Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Tom Lefroy is the chief subject of Jane Austen’s earliest surviving letter, her “Irish friend,” with whom she enjoyed behaving outrageously at a dance. He was a law student from Ireland, a holiday visitor to his uncle in Hampshire and, at just twenty, the same age as she. He was also financially dependent on the goodwill of another uncle and, since neither he nor Jane had a penny, an engagement between them was out of the question; when it became obvious that they were falling in love he was sent smartly away. Jane joked about him, but it was a painful experience, and she was still thinking of him three years later. He married an heiress, and became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. As a very old man he acknowledged, when questioned, that he had loved Jane Austen in 1796.

  Manydown House, where Jane and Tom danced together. It was the home of her friends, the three Bigg sisters; and seven years after her romance with Tom Lefroy their brother Harris, heir to Manydown, proposed marriage to Jane while she was staying with them. She accepted his proposal in the evening, but changed her mind during the night.

  Mrs. Austen’s brother James Leigh (above), who came into a fortune and changed his name to Leigh-Perrot. He and his wife Jane (right) divided their time between their Berkshire home and Bath. Their childlessness encouraged Mrs. Austen to hope her children would be made their heirs; but they liked to keep the Austens guessing about how they would leave their money.

  The Revd. George Lefroy, uncle to Tom, and like him of Huguenot descent, lived at Ashe rectory, only a step from Steventon. His wife Anne (right) was cultivated and charming, and showed particular friendship to Jane, who credited her with “genius, taste, and tenderness of soul.” Mrs. Lefroy set up a Straw Manufactory to help the poor when the war with France brought hard times to the Hampshire villages. She was killed by a fall from her horse.

  Luxurious Godmersham, standing in its idyllic parkland near Canterbury, where Edward Austen became master, brought up his many children and entertained his brothers and sisters. Henry was the most frequent visitor; he wrote a poem in praise of Godmersham, enjoyed the shooting and read plays aloud in the library in the evening. Cassandra came mostly to help her sister-in-law through her confinements. Jane was conscious of being regarded as a poor relation, and the best friend she made there was the governess, Anne Sharp.

  Mrs. Knight, Edward’s adoptive mother and benefactress, was Jane’s only patron, presenting her with an annual “fee.” This was all Jane had beyond the meagre pocket money her parents were able to allow her, until she began to earn from her writing in her mid-thirties.

  Elizabeth Bridges, daughter of a Kentish baronet, married Edward Austen in 1791 at the age of eighteen. She did not care for Jane, perhaps because she thought her too clever. A devoted wife and mother, she was almost permanently pregnant throughout her married life; she died in 1808, after the birth of her eleventh child.

  The Revd. George Austen as an old man. His granddaughter Anna remembered how his fine white hair and bright eyes attracted admiring glances in Bath, where he moved with his wife and daughters in 1801. He died there in 1805 and is buried in the church of St. Swithin at Walcot, the same church in which he was married in 1764.

  Jane Austen visited Bath (above) in 1797 and 1799, and made precise use of it as a setting for scenes in her early novel Northanger Abbey and again in Persuasion. She admired the beauty of the surrounding countryside, but came to dislike the city itself, with its “white glare” and inescapable social round; and although she wrote so well about it, she seems to have done little writing while she lived there.

  Lyme Regis, its houses steeply stacked about the bay where Dorset and Devon meet, laid its spell on Jane Austen during her visits of 1803 and 1804; and she immortalized it in Persuasion, not only with a scene of high drama but with her lyrical account of its delights, from the Cobb, the fast-flowing tide, the sands and the bathing machines to the dark cliffs of Charmouth nearby and the “green chasms between romantic rocks” at Pinny.

  An early photograph showing, on the left, Chawton Cottage. It was offered by Edward to his mother and sisters when it became available after the death of the previous tenant, his farm bailiff, and they settled gratefully in the house in 1809. Here Jane Austen took up her pen again after ten years in which she had produced almost nothing. She was at Chawton when two of her early books were published—Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813—and three more were written here, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, making the very modest house into one of the great sites of literary history. It went unrecognized for more than a century, however, and was divided into tenements for labourers; only in the 1940s were the first efforts made to restore it by the newly formed Jane Austen Society. It is now a museum.

  Rowlandson’s engraving of the Prince Regent driving a curricle shows just what dashing and precarious vehicles they were. Henry Austen drove one, and his wife wrote of being “sometimes so gracious or so imprudent as to trust my neck to Henry’s coachmanship.” Willoughby, Darcy, Bingley, Henry Tilney and Charles Musgrove were all given curricles to drive by Jane Austen, and Mr. Collins, John Thorpe and Sir Edward Denham owned gigs, which were very similar and equally showy. The dreadful Thorpe described his gig as “Curricle-hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword-case, splashing-board, lamps, silver moulding, all you see complete.”

  Willoughby carrying Marianne after she has sprained her ankle: an engraving from the 1828 French edition of Raison et Sensibilité.

  Marianne on her sickbed: the title-page engraving for Bentley’s 1833 Sense and Sensibility, the first English edition with illustrations. All the illustrations in Bentley’s edition are by an otherwise unknown artist called Pickering, engraved by William Greatbatch.

