Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  As for Charles, no one had set eyes on the youngest brother since the end of 1804, when he departed for the North America Station. He had an affectionate heart, and was lonely for his sisters, whom he loved dearly; and he found comfort by becoming engaged to a sixteen-year-old beauty in Bermuda. Fanny Palmer came of a family of English lawyers who had made careers for themselves on the island, but she had no fortune and was still younger than Francis’s Mary. She and Charles were married in Bermuda in May 1807, a romantic match on the edge of the world between the young naval officer and the pink-cheeked, golden-haired child bride, with only her married sister to support her. He naturally had no family present at all. Letters went to and fro, but Fanny did not meet any of the Austens for another four years, when Charles was at last posted back to England, by now with two little daughters; the babies and their girlish mother were then warmly taken into his family, especially by Cassandra and Jane, always tender to their little brother.

  And Cassandra? In her own words Jane was “the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure”; which made her the moon and shadow to Jane’s brightness.2 Cassandra is never much more than a darkly seen shape; like the silhouettes which are the only representations of her, outline only. Her niece Caroline ( James’s younger daughter) wrote, “I did not dislike Aunt Cassandra—but if my visit had at any time chanced to fall out during her absence, I don’t think I should have missed her.”3 A good woman, there is no doubt of that, but there is something disquieting too about a once cheerful, pretty girl who elects the role of virgin widow in her early twenties, so certain she will never recover from the loss of one lover that she rejects youth and its pleasures in favour of melancholy and self-effacement. The only passion of hers that has survived is in her letters about Jane, written in the days after her death, when she spoke of her being “part of myself” and even reproached herself for having loved her so much, accepting that God had punished her for such exclusiveness: “I can acknowledge . . . the justice of the hand which has struck this blow.” Her submission suggests a particularly nasty view of divine justice: because you love someone better than other people, God punishes you by killing the person you love. If this was Cassandra’s view of the working of her maker, her company may not have done much to raise Jane’s low spirits.

  Jane did once suggest Cass could be funny, and she must have laughed at Jane’s jokes; but no one remembers Cass making any. She did not complain either, it seems, about being the permanently useful sister-in-law, nurse and aunt; and may well have done everything she could to protect Jane from being absorbed in the same way. As the only person Jane discussed her work with, she was in a unique position to encourage her and question her about her plans. She was also the closest witness of Jane’s depression, seeing before her eyes how the lack of a settled home kept her from writing and wasted her God-given gifts. Cassandra must have worried more than anyone else when Jane fell silent after the marvellous books of the 1790s.

  But for the moment there was nothing to be done, and all through 1806 the sisters were as unsettled as ever. Most of the first three months were spent in Hampshire, at Steventon with James and Mary, and at Manydown, where it was agreed that the awkwardness of Harris’s proposal should be forgotten. Halfway through March, Jane and Cass returned to Bath; their mother had taken Anna to another set of lodgings, and was negotiating to move yet again. This further removal fell through, to the relief of her daughters, who continued to find the gaieties of Bath disagreeable. They remained in Trim Street, boxed in among buildings and with no gardens in sight, into the summer; Martha Lloyd, whose mother had died, took lodgings near by, and it was agreed that she would join them as a fourth member of the household wherever they settled next. The question was where.

  Now one of the brothers did make a proposal. Francis was eager to be married and had fixed on the month of July; he knew he must necessarily be away at sea a great deal, and he suggested that he and his Mary should share a house with his mother, his sisters and Martha. Whatever Mary Gibson felt about the prospect of living with four unknown older women, she did not question Frank’s idea. Since they had to be near a naval base, he proposed Southampton, in Hampshire, close to Portsmouth and already familiar territory. It was an attractive town then, still surrounded by its medieval walls, with open walks beyond them beside the sea and along the River Itchen; and it was busily promoting itself as a spa and a resort. The Austens agreed to start off in lodgings and do their house-hunting once they were there.

