Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  She has been for a walk on the Cobb with yet another of the young ladies who might possibly turn into a friend, a Miss Armstrong. She “has Sense & some degree of Taste”; her flaw, one not shared by Jane, is that “she seems to like people rather too easily.” Jane is much more interested in two of the servants her parents have brought with them, Jenny and James. She finds them books and newspapers to read and, as a thoroughly enlightened employer, sends them off for a long tramp together over the clifftops to Charmouth. Jane expresses her pleasure that Jenny has found a new way of putting up her hair; and she has enjoyed a few dances at the Lyme Assembly Rooms—two shillings for a subscriber, four for non-subscribers, with card room, billiard room and chandeliered ballroom, two violins and a cello for dancing every Tuesday. Mrs. Austen plays cards with “Le Chevalier”— possibly Mrs. Hancock’s old friend, Sir John Lambert, still in touch with Eliza and returned from France with the peace.2 Jane dances with a Mr. Crawford, but not with the “odd looking Man” who eyed her for some time and asked her if she intended to dance any more; and whom she suspects of being Irish “by his ease.” “I imagine him to belong to the Honble Barnwalls, who are the son & son’s wife of an Irish Viscount—bold, queerlooking people, just fit to be Quality at Lyme,” she declares snobbishly. She is interested in who is fit to be Quality and who is not, and nervous that Mrs. Austen might bring out her stockings to be darned when visitors are present, as Miss Armstrong’s mother did—the sort of anxiety parents induce even in their grown-up children.

  Now that Henry had gone, there was no one for Jane to go rambling with, and she spent too long enjoying herself in the sea, and tired herself out. Her father and mother could not possibly have managed the steep climb up from the seafront at Lyme to the cliff walk to Charmouth, and the wildly overgrown undercliff walk to the west of the town would also have been daunting for them. They were unlikely even to venture on to the Cobb, the famous stone jetty curved like a great hooked finger; it had a sloping surface and rough, tricky steps offering neither handholds nor railing. As a group, the Austens would have kept to the public promenade along the front, and the gentle walk inland beside the Lym, rushing and gurgling through the town on its way to the sea. On Sunday they would all process from their lodgings in Broad Street to attend the parish church, a curious amalgam of Norman and Gothic, Jacobean gallery and pulpit: plenty to look at if the sermon palled. So Jane played the dutiful daughter, and kept an eye on the arrangements at their lodgings: “I detect dirt in the Water-decanter as fast as I can, and give the Cook physic.”

  Years afterwards, when Cassandra was an old woman, she told her niece Caroline that she and Jane became friendly with a young man at one of the Devon resorts who showed signs of becoming fond of Jane, and went so far as to ask whether they might meet again the following summer. This is hardly the approach of an ardent lover like Jane Cooper’s Thomas Williams, with his almost instant proposal; but Cassandra had the impression that Jane returned his interest. The next thing they heard was that the man had died; there was no second summer meeting, and this is the whole of the story. If it is true, and if Jane had really hoped for more, it makes another sadness in her life. There is, however, nothing in writing by Cassandra, no name, no precise place or date. When Caroline set down her account forty years after she was told it, it had become as mistily romantic as the wilder shores of Devon itself when the weather is uncertain.

  Another episode from the same period is better documented and throws a much clearer light on what was going on in Jane’s head. In the autumn of 1802, she and Cassandra were wandering about as usual, spending two nights in their old Steventon home with James and Mary before travelling on to Godmersham with Charles, who was currently unemployed because the peace between the English and the French that spring had put so many ships out of commission. At the end of October, after eight weeks in Kent, the sisters returned with Charles to Steventon, intending to see old friends and one or two enemies also. We know from Eliza Chute’s diary, for example, that she dined with all the Austens at Oakley Hall, the Bramstons’ house, in November. Two weeks later Jane and Cass were invited by the Bigg sisters for a stay of several weeks at Manydown, where they had so often enjoyed themselves. Alethea and Catherine were both still single, and Elizabeth Heathcote had come home to her father’s house with her baby son William after the tragic early death of her husband that spring.

