and terror of death. Hers did not take that form. She would not allow herself to indulge anything she might label self-pity; and she never became clinically ill, as Cowper, who brooded on his own sinfulness and feared being cast out of God’s mercy, did. Cowper died in 1800; Jane loved his poetry, and gave some of his lines to Fanny Price to quote in Mansfield Park. Her account of Fanny’s permanent low spirits after a childhood trauma, and her very different account (in Sense and Sensibility) of Marianne unable to combat her misery and willing herself into serious illness, show how well she understood depression. And however she dealt with and controlled her own, it struck at the core of her being: it interfered directly with her power to write. The great burst of writing of the late nineties simply came to a halt.

  17

  Manydown

  For the next four years the Austens were on the move almost as much as they were in Bath. Mrs. Austen may have settled on city life, but Mr. Austen turned out to be as interested in travelling further; he was a true pioneer of all those who, on reaching retirement age, make for the sea coast. At seventy he became a wonderfully enthusiastic and resilient tourist, and he was particularly keen on the resort towns of the Devon and Dorset coast. Although there was another invasion scare in 1801, and Nelson bombarded Boulogne to show Napoleon where the real power lay, the West Country was hardly affected. We read of soldiers posted on the coast marrying local girls, rather than of anyone staying away; and in fact its fishing villages and small towns were expanding and competing for visitors, as the fashion for sea bathing and villas with marine views grew and spread.

  The climate on that coast is mild, the scenery delightful. For Jane Austen there was the pleasure of coastal walks and sea bathing, although she seems never to have learnt to swim. She had to be content with a bathing machine and a maid to attend her when she took a plunge; even so, bathing, like dancing, was a bodily pleasure she could joyously indulge to excess. The Austens tried Sidmouth in 1801, and Dawlish and Teignmouth in 1802, possibly going on to Tenby and Bar-mouth in Wales in the same year. They may have been at Charmouth in the summer of 1803, and were certainly at Lyme Regis in November 1803—Lyme is noted for its sunny Novembers. Add to this a long autumn visit to Godmersham by the two sisters in the autumn of 1802, another a year later, and a stay of several weeks at Lyme again in the summer of 1804, this time with Henry and Eliza, and the house they took in Bath looks rather more like a perch than a home.

  No. 4, Sydney Place, was, however, a good, well-proportioned, newly built terraced house. It was well placed outside the crowded centre of Bath, but within easy walking distance over Pulteney Bridge. From its tall drawing-room windows it looked across the road to the newly laid-out and very agreeable Sydney Gardens at the front, and there was a small garden at the back. Here James, Mary and nine-year-old Anna visited them in the spring of 1802. Anna later wrote sweetly of her grandparents that “this was the short Holyday of their married life,” and that Mr. Austen’s fine white hair and bright eyes were admired wherever he went.1 They at any rate clearly enjoyed the change, the relaxation, and cheerfulness of town life.

  In Sydney Place they also made good use of the excellent doctors of Bath. Mrs. Austen fell ill, and this time it was the real thing; for a time there was even fear for her life. She recovered under the care of a good Dr. Bowen, and with much careful nursing from her daughters. The verses she produced on getting better are more proof of her resilience and tough sense of humour. Boldly named “Dialogue between Death & Mrs. Austen,” they go:

  Says
Death, “I’ve been trying these three weeks or more

  To seize an old Madam here at Number Four,

  Yet I still try in vain, tho’ she’s turned of three score;

  To what is my ill-success owing?”

  “I’ll tell you, old Fellow, if you cannot guess,

  To what you’re indebted for your ill success—

  To the prayers of my husband, whose love I possess,

  To the care of my daughters, whom heaven will bless,

  To the skill & attention of Bowen.”

  There is an impish serenity about the lines. Mrs. Austen can take death or leave it, and crack a joke about it. Her attitude suggests where Jane derived her own unblinking attitude towards death, never a subject for sentimentality or backward-looking with her; something to be avoided, to be sure, but, when it had happened, tidied away as quickly as possible so that the living could get on with what mattered. Mrs. Austen’s lines also show how, despite the tensions and disagreements that sometimes divided the family, they held together solidly when danger threatened any one member.

  The single letter of Jane’s to break a four-year silence between 1801 and 1805 was written at Lyme in September 1804, and shows that little had changed for her, either inwardly or in her relations with others, since the abandonment of Steventon. She is writing to Cassandra, who has gone on to Weymouth, a much smarter resort along the coast, with Henry and Elizabeth, who have also been at Lyme; Cass is on her way to Ibthorpe, leaving Jane with their parents. The letter is one of her frank ones. She is finding her Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s letters to her mother irritating because she does not understand the difference between a sloop and a frigate—which she, as the sister of two naval officers, naturally does. “My Aunt may do what she likes with her frigates,” she writes rudely.