  But first Mrs. Austen carried her daughters off for the summer on another of her favourite rounds of visits to the cousinage. While they were travelling, Frank was married in Ramsgate, and took his bride to Godmersham for their honeymoon. Jane produced a poem to mark the occasion. It was written for Fanny, in her voice, describing the arrival of the bridal pair at Godmersham, and sent to Fanny to amuse her, although it was certainly meant to reach Frank too. Done with a novelist’s eye and ear for the scene in front of the great house where the children are waiting to welcome the “lovely couple,” it sparkles with joy for her brother. You hardly expect Austen to write an epithalamium, but it is her best piece of verse:

  Down the hill they’re swift proceeding

  Now they skirt the Park around;

  Lo! The Cattle sweetly feeding

  Scamper, startled at the sound!

  Run, my Brothers, to the Pier gate!

  Throw it open, very wide!

  Let it not be said that we’re late

  In welcoming my Uncle’s Bride!

  To the house the chaise advances;

  Now it stops—They’re here, they’re here!

  How d’ye do, my Uncle Francis?

  How does do your Lady dear?

  “Nutting,” illustration from The Seasons by James Thomson (1794)

  Jane had not met Mary Gibson, but she knew she was already Fanny’s friend; Mary had stayed at Godmersham after becoming engaged to Frank, in the autumn of 1804, when he and Charles were both there, and Fanny’s diary describes how the two girls went nutting together in the river walk, and grieved when “the horrible abominable beastly Admiralty” summoned both the young men to return to their ships in the small hours. Now Fanny wrote stolidly in her diary, “I had a bit of a letter from Aunt Jane, with some verses of hers.”4

  The Austen ladies had left Bath at the beginning of July, Jane and Cassandra rejoicing at their escape from the place they had come to hate, to which they never went back; when they needed to take the waters some years later, they chose Cheltenham. But now Mrs. Austen took them, after a preliminary stay at Clifton, to Adlestrop in Gloucestershire, where Cousin Thomas Leigh presided at the rectory, with his nephew at the big house. The old gentleman was pleased to show the improvements carried out to the estate by the landscape designer he had employed at great expense, Humphry Repton, the most fashionable name available. Repton had opened the grounds of the two houses into one large park, constructed a waterfall to run through the flower garden, and enclosed the village green. This last part of the scene can hardly have been considered much of an improvement by the villagers; but they were powerless against the combined power of Repton, fashion and their landlord.

  Their stay in Adlestrop was cut short when Cousin Leigh swept them off to Warwickshire to be his guests at Stoneleigh Abbey. The great house was not quite his, but he had just heard he was in line to inherit it. Hence the hurry: as a result of one of the complicated wills that were such a feature of life among Leighs and Austens, there were other claimants, and Mr. Leigh was determined to be on the spot. He installed himself firmly at Stoneleigh among the scores of servants whose mistress had just died, buttressed by his lawyer and a large party of friends, including his fascinated Austen cousins. Other claimants, among them Mrs. Austen’s brother James Leigh-Perrot, gathered more discreetly in London and complained of his behaviour; but an inheritance was an inheritance. It demanded that you put yourself out.

  The Stoneleigh estate and mansion were set in lush country
on the banks of the Avon where the original Cistercian abbey had once stood. Mrs. Austen wrote to Mary at Steventon, bubbling with enthusiasm for the grandeur of the place, relishing every moment of her stay and alert to every detail of the house, the grounds, the servants and the service. She counted the front windows, making them forty-five (and getting it right). She suggested to her Cousin Thomas that he might install signposts along the labyrinthine corridors (“I have proposed his setting up directing Posts at the Angles”). She revelled in the scale of everything from the kitchen garden and fish ponds to the billiard room; she even began to worry about the cost of putting the scores of servants into mourning for their late mistress. She described the state bed chamber, with its high dark crimson velvet bed, as “an alarming apartment just fit for a Heroine”—a nod to Jane—and the shady woods around the house “impenetrable to the sun even in the middle of August”; Humphry Repton had not arrived here yet, although he soon would.5 She wrote of visits made to Warwick and Kenilworth castles; and of the chocolate, coffee, tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot and cold rolls and bread and butter on the breakfast table. “Dry toast for me,” she finished, boasting with some justification of her asceticism.

