Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  In April she wrote to Richard Crosby, the publisher who had bought Susan (Northanger Abbey) for £10 six years before from Henry’s lawyer and done nothing with it. The letter is firm and confident, offering to supply a copy of the book if it had been lost and they were prepared to print it now without delay; otherwise she intended to find another publisher. Her confidence failed only at the thought of other eyes seeing what she was about, and she asked him to answer care of the post office, and to a false name she had chosen for herself, “Mrs. Ashton Dennis.” Crosby was not impressed and wrote back three days later denying that there had been any stipulation as to when he would publish, or that he was bound to do so, and offering to sell the manuscript back to Mrs. Ashton Dennis for £10.

  She was in no position to raise so much money. Jane’s entire spending money for 1807, the only year for which we have her accounts, was something like £50, and it was made up from money allowed her by her mother, plus a little extra from Edward and also the generous Mrs. Knight. Of this £14 on clothes, more than £8 on laundry, nearly £4 on postage, above £6 on presents and £3.10s. 31⁄2d. on charity; the hire of a piano cost her £2.13s.6d., and rather less than £1 went on plays and “waterparties.”7 It was a modest budget, and since she was wholly dependent on other people’s goodwill for every penny she had to spend, and could not be certain of next year’s income, there was no question of repurchasing her manuscript. Crosby remained both uninterested in publishing and unwilling to return it. She had to let it go, and it was only in 1816 that it was bought back.

  The house in Castle Square was given up in May. Martha went to stay with friends in London, the others to Godmersham, where Henry and Eliza also made a rare visit together. Instead of plays Henry now read prayers in the library, a new departure, signifying a change of mood in the family following the death of Elizabeth.8 Fanny went for walks with Aunt Eliza, and attempted some mimicry of her conversational style in her diary: “Uncle & Aunt Henry Austen went away early ce matin. Quel horreur!” she wrote when they left. They were moving too, to a house in newly fashionable Sloane Street.

  Next to leave Godmersham were Jane and her mother. By 7 July they were in the cottage at Chawton, joined soon afterwards by Cassandra and Martha. The effect on Jane of this move to a permanent home in which she was able to re-establish her own rhythm of work was dramatic. It was as though she were restored to herself, to her imagination, to all her powers: a black cloud had lifted. Almost at once she began to work again. Sense and Sensibility was taken out, and revision began.

  20

  At Chawton

  Chawton village, a dozy place startled into attention several times a day by the clatter of rapid coach traffic through its centre, stood where three roads met: to the north, Alton and London; to the south, Winchester if you followed one fork, Gosport along the other. The Austens’ cottage was on the corner at the divide, so close to the road that the beds in the front rooms upstairs were sometimes shaken by the six-horse coaches that thundered past. Slower carriages allowed curious passengers to see into the rooms. “I heard of the Chawton Party looking very comfortable at Breakfast, from a gentleman who was travelling by their door in a Post-chaise,” Mrs. Knight wrote to Fanny soon after Mrs. Austen had moved in.1 She liked to look out at the village street, and often sat by the sunny dining-room window to enjoy whatever it offered by way of entertainment.2 Jane also amused herself with the passing traffic; at the start of the Winchester term she observed “a countless number of Postchaises full of Boys pass yesterday morning—full of future Heroes, Legislators, Fools and Villains.”

  The house was L-shaped, of old red brick. Built as a farm about 1700, it later served as an inn; there were two main storeys, and attics above under the tiled roof. Opposite it, between the fork in the roads, was a wide shallow pond, and at the back a “pleasant irregular mixture of hedgerow, and grass, and gravel walk and long grass for mowing, and orchard, which I imagine arose from two or three little enclosures having been thrown together, and arranged as best might be, for ladies’ occupation,” according to Jane’s niece Caroline, who knew the place well.3 There was a kitchen garden, a yard and generous outbuildings. The church, the rectory and Chawton House were ten minutes’ walk away along the Gosport road. Something like sixty families lived in the village, almost all labourers on Edward’s farms and woodlands. They naturally held their employer’s mother and sisters in great respect, and carried out work for them on his orders, digging the garden, for instance, and chopping firewood. The ladies in return taught some of the village children to read, and made clothes for the needy, of whom there were a great many in those increasingly needy times; the altogether destitute were maintained from the poor rates. The Austen ladies also extended kindness to another sort of villager in the shape of Miss Benn, sister of a poor clergyman with too much family and too little income to help her, and reduced to renting a labourer’s cottage. “Poor Miss Benn” appears very much oftener in Jane’s letters than their few better-off neighbours; she was not very interesting, but then nor were they.

  Before the ladies arrived, Edward had the plumbing renewed for them. This did not mean indoor sanitation, of course; some town houses had water closets by then—Henry’s and Eliza’s, perhaps—but you did not expect the luxury of piped water in a country cottage. An improved pump at the back, and a better cess pit for the privy, well away from the house, would be enough. Some structural alterations were also carried out; however much Mrs. Austen liked looking out at the passing world, it was thought better to have the front drawing-room window blocked, replaced by a large and pretty Gothic one on the garden side. The ceilings were low and roughly finished, and none of the bedrooms large, but it was furnished comfortably enough, or at least to the standard of an ordinary country parsonage: this is again according to Caroline.