  The five young women had much to talk about and were planning long, cosy winter evenings together; the Bigg sisters may have had something else in mind as well. Their father was at home, a hale sixty-year-old; so was their younger brother, Harris, who had reached his majority in May. He had been away finishing his education at Worcester College, Oxford, so Jane and Cassandra had not seen him for some time; the shy, stammering boy, although still awkward in manner, had turned into a broad-shouldered, tall and much more confident young man. He was after all the heir to considerable estates.

  On the evening of 2 December, Harris asked Jane to become his wife. It seems likely his sisters conspired with Cassandra for the couple to be left alone together, in the library, perhaps, or one of the small drawing rooms. It may also be that they had encouraged Harris to make his proposal; he was their little brother, and they may have felt he needed some help. Because of his stammer he had been privately educated at home until he went to Oxford, and the stammer still remained, which meant that social life could be something of an ordeal, and made him occasionally aggressive.3 So perhaps his loving and powerful elder sisters persuaded him that a wife he had known and liked all his life would solve his problems and make him a happy man. Whether Harris fancied himself in love with Jane or not, he decided she would make a good wife, and duly proposed.

  Jane, no doubt very fond of her friends’ brother, whom she would have danced with when he was a child, accepted his proposal. The discrepancy in their ages was only five years, nothing of any moment; Eliza was ten years older than Henry. The entire Manydown household was delighted. The evening was passed in congratulations, and everyone went to bed rejoicing.

  Jane would now become the future mistress of a large Hampshire house and estate, only a few miles from her birthplace, and close to her brother James. She would be almost as grand as Elizabeth Austen at Godmersham. She would be able to ensure the comfort of her parents to the end of their days, and give a home to Cassandra. She would probably be in a position to help her brothers in their careers. She would be surrounded by dear sisters-in-law and friends. She would be a kindly mistress to the estate workers. She would have children of her own. All these thoughts must have rushed through her head, each one like a miracle, offerings of happiness she had given up expecting.

  And she would have a perfectly decent young husband. There she paused. Seven years before, she had danced here at Manydown with all the élan of her love for Tom Lefroy; she had sat out with him, joked with him, done everything that was profligate and shocking, believed he cared for her and known she cared for him. She had let the world see it, not minding if she were talked about. It was even possible that Harris had kept a vision of Jane as she had been then, dancing so recklessly and happily. She had only to compare the emotions of that night with this one to realize what a gulf lay between real happiness and delusive dreams. The night went by, and Jane stayed awake, like a heroine in a novel who cannot sleep because too many emotions are pressing in on her: “the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion . . . a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears,” as she had written mockingly herself. She thought and thought; and in the morning she packed her bag, dressed herself grimly, and sought someone— Alethea perhaps—who would find Harris. Again they were closeted alone in the library, or the small drawing room, and this time Jane explained, with all the delicacy in her power, that she had made a mistake and could not after all marry him. She esteemed him, she was honoured by his proposal, but on thinking it over she realized that esteem and respect were not enough, and that she would not be behaving fairly or rightly to
wards him if she accepted the offer of his hand.

  After this appalling explanation, she and Cassandra could not stay on at Manydown as planned. Alethea and Catherine ordered the carriage and drove with them to Steventon, where a very surprised Mary received them and saw the Austens and the Biggs embrace tearfully by way of farewell. Jane then insisted that James must take them back to Bath the very next day; she was for once peremptory, and when asked for an explanation refused to give any. When Mary found out the reason later, she much regretted Jane’s change of mind from a worldly point of view, but said she also understood why she had made it.

  To continue the story from Harris’s point of view, he did not pine for long. Two years later he found a young woman from the Isle of Wight who could and did love him. They were married and she bore him ten children. Their eldest son became a clergyman, a Whig and a poet; on the one hand he translated the whole of the Iliad into English verse, and on the other he was active in supporting the Basingstoke Mechanics’ Institute and promoting allotment holdings for agricultural labourers. We would naturally rather have Mansfield Park and Emma than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world, and who would almost certainly have prevented her from writing any further books. At least Harris’s son grew up to be a thoroughly good and honourable man, one of whom Jane Austen would have approved.