  Yet another distant Leigh cousin, the widowed Lady Saye and Sele, joined the house party. She was a tedious and scatty old woman: “rather tormenting, tho’ something amusing, and affords Jane many a good laugh,” wrote her mother. It is a relief to hear of Jane laughing, even satirically, under the assembled weight of so many decrepit family members and hangers-on. She came away with one useful impression at least: the chapel at Stoneleigh is like enough to the one described in Mansfield Park to suggest it was the model for the chapel at Sotherton, with its plain sash windows, lack of ornament, wooden pews and gallery for the family.

  After this they went on to Edward Cooper in Staffordshire. Hamstall Ridware was a peaceful rural spot in principle, and the rectory a fine house, but the eldest Cooper boy turned out to be a pompous bully of twelve and all eight little Coopers went down with whooping cough one after another. Jane caught it from them, and coughed her way through the autumn.

  So back to Steventon in October, where Frank and his Mary were waiting for them, and on to Southampton. Cass had agreed to spend Christmas at Godmersham, where there was a tenth baby. Fanny wrote in her diary: “Nov. 16, Mama did not go to Church. About ½ after 8 in the evening, my dearest Mama was safely delivered of a daughter. She had a good night & I saw her afterwards & the baby, which is immense. Fri. 21 Baby to be Cassandra Jane.” Cassandra had earned the compliment, and Jane surely did not mind being tucked in perfunctorily after her. “Mama” did not leave her room until 15 December, when she dined in the schoolroom; she did not go out of the house until mid-January, and went to church for the first time at the end of January. But the children had the usual Christmas dancing and games, Hunt the Slipper, Oranges and Lemons, Wind the Jack, Lighting a Candle in Haste and Spare Old Noll; the gentlemen enjoyed their rabbit and snipe shooting, and the boys rode in the park.

  While this was the Godmersham Christmas, Jane’s Southampton one was not so enjoyable. Martha went to her sister Eliza Fowle in Berkshire. Frank’s Mary was pregnant and feeling ill, with fainting fits that usually came on after eating a hearty dinner, as her sister-in-law put it, a touch uncharitably. Looking back from our easier century, you feel how wretched it must have been when a longed for marriage brought pregnancy and illness almost before the couple could enjoy one another; but this is a strictly anachronistic piece of sympathy. Then James and his Mary invited themselves with their baby Caroline for the New Year. It was at the end of this visit that Jane wrote to Cass, “When you receive this, our guests will be all gone or going; and I shall be left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, and probably to regret that I did not take more pains to please them all.” It is a classic statement, immediately recognizable to anyone who has taken charge of a family Christmas with limited space and money at their disposal. She loved them, but the demands of that love left her time unprotected, and this made her hate them too.

  She never pretended to like James’s Mary, who was not in the least interested in books and rather too interested in money; and James himself was not above criticism. When he wrote to say he planned to make another visit, she told Cass, “I am sorry & angry that his Visits should not give one more pleasure; the company of so good & so clever a Man ought to be gratifying in itself;—but his Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied from his Wife’s, & his time here is spent I think in walking about the House & banging the Doors, or ringing the Bell for a glass of Water.”

  The eye for detail is perfect and would grace a novel. At once James appears before us, a man not quite at ease either with his sister or himself, making nervous, unnecessary demands and asserting opinions not really his own, but ones he has been browbeaten into by the stronger personality at home. In his wife’s diary, incidentally, he is always put down simply as “Austen,” just as Mrs. Elton refers to “Knightley” rather than “Mr. Knightley” in Emma, to Emma’s disgust. Jane herself never failed to give every gentleman his “Mr.” in her letters, as did Mrs. Chute in her diaries. Mary Austen’s was standard usage, and implied no disrespect to her husband; but there are nuances to such things, as Jane appreciated. James’s banging of doors and ringing of bells somehow seems more “Austen” than “Mr. Austen”; you cannot imagine his father behaving so.

  Jane found little good to say about their Southampton neighbours either. “Our acquaintance increase too fast,” she grumbled. “There was nothing to like or dislike” in a friendly admiral and his daughter. Another family “live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.” After this spleen, there was something to cheer her up at last. In February she was writing to Cass, still in Kent, about the house they had found. It was old and not in very good repair but with plenty of room, and a large garden that ran to the town walls; and it was the garden that made her happy. She writes as a long-deprived gardener restored to bliss; and you remember her showing chaffinch nests to Edward’s children all those years ago, in the garden at Steventon. She ordered a syringa in honour of Cowper’s line: “Laburnum, rich / In streaming gold; syringa, iv’ry pure.” “We also talk of a Laburnam,” she went on, and there were to be currants, gooseberries and raspberries as well as new shrubs and roses. It is a relief to find her happy in the prospect.

  The house stood in Castle Square, and the landlord was the Marquis of Lansdowne, who had just built himself a mock-Gothic castle alongside which formed part of their view.6 Jane had some dealings with Lord Lansdowne’s house painter, or “domestic Painter I shd call him,” she wrote, “for he lives in the Castle—Domestic Chaplains have given way to this more necessary office, & I suppose whenever the Walls want no touching up, he is employed about my Lady’s face.” An old-fashioned joke, but the Marchioness was generally despised as having been her husband’s mistress before she was his wife, and no doubt she did paint her face. Otherwise she was harmless, and added to the gaiety of the place; she drove a little phaeton drawn by eight extremely small ponies, which appealed greatly to visiting children, who watched them, entranced, from the Austens’ windows.

  Henry brought Cass home from Godmersham, where he had entertained everyone by reading a play aloud on two successive evenings, and they all moved into the Castle Square house. At once Frank was given a command and had to leave to fit out his ship, the St. Albans, which was to do convoy duty to the Cape of Good Hope, and then to China. This left his mother and sisters to take charge of Mary’s confinement in April. It did not go well. Fanny was kept informed and entered in her diary that Mary was “so ill as to alarm them extremely,” and that she relapsed into bad fainting fits after the birth; an anxious time for her sisters-in-law. Frank’s Mary, like Edwar
d’s Elizabeth, was destined to bear eleven children, and to die after giving birth to the last; this time she recovered, and Frank got home for the christening of his daughter in May, and stayed with them until the end of June, when he sailed for the Cape.

  Before he went, Edward came over to see him in Southampton. He had been visiting his estate at Chawton following the departure of his tenant there, and suggested to his mother and sisters that they might like to join him in September at Chawton House for a family holiday while it stood empty. He could escort his eldest son to Winchester for his first half while they were there, and James and Mary could come over from Steventon too; there was plenty of room for them all. So while Mrs. Frank took her child to see her family in Ramsgate, the other ladies made their first visit to Chawton House. Its tapestried walls, intricate corridors, huge old fireplaces, great hall, gallery and family portraits impressed them properly, but not to the exclusion of more modern attractions; Fanny’s diary records three shopping expeditions to Alton with Aunt Jane in five days.

  The family party went on to Southampton, where the three Austen ladies entertained Edward, Elizabeth, Fanny and her brother William at Castle Square for several days, and Henry came to join them. They went to the theatre to see John Bannister in The Way to Keep Him, Arthur Murphy’s perennially popular satire on women who stop bothering to please their husbands after marriage. There was a boat trip to Hythe, and another to see the picturesque ruins of Netley Abbey: “we were struck dumb with admiration, and I wish I could write anything that would come near to the sublimity of it,” wrote Fanny in a letter.7 Other visitors to Netley objected to the stalls for toys and gingerbread, and the presence of picnicking parties.8 And Fanny’s diary records “we eat there some biscuits we had taken and returned quite delighted. Aunt Jane and I walked in the High Street till late.” The next day Henry hired a sociable and took everyone for a drive in the New Forest; everyone except Aunt Jane, that is, who had perhaps had enough of the family, and stayed at home alone.