  Mrs. Austen and Martha each had a bedroom to themselves, and there was a “Best Bedroom” kept for guests; family tradition says that Jane continued to share with Cassandra, as they had done at Steventon. 4 Their bedroom was one with a fireplace beside which you could sit comfortably in an armchair in your dressing-gown; and two beds, as at Steventon. 5 We find it surprising that Jane did not want to be alone, claiming the privacy that seems appropriate to a writer; especially since she had often enjoyed a room of her own during the many periods when she and Cass were separated. But sisters can become couples, as dependent on the companionable chat of bedtime as husband and wife; Jane described to Anna how she read aloud to Cassandra “in our room at night, while we undressed.” 6 No doubt they also found pleasure in playing the game of contrasting personalities. I knew two middle-aged sisters who, in the innocent days of the 1950s, explained to my mother in so many words that they thought of themselves as being like husband and wife; the elder went out to work wearing a suit, the younger preferred flower-printed dresses and took charge of their house and garden. They were certainly sisters, and not lesbian companions, and had evolved their own way of living which both found quite satisfactory. Neither Jane nor Cassandra adopted a masculine role—they had too many brothers to compete with to allow that—but they enjoyed their complementarity. “I know your starched notions,” Jane teased Cassandra. To the younger generation, Jane was not the prickly person who appears in many letters but the warm and lively aunt, while Cass was “colder and calmer.” Where Cass was prim, even dull, Jane was always ready to entertain them. Where Cass gave her niece Fanny a lecture on astronomy which left her with a headache, Jane laughed over a silly story with Anna, and Cass “would exclaim at our folly.”7 Their different roles were known and understood within the family.

  And Cassandra knew how to leave Jane alone. Jane got up first, and went downstairs to her piano before anyone was about. The piano was an early acquisition at Chawton, and must have stood in the drawing room, at the end of the house, out of earshot of the main bedrooms. While she practised, or simply thought, or wrote, a maid laid the fire in the dining room and filled the kettle. Then Jane prepared the nine o’
clock breakfast for the rest of the family. That was, by agreement, her only household responsibility beyond keeping the key of the wine cupboard, and, since breakfast was nothing more than tea and toast, both made on the dining-room fire, it was not a demanding one. In this way she was privileged with a general exemption from domestic chores when Cass and Martha were at home—almost as a man was privileged. They took responsibility for all the arrangements for the other meals of the day, the morning snack and the late-afternoon dinner; Martha’s recipe book has survived, with its soups, cakes, cheese puddings and vegetable pies. 8 There was a cook—she was paid £8 a year—but the planning and a good deal of the work must have been in the hands of the ladies. 9 Mrs. Austen was now also relieved of being housekeeper-in-chief, and gladly gave herself to the garden. Her granddaughter Anna described her at work there: “She dug up her own potatoes, and I have no doubt she planted them, for the kitchen garden was as much her delight as the flower borders, and I have heard my mother say that when at work, she wore a green round frock like a day-labourer’s.”10 Mrs. Austen in her seventies, dressed as a labourer and putting in potatoes, must have been one of the sights of Chawton.

  The Austens did not enter into the social life around Chawton as they had at Steventon. There were no dances and few dinners, and they remained largely withdrawn into their private activities, except when enlivened by family visits. “Our small family party has been but seldom enlarged by friends or neighbours,” reported Cassandra to Cousin Phila after the Christmas season of 1811.11 Frank had moved his wife and baby to be near them again while he sailed the China seas, and his second child was born at Rose Tree Cottage on the Alton road just after they moved in. Because the baby was a boy, Jane wrote a congratulatory poem to Francis; she was conventional enough to feel he mattered more than his elder sister. The verses began, “My dearest Frank, I wish you joy / Of Mary’s safety with a Boy, / Whose birth has given little pain / Compared with that of Mary Jane.” The reference to pain suggests she may again have been in attendance at the birth; and from now on, with a sense of the ordeal of childbirth made more sensitive also by Elizabeth’s death, she is more inclined to write pityingly of married women. But she never criticizes her brothers.

  At the end of the verse epistle she wrote of her pleasure in their new home:

  How much we find

  Already in it, to our mind;

  And how convinced, that when complete

  It will all other Houses beat,

  That ever have been made or mended,

  With rooms concise, or rooms distended.

  The metaphor is brilliantly surprising with its suggestion of rooms as living tissue to be cut short or swollen; we have all seen concise bathrooms and distended kitchens.

  Some old neighbours turned up at Chawton, and there was news of others. Harry Digweed from Steventon had married a Dummer girl, Jane Terry, and moved to Alton. Jane was ferociously condescending about them, the more so when her niece Anna, James’s daughter, aged only sixteen, declared her determination to marry Mrs. Digweed’s brother, Michael Terry, a shy clergyman in his mid-thirties. It was a classic case of the girl who feels bored and unwanted at home rushing into the first love affair that comes along, and it fizzled out after her father had given his reluctant permission for the engagement. She was invited to Godmersham, and Mr. Terry travelled to Kent to visit her, and won the approval of Fanny and her father; but on returning home Anna announced she had changed her mind. This annoyed her father and stepmother as much as the original engagement, and she was sent to spend three months at Chawton with her grandmother and aunts in the summer of 1810. Officially, she was in disgrace; in truth, she enjoyed herself and was better entertained than at Steventon.