  Captain Wentworth removing little Harry Musgrove from his aunt Anne Elliot’s back while she tends his injured elder brother: an engraving from the 1821 French edition of La Famille Elliot, ou L’Ancienne inclination (Persuasion). This must be the earliest illustration to any of Austen’s novels.

  Elizabeth Bennet with Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the garden at Longbourn: the most dramatic scene in the book, in an engraving from Bentley’s 1833 edition of Pride and Prejudice.

  Sir Thomas Bertram interrupts Mr. Yates while he is rehearsing on the improvised stage at Mansfield Park: a dramatic engraving from Bentley’s 1833 edition of Mansfield Park.

  Emma works at a portrait drawing of Harriet Smith, watched admiringly by Mr. Elton: engraving from Bentley’s 1833 edition of Emma.

  A daguerreotype taken in old age of Jane Austen’s dear friend Martha Lloyd, who, after sixty-three years as a spinster, became the second wife of Admiral Sir Francis Austen.

  The sad survivor: a silhouette of Cassandra Austen, made in later life, showing an imposing-looking woman, but with a cheerless face.

  Jane’s well-loved brother Frank, Admiral Sir Francis Austen, still a handsome man, in a daguerreotype taken in the latter part of his ever-active life. He was the longest lived of the family, dying in 1865 at the age of ninety-one. He preserved Jane’s letters carefully for fifty years, but immediately after his death they were destroyed by his daughter Fanny, who failed to consult with anyone else. An irreparable loss.

  19

  A Death in the Family

  For another year Jane’s time was given to her brothers and their families. She was thirty-three in December 1808, and settling into the role of maiden aunt. If she was not with Francis, Mary and their baby in Southampton, she was at Steventon with James and his three children, or at Godmersham, with Edward’s troop of ten. She also went to the Fowles at Kintbury, where the rectory had passed, like Steventon, to the eldest son, Fulwar. Old Mr. Fowle was dead, and so was his son Charles, another childhood friend, only in his thirties; now there were eight children in the new generation, ready to be entertained by visiting “aunts.”

  The only childless home was Henry and Eliza’s, where she spent a month in June and July. Their house at Brompton was small, but they were good hosts. They had time to make conversation, and
kept up a round of dinner parties with London friends as well as theatre and concert-going; Henry even owned his own box at the Pantheon Opera House in Oxford Street.1 Eliza was distinctively different from the other sisters-in-law, at once stranger and sadder through her complicated cosmopolitan history, and closer to Jane, as a first cousin whose memories went back to her earliest years. 2 There was another pleasant feature to the household in her French women servants, Madame Bigeon and her daughter Marie Marguerite, Madame Perigord; Jane found them charming and interesting. Brompton was altogether a different world, where there was time to sit and talk, and an appreciation of a whole range of the pleasures of life: food and wine as well as music, pictures and reading.

  At Manydown too there was leisure for conversation; her two weeks with the Biggs were such a success this year that she invited them for a return visit to Southampton in the summer. It was to be a “snug fortnight” when her mother would be away at James’s, and a happily anticipated release. When she found the arrangement was going to fall through, because she was at Godmersham and no one there could conveniently escort her back to Southampton in time to receive her friends, she was so upset that she was driven, uncharacteristically, to plead with Edward. The family had simply assumed that Godmersham was as good for her as anywhere else, and that she might as well stay there for another two months until Henry was due to come down, when he would take her back. It had not crossed anyone’s mind that she might have plans of her own to be taken into account. She must have felt like an awkward parcel.

  Jane had to give Edward and Elizabeth a “private reason” for needing to keep her engagement with the Biggs before they gave way and he agreed to take her home. Perhaps she told him she did not want to offend the Manydown sisters after her treatment of their brother; they were after all an important county family. Even then Edward was ungracious about the journey, and Jane wrote resignedly, “till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things.” Not that there was the least prospect of such a purse.

  The snug fortnight would be the last with Catherine Bigg, who was to be married, at thirty-three, to a clergyman approaching sixty, the Revd. Herbert Hill. Jane’s remark as the wedding day in October approached, “tomorrow we must think of poor Catherine,” suggests how she viewed her friend’s fate.3 She was learning to see that spinsterhood, a condition which had for so long looked fearful, could be a form of freedom. In August, Frank was home again, and told them he and Mary wanted to move to a home of their own on the Isle of Wight. Jane quite saw the point: with “plenty of each other” they “must be very happy,” and she was happy for them; but for herself she had seen enough of babies and pregnancies to know she could live contentedly without them. The events of the next months confirmed that feeling.

  Cassandra went to Godmersham for Elizabeth’s eleventh confinement. There was already a nurse installed, and the boys had gone off to school, the two eldest now at Winchester. Fifteen-year-old Fanny wrote in her diary on 27 September, “Mama as usual very low,” but on the 28th, “About three this afternoon to our great joy, our beloved mother was delivered of a fine boy and is going on charmingly.” On 4 October “Mama got up for dinner,” and the next day “Papa to Quarter Sessions.” On Saturday the baby was named Brook-John, names from Elizabeth’s family. Three days later, the mother was dead, leaving a family stunned by the suddenness of her collapse. The doctor could offer no explanation; she had eaten what Fanny called a hearty dinner only half an hour before the end. She was thirty-five: a well-to-do, well-born, well-looked-after woman who had married for love at eighteen, and been pregnant almost permanently ever since.4

  Henry dashed to Godmersham, and letters flew to and fro between Cassandra and Jane, and from both of them to more distant members of the family who must be informed. “May the Almighty sustain you all,” wrote Jane, invoking Him as she had not felt necessary at the time of her father’s death. She thought of “dearest Edward, whose loss & whose suffering seem to make those of every other person nothing,” but also “of Henry’s anguish,” acknowledging his special position at Godmersham; “but he will exert himself to be of use & comfort.” She excused herself from “a Panegyric on the Departed” beyond a line on “her solid principles, her true devotion, her excellence in every relation of Life,” her chief thoughts being with the children, Fanny propelled into the position of mistress of the house and virtual mother to the new baby, and the boys away at school. They were fetched by James to Steventon, to her disappointment: “I should have loved to have them with me at such a time.” Then there was poor little Lizzy, who was, with seven-year-old Marianne, packed off to boarding school in Essex within three months, neither their elder sister nor their Aunt Cassandra raising any objection. Jane kept worrying about “dear little Lizzy & Marianne in particular,” and the “poor little girls” were much in her thoughts on the day they were sent away. The little girls protested so strongly that they were allowed home and given a governess, but not before they had spent a year at school in Wanstead. 5 “I suppose you see the Corpse,—how does it appear?” asked Jane of her sister, with somewhat disconcerting curiosity. She may have been thinking of the only dead body she had seen, her father’s, whose sweet and serene expression had comforted her, and hoping for the same reassurance. She went on to imagine Edward “restless in Misery going from one room to the other—& perhaps not seldom upstairs to see all that remains of his Elizabeth.” Ten days later young Edward and George arrived at Castle Square. They had come by coach from Steventon, insisting on sitting outside with the coachman, and although he gave them his coat they were chilled to the bone.

  Now Jane rose magnificently to the task of comforting the two boys. She was too sensible to expect them to pine and grieve or listen to psalms and sermons more than could possibly be helped. Instead, she made paper ships with them, to be bombarded with chestnuts, and organized card games and spillikins. She thought up riddles and charades, and best of all went out on the river with them to see a battleship under construction, allowing them to take the oars of the rowing boat for a good part of the way. She knew from her own childhood what boys enjoy, and felt instinctively how much better it was to cheer them up with excursions and games than to insist on mourning. It is one of the rare moments in the Austen family history when she was in command; and she did exactly the right thing.

  In the midst of all these arrangements there was another preoccupation. Edward had at last made the offer of a house to his mother and sisters; or rather he now offered them a choice of two, one close to Godmersham in the pretty village of Wye, the other his bailiff’s cottage in Chawton village, the bailiff having died, and his widow being willing to leave at midsummer. Chawton cottage could be put in order without much expense, and there was a garden, some outhouses, six bedrooms and garrets for storage. Mrs. Austen was pleased with the idea of Wye, but was easily persuaded by the other three—Martha remained one of the group—to take Chawton. They knew the village and had already appreciated its nearness to Alton. Henry had a branch of his bank there, and James was only about twelve miles away, which was bound to weigh with his mother. And it was rural Hampshire, to which their tastes and loyalties strongly inclined them. So it was decided, and the move set in motion, to take place in July.

  Cassandra remained at Godmersham throughout the winter, where the period normally given to festivities, including Edward’s and Elizabeth’s wedding anniversary, passed sadly. But Jane, in Southampton, had an access of high spirits. She insisted on Martha going with her to the play, advancing absurdly the reason that she “ought to see the inside of the Theatre once while she lives in Southampton, & I think she will hardly wish to take a second view.” Next the two of them went dancing, taking themselves to the Assembly Ball at the Dolphin. Jane was surprised to be asked to dance (“You will not expect to hear that I was”) by a black-eyed gentleman whose name she did not know. After that she and Martha may have danced together, rather than joining the “many dozen young women standing by without
partners, & each of them with two ugly naked shoulders!” If she disapproved of bare shoulders, she enjoyed everything else; there were new dances that year, named as usual for public figures and causes like the anti-slavery bill: “The Fair Slave” and “Mr. Canning’s Waltz,” as well as “The Ocean Fiend,” “Brighton Races” and “Lady Dashwood’s Reel.”6 Jane reminded Cassandra that they had both attended a ball at the Dolphin fifteen years ago, and went on to say she was quite as happy now as she had been then. It was a claim she would scarcely have made at any time during the past ten years. “In spite of the shame of being so much older,” as she put it, she was reviving, growing cheerful and purposeful. She enjoyed teasing Martha by pretending to believe she was carrying on an immoral love affair with a local clergyman, a respectable married man. Martha was “the friend and sister under every circumstance,” she told Cass, not quite tactfully perhaps. And the friends went dancing again in January, to celebrate Queen Charlotte’s birthday, or perhaps simply Jane’s good spirits.