  On the face of it, the effects of the whole episode were no worse for Jane than for Harris. The friendship between the Austens and the Bigg sisters was undamaged. Harris moved away into a house of his own, and Jane was able to continue to visit Manydown as before. In fact, it marked another painful epoch in her life, because this was her last serious thought of marriage and the possibility of having children. After this she, like Cassandra, hurried into middle age.4

  Hurrying into it was one way of dealing with the fact that it was not an easy prospect to face. Looking around, she saw her friend Martha Lloyd, ten years older than her, living with her old, infirm, widowed mother and her mother’s friend Mrs. Stent. “Poor Mrs. Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves, unequal to anything & unwelcome to everybody,” she wrote, although she was still in her twenties. 5 Thoughts of this kind, and fears of the future, were on her mind; not unreasonably, given the age of her parents and the question mark over how she and Cassandra would manage their lives without them.

  The fiasco with Harris seems to have returned her to her manuscripts. She had been carrying these precious bundles around from place to place, year after year, and purely as physical objects they must have caused her some anxiety. They had to be preserved from water, fire, loss, disintegration and all the hazards of life on the move. Packets of paper are easily mislaid on coaches, in lodgings, at inns: you think of the mistake that sent her bags from the inn at Dartford on their way to the West Indies. Even the houses of relatives and friends do not offer perfect security; there are always maids lighting fires, and children looking for something to make paper darts with. The manuscripts had gone with her to Bath, first to the Leigh-Perrots, then to Sydney Place. They then accompanied her around the Devon coast and Wales, and wherever the Austens travelled during the next years, to Godmersham, and back to Hampshire for their frequent visits to different households there; for it seems unlikely she would have left them on a shelf in an empty or rented-out house in Bath. The more you think about it, the more surprising it becomes that nothing was lost. Keeping them under her eye must have been one of the unmentioned but essential disciplines of her life.

  Now she copied out and revised Northanger Abbey (still called Susan). Henry offered to take over from Mr. Austen as her agent, and deputed one of his business partners, a lawyer named William Seymour, to offer the manuscript to Richard Crosby, a London publisher. This was at the start of 1803. Crosby paid £10 for the manuscript, promising early publication. He then advertised the book in a brochure called Flowers of Literature as being “in the Press”; but after this nothing more happened. It was worse than Cadell’s blind refusal; this time Jane’s hopes had been raised by an acceptance.

  She none the less started on a new novel, which she called The Watsons.6 The first thing that strikes you about it is that it is the story of a group of youngish women—four sisters—who are all unmarried, have very little money, and are casting about more or less desperately to remedy their situation before their invalid father dies, when they know they will be even worse off. For the present they have a home at least; but because Mr. Watson is a clergyman they will lose that when they lose him. The parallel with Jane’s and Cassandra’s situation is obvious; and the similarity became more striking. She planned to kill off Mr. Watson in the story, only to face the real death of her own father in January 1805. At this point she abandoned the book for good.

  Her biographer nephew suggested that she gave up because she found she had placed her heroine too low down in the social hierarchy. A more likely reason is that the theme of the story touched too closely on Jane’s fears for herself, Cassandra and their companion Martha Lloyd, whose hopes of marriage had fallen through, and who faced the same bleak uncertainty over her future. For someone who took care not to write autobiographically, this degree of parallel between her fiction and her own life may have become impossibly tricky to handle.

  The conversations she wrote for the Watson sisters are strikingly grimmer than anything else in her work. Elizabeth Watson, the eldest, defending the crude husband-hunting of her juniors, remarks, “but you know, we must marry . . . my father cannot provide for us, & it is very bad to grow old and be poor & laughed at.” Emma, the youngest, who has grown up in affluence with a rich aunt, protests, “to pursue a Man merely for the sake of situation—is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education & feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be Teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a Man I did not like.” Elizabeth, better informed about the harsh realities of women’s lives, replies: “I would rather do any thing than be Teacher at a school . . . I have been at a school, Emma, & know what a Life they lead; you never have.”