  The poem by Jane Austen to her brother Frank on the birth of his son

  Jane kept up regular contact with the Biggs; Alethea’s nephew William Heathcote and her nephew James-Edward were close friends and went to Winchester together. Through James and Mary as well as through Manydown came news of the Chutes, the Portsmouths, Harwoods, Bramstons and Lefroys. Jane was not much better pleased with Anna’s second engagement than with her first, this time to Benjamin Lefroy, the youngest son of her old friend. “There was that about her which kept us in constant preparation for something,” as her aunt wrote, sounding as though the whole family were nervous of what Anna, attractive, wayward and unpredictable, might do next, if not with one young man, then with another. Fifteen years had gone by since Jane herself set out to shock the neighbours by her behaviour with Benjamin Lefroy’s cousin, and there must have been some consciousness of this at the back of her mind even as she made her aunt-like pronouncements about the ill-matched temperaments of Ben and Anna, he a solitary with a “queerness of Temper,” she gregarious and unsteady. Anna’s alleged unsteadiness disappeared entirely when she became a married woman; and Jane herself had, after all, broken off an engagement. You wonder if the aunt’s occasional asperities towards her clever, charming niece are tinged, however faintly, by regrets for her lost Lefroy.

  When Ben Lefroy turned down a curacy on the grounds that he was not sure about taking orders, the family was enraged; he told his future father-in-law he would have to give up the engagement rather than be pushed into the curacy. James complained about this during one of his frequent visits to Chawton, made on horseback, alone and across country, as he most enjoyed travelling. Occasionally he brought a poem for them to read. In 1812 there was “Selborne Hanger”:

  Who talks of rational delight

  When Selborne’s Hill appears in sight

  And does not think of Gilbert White?

  . . . Oh could my rude and artless lay

  Such sweet attractive charms display . . .

  Ne’er would I seek fictitious theme . . .

  As far as we know, James never did seek a fictitious theme after his early efforts in The Loiterer; and about these he now spoke slightingly.12 He does not appear to have offered encouragement to his sister in her writing, although he did later respond warmly to Mansfield Park. 13 When he composed his memorial lines to her they were full of love and praise for her character, but remote about the quality and content of her writing. He commended her for not giving offence in spite of her eye for the ridiculous, and for keeping up her share of domestic work while she wrote; also for not succumbing to the vanity or pride that afflicts authors. 14 In another late poem he singled out Scott as a novelist, but did not mention her. All this suggests a somewhat ambiguous reaction from the eldest son, who considered himself the writer of the family, towards the little sister, who claimed the territory from him and used it to produce—well, only novels: “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” The passage in defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey has the ring of personal argument; it also loyally singles out two other women novelists, Burney and Edgeworth, for praise. Whether James and Jane ever discussed the subject of women’s fiction openly or not, there are the elements of a debate in their respective writings.

  Henry’s visits were as likely to be impromptu as announced; he would arrive in his curricle or gig to see his bank partner in the High Street in Alton, and then take one of his sisters for an outing to Selborne or Petersfield. Edward came from Kent in the autumns of 1809 and 1810 and the spring of 1812, with Fanny, now his indispensable companion, so devotedly did she take on her mother’s role; they divided their time between Chawton and Steventon, went to Alton Fair, took the boys to Winchester and were invited to dinner at The Vyne.15 Fanny was always glad to return to Kent, but he found these Hampshire visits so congenial that he decided not to re-let Chawton House when the present tenants’ lease expired, but to keep it for family use.

  Charles, still in the Atlantic—he did not return to England until 1811—sent news of his two Bermuda-born daughters and asked
his sisters to stand as godmothers. Frank arrived home in July 1810 to see his son for the first time. In the public sphere he received formal thanks from the Admiralty for his effective command at sea; and from the East India Company a thousand guineas and some silver-plate for bringing back “Treasure” from China to England. Like Warren Hastings, Frank was a pragmatist who worked with high efficiency within the conventions he found and did not think of trying to change them. He had joined the navy to make money as well as to serve the country, and could well take the view that carrying bullion for the East India Company was one way of serving his country. These were in fact his last dealings with the Company; he went on to serve in the North Sea, fighting the Americans in the war that broke out in 1812, and later escorting convoys in the Baltic. Mary bore him a second son in 1811.

  All this family business stirs in the letters of aunt, sister, godmother and good village lady. The other life was stirring too, entirely apart from Chawton and her brothers’ careers and children: Jane Austen managed the day-to-day routines of a novelist with an efficiency and discipline worthy of her naval brothers. The famous account of her working habits, given by her nephew, credits her with almost miraculous powers in stopping and starting under interruption.

  She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.16