Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  The picture is admirable, exasperating, painful; and can be only half true. How she juggled with revisions under such circumstances becomes especially mysterious; neat and dextrous as she was, she could not go through a complete manuscript of Sense and Sensibility, making changes and rewriting, with only single sheets of paper under her blotter. There must have been times when the other inhabitants of the cottage protected her silence and privacy with something more effective than the creaking door. There was after all no reason why she should not have worked upstairs, or in the early morning during her piano-practising time.17

  Encouragement and practical help came from Henry. In the last months of 1810 the publisher Thomas Egerton of the Military Library, Whitehall, agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility. Henry’s army connections may have helped to make the deal, but Egerton was not enthusiastic enough to take any risk when an ex-officer offered him a manuscript by an anonymous lady. He merely agreed to publish on commission, which meant the author paid for the printing, plus something for advertising and distribution, and kept the copyright. “Printed for the Author” states the first edition of Sense and Sensibility: Henry and Eliza’s money paid for the printing. 18 And in March he and Eliza welcomed her to Sloane Street again, where she began to correct her proofs.

  At this point Jane Austen hoped the book would appear in June. The immediate family, and friends as close as Mrs. Knight, were in the know—Jane expected her benefactress to like at least the character of Elinor—but she begged them to preserve strict secrecy as to her authorship. A fellow novelist, Mary Brunton, publishing at the same time, told a friend why she would not consider letting her name be known to the public: “To be pointed at—to be noticed & commented upon—to be suspected of literary airs—to be shunned, as literary women are, by the more unpretending of my own sex: & abhorred, as literary women are, by the more pretending of the other!—My dear, I would sooner exhibit as a rope dancer.”19

  A lady naturally avoided any public notice; but the intensity of Jane Austen’s feelings about seeing her work in print after so many years was overwhelming. “No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S,” she told Cassandra. “I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.” It is the rejoicing, vulnerable voice so rarely heard in her letters; much closer to Marianne’s voice than Elinor’s, and not unlike the one prompted by Tom Lefroy fifteen years earlier. Like every writer, Jane was frightened of the world’s response; at the same time her book was the child of her heart; and she must have known in her heart that it was good.

  The end of April came and the printer had reached only Chapter 9 and Willoughby’s first appearance, not even the end of the first volume. Henry was hurrying him as best he could, but he was about to go away on business. No matter, Eliza would act for him: “It will not stand still during his absence, it will be sent to Eliza.” The acknowledgement of Eliza’s concern with the printing of the book, able to take over Henry’s role, and judged reliable to Jane, is important; as the printing went on slowly, the sister-cousins had a common interest and purpose. They had always been friends; now their friendship acquired an extra dimension, and they made plans for Eliza to come to Hampshire for a fortnight’s visit in the summer.

  Sense and Sensibility was advertised on 31 October 1811 in the Morning Chronicle as “a New Novel by a Lady—.” A week later another advertisement called it an “Extraordinary Novel!” and at the end of November it had become, in the way of newspaper announcements, “Interesting Novel by Lady A—.” Who could the mysterious Lady A— be? She was good for publicity purposes at any rate. Publication dates were no more exact then than now, and the number of copies printed is not known but is not likely to have been more than 1,000; the three-volume edition sold for fifteen shillings. It sold out by the summer of 1813, and made Jane a profit of £140. The importance to her of this first money she had earned for herself can be best appreciated by women who have endured a similar dependence. It signified not only success, however modest, but freedom; now she could decide one or two things for herself. She could give presents and plan journeys. A fixed order had been moved.

  Well before Sense and Sensibility sold out, Egerton saw that it was a success and was ready to buy her next work. There were favourable reviews, well meant if leadenly worded: “very pleasing and entertaining” and “well written; the characters are in genteel life, naturally drawn, and judiciously supported. The incidents are probable, and highly pleasing, and interesting; the conclusion such as the reader must wish it should be.” 20 Still more important, it had taken the fancy of the beau monde , the people whose taste and opinions were most influential, and was passed round at dinner tables and in letters to friends and lovers. Lady Bessborough, clever and sharp as a pin, friend of Sheridan and the Prince of Wales and sister of the late Duchess of Devonshire, had the perception to complain that it ended “stupidly,” but she was greatly amused by it. Little Princess Charlotte, next in line to the throne, sixteen years old and simultaneously neglected and quarrelled over by her parents, the Prince Regent and his estranged wife Caroline, felt that “Maryanne & me are very alike in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &c however remain very like. I must say it interested me much.”21 The family of Lord Holland was delighted with it too, judging from the remark of his eldest son, who told Charles Austen a few years later that “nothing had come out for years to be compared with ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ ” 22