  The two middle sisters are depressed, quarrelsome and unrealistic in their expectations of men who are merely casual acquaintances; the expression on their faces is “sharp and anxious.” One brother, Robert, has married the daughter of a lawyer with enough money of her own to allow her to condescend mercilessly to her sisters-in-law. Mrs. Watson is dead and Mr. Watson is largely confined to his room. Emma Watson finds home life the more difficult because she has been brought up with expectations of inheriting her widowed aunt’s riches, only to see her aunt succumb to a fortune-hunting Irish officer as a second husband. Emma was “sent back a weight upon your family,” as her brother delicately puts it; “By Heaven! A woman should never be trusted with money,” he adds, by way of reproach to his late aunt.

  If family life among the Watsons is grim, when the upper classes appear they are no better. Lord Osborne, who admires Emma at a ball, is the sort of man who talks loudly about a woman within earshot: “Why do not you dance with that beautiful Emma Watson . . . and I will come and stand by you . . . & if you find she does not want much Talking to, you may introduce me by & bye.” Then, “bring me word how she looks by daylight.” Deciding to have a word with Emma, he returns to the ballroom with the excuse that he is looking for his gloves, not bothering to hide the pair he is holding in his hand. His friend, Tom Musgrave, is a self-satisfied puppy who could appear with very little alteration in a feminist novel of the 1990s. When the young ladies arrive at the inn where a ball is to take place, Musgrave is standing, not yet dressed for the evening, in the doorway of his bedchamber, in order to watch them walk by. He tries to bully Emma into accepting a lift she does not want, and enjoys turning up unexpectedly at the Watsons’, and boasting about his grander engagements.

  These and other impressions of provincial life, set down
from memory as she sat in Bath, strike as truthfully as anything in Austen. There is the cold, empty appearance of the town ballroom before the dancing starts; the powdered hair of the footman in the best house in town, the curl papers in the hair of the daughter of the house, and the mother’s two satin dresses “which went thro’ the winter.” We learn that conversation is impossible when driving through the town in an open vehicle, from the clatter of the streets. We see a plate of fried beef make up the whole dinner of Elizabeth and Emma when they are on their own, and serving themselves, at home. There is a lordly invitation to look in on the hunt meeting—“Everybody allows that there is not so fine a sight in the world as a pack of Fox-Hounds in full cry. I am sure you will be delighted to hear the first Burst”—with the recommendation to wear half-boots or come on horseback, made to a young woman who can afford neither.7

  The picture of society is bleak and pessimistic, and although the narrative moves fast, Mary Lascelles, who trained a keener eye on Austen’s style than any other critic, finds that she “seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threatens her style.” 8 One scene alone lights up the fragment, when Emma takes pity on little Charles, a ten-year-old who is longing to dance at his first ball, and is let down by his promised partner. Emma offers to dance with him instead, and his delight and gratitude at having such a pretty partner, and staying up so late, and being able to tell her about his life—Latin lessons, his first horse and his first hunt, the stuffed Fox and Badger he would like to show her at the Castle—is tenderly realistic. He is proof of how carefully Austen listened to children talking; and he is the most attractive child in her work.

  Little Charles apart, The Watsons is cheerless. Deaths feature so little in Austen’s novels that you can’t help wondering how she would have described the last moments of Emma Watson’s father, who was to be killed off, according to Cassandra’s recollection of Jane’s plan. But before she reached that point, she had to face a whole series of real deaths. In October 1801 Eliza’s beloved son Hastings, worn out by increasingly frequent fits, died at the age of fifteen. The fat, fair baby who had been the plaything of all the Austen family at Steventon was more cruelly afflicted than their own George. Although he learnt to speak, and Jane was very struck by his formal phrases, remembering him talking of “my very valuable friend,” his condition deteriorated as he grew, and he endured a “sad variety and long series of pain.” By the time he died, his mother had come to understand he had no expectation of a normal life, and now turned to the hope that her “dear child” had exchanged “a most painful existence for a blissful immortality.”9 She had him buried in Hampstead beside his grandmother, the stone inscribed “Also in memory of her grandson Hastings only child of Jean Capot Comt. de Feuillide and Elizabeth his wife born 25th June 1786 died 9th October 1801”: choosing not to give him the title his father had claimed.