  Egerton was prepared to pay for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice . He offered £110 and, although Jane had hoped for £150, she accepted, no doubt on Henry’s advice. This was in November 1812. Copyright at that date was in any case not as it is today; it lasted for only fourteen years, extended for another fourteen if the author were living. “It’s being sold will I hope be a great saving of Trouble to Henry, & therefore must be welcome to me,” Jane wrote to Martha; it meant he did not have to advance money. To Cass she again called the new book “my own darling Child.” It was advertised as being “by the Author of Sense and Sensibility” and sold for the higher price of eighteen shillings; and was immediately reviewed extremely favourably, with particular attention given to Elizabeth Bennet’s character. There was even greater enthusiasm from the public. Sheridan recommended it as one of the cleverest things he had ever read; it must have reminded him of his own mastery of dialogue before he threw away his best talents, and he was generous enough to recognize and hail a greater voice than his own. Henry Austen was told by a literary gentleman that it was much too clever to be the work of a woman. Warren Hastings wrote so admiringly that Jane was “quite delighted.” The great world read, laughed and bought.

  Jane Austen herself was not part of this excitement. She was preserving her anonymity at Chawton, and alone with her mother; Cass and Martha were both away visiting when Pride and Prejudice appeared. She had sets sent to her brothers, and celebrated publication by taking turns with her mother to read the first chapters aloud to Miss Benn, as they sat beside their fire on a damp January evening. “She was amused, poor soul! that she cd not help you know, with two such people to lead the way; but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.” Just for once in her life, whether she knew it or not, Miss Benn was the luckiest person in the kingdom.

  When Mrs. Austen took over the reading on Miss Benn’s second visit, she went too fast, and “tho’ she perfectly understands the Characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought.” Jane could not help being exasperated by her mother, the strong, stubborn old woman used to being in charge, who wanted to make her mark even in appreciating and interpreting her grown-up daughter’s work. She found too that anonymity, however ladylike, had considerable drawbacks. Every author hopes to talk about a newly published book, but there was no one at hand to talk to. She wrote to Cass about the typograp
hical mistakes and the sudden realization that she had made the Bennets serve suppers when they would not have done; and how a “ ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear—.” Since there was no one at Chawton with whom she wanted to discuss any of this, she went out walking, in the mud, to Alton; at least she escaped her mother’s visitors, she grumbled.

  Then she decided she would let young Anna into her secret. After that, she wrote to Cass at Steventon to inform her that other people in Chawton were reading books by Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Grant; although she does not say so, no author is quite pleased to hear of other books being read when hers is available. Foolish Mrs. Digweed had the three volumes of Mrs. Grant’s Letters and “it can make no difference to her, which of the 26 fortnights in the Year, the 3 vols lay in her House.” 23

  When she returned to the subject of Pride and Prejudice, she let her pen run on as freely as if she were in love with her “darling Child”; as indeed she had every right to be.

  The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte—or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.—I doubt your quite agreeing with me here—I know your starched Notions.

  She liked to tease Cass when she was happy, and there are few passages in the letters so happy, so witty, so free as this. Here she has no need of defences, and her prose sails as blithely and brightly as any of Elizabeth Bennet’s most beguiling speeches.

  21

  Inside Mansfield Park

  In the spring of 1811, when Jane was correcting her proofs while staying with Henry and Eliza in Sloane Street, Eliza gave a musical party. She employed professional pianists, harpists and singers, decorated her drawing room with a hired mirror, special chimney lights and floral arrangements; eighty guests were invited and over sixty came, overflowing from the first-floor drawing room into the passages and front room. The party was a success; it went on until midnight and was mentioned in the Morning Post. Jane enjoyed the music, and reported to Cassandra that a drunken naval captain talked to her about their brother Charles. On another evening Eliza took Jane to visit a French friend, the Comte d’Antraigues, with his musical Countess and son Julien. “It will be amusing to see the ways of a French circle,” wrote Jane.

  What neither she nor Eliza knew was that Emmanuel Louis d’Antraigues was a spy, in the pay of both the Russian and the English governments, and now in some trouble; his English protector was Canning, but Canning was no longer Foreign Minister, and d’Antraigues was fearful about his own future. He was also anxious to rid himself of his wife.1 Naturally none of this was apparent during the Austens’ visit. “Monsieur the old Count, is a very fine looking man, with quiet manners, good enough for an Englishman—& I beleive he is a Man of great Information & Taste. He has some fine Paintings, which delighted Henry as much as the Son’s music gratified Eliza.”

  “The old Count” was fifty-eight. The Countess was a retired opera singer, Anne de Saint-Huberty, who had been at the height of her fame in the 1780s. The Austens could reflect that such marriages were not unknown in English society, since the Earl of Craven, kinsman to Cassandra’s fiancé, had married the popular actress Louisa Brunton in 1807.2 Eliza’s acquaintance with d’Antraigues may have dated from the 1780s, during her first marriage; like Capot de Feuillide’s, he was a Gascon, and a favourite young officer at Versailles; unlike de Feuillide, his title was genuine. Beyond this, nothing about him was straightforward. He had veered between free-thinking and religion, between a vehemently expressed republicanism and support for the monarchy, and had to leave France in 1790; his castle was burned down by his peasants, and he never returned, but wandered Europe working for those who would pay. Napoleon imprisoned him in Trieste, and he travelled to Russia, where he was employed by Alexander I, officially as an adviser on education. He arrived in England in 1807, apparently an unfortunate émigré, and his wife was invited to set up a singing academy by the Duchess of York.

  The quiet manners that impressed Jane Austen were thus a cover for a man who had intrigued all his life, and was now embittered and desperate; and the following year d’Antraigues and his wife were both brutally murdered by their manservant, a deserter from the French army in Spain. The young Comte Julien held Napoleon responsible, but d’Antraigues’s biographer believes it was no more than the act of an embittered servant, adding that d’Antraigues’s position in England was barely tenable (“il était à peine toléré en Angleterre”). There the story rests, and there is no further mention by Jane Austen. But how did Henry and Eliza come to have such raffish and even dangerous friends? Had they no inkling of their situation, or did d’Antraigues have contacts useful for Henry? There is no knowing. In London society it was difficult to be sure of anyone’s credentials; opera singers and actresses became countesses, just as Eliza herself had been a countess, or believed herself one. The long decades of war had stirred the brew so that nothing was dependable. Henry was making his living by finding men whose interests and needs he could serve, and it was a tricky business; he counted on their honesty, they relied on their expectations, and everyone was juggling. In the same year the d’Antraigues were murdered, the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was also shot dead as he entered the House of Commons, by a commercial agent who had been ruined by the economic war with France.

  Eighteen-eleven, the year in which Eliza took Jane to meet the dubious d’Antraigues, was the year in which Mansfield Park was begun. It was also the year in which the Prince of Wales, after more than two decades of frustrated hopes, was at last appointed Prince Regent. The King was afflicted with madness yet again, and this time he was not expected to recover. In Hampshire his seventy-third birthday was nevertheless celebrated in June, with loyal parades of Volunteers on Selborne Common. In London the Prince Regent celebrated his own elevation, also in June, at Carlton House, rather differently. The party he gave was ostentatious even by his standards. It cost £120,000, money taken from a nation that had been expensively at war for nearly twenty years and was hardly able to feed its poor. To this ill-judged event the Prince failed to invite his own wife, with whom he was engaged in a long-drawn-out war of his own. Jane Austen’s view of him is sufficiently indicated by a remark she made about the Princess of Wales some months later: “Poor Woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband.”

  Eighteen-eleven also saw the scandal of the Duke of Clarence’s dismissal of his mistress and mother of his ten children, the actress Mrs. Jordan. She moved out of their home and into a house in Cadogan Street, just round the corner from the Henry Austens. They may have noticed the arrival of the five younger FitzClarence children in February 1812, brought to the back door by the Duke, and their departure again in June, when their mother returned them sadly to his care, judging it in their best interest. In the House of Lords, Clarence spoke in favour of the slave trade; elsewhere he made himself a laughing stock by pursuing rich young heiresses, urged into matrimony by the Regent, himself quarrelling furiously with his wife over his daughter’s custody. The behaviour of Princess Charlotte, who had so much identified with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, was feared to be almost out of control. She spent her time flirting with unsuitable young men, one of them her cousin, the eldest son of Mrs. Jordan. On the one hand there was social, moral and political confusion; on the other, patronage ruled. The Regent appointed Clarence Admiral of the Fleet in December 1811, putting him at the head of a system in which advancement depended largely on knowing the right people, as the Austens had always understood.3

  The princes were able to live with a total disregard for justice, religious principles or the sanctity of marriage; but their
behaviour was widely perceived as a liability upon the nation. Mansfield Park is, among other things, a novel about the condition of England, and addresses itself to the questions raised by royal behaviour and the kind of society it encouraged. It sets up an opposition between someone with strongly held religious and moral principles, who will not compromise them for any reason, will not consider a marriage that is not based on true feeling rather than opportunism, and is revolted by sexual immorality; and a group of worldly, highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young people who pursue pleasure without regard for religious or moral principles. On the worldly side, Henry and Mary Crawford have been tainted by their uncle the Admiral, who has the power of patronage, keeps a mistress openly and passes on a light-hearted attitude towards unnatural vice in the navy to his niece. Maria and Julia Bertram are led astray by vanity and greed, unable to resist temptation; their corruption is completed by moving from their father’s house in the country, where outwardly correct standards are maintained, to London, where anything goes. This is at any rate one way of looking at Mansfield Park; and the parallels with the highest Regency society are all there. (Readers who would like to be reminded of the plot of Mansfield Park can turn to the endnote.4)

  The championing of morality and criticism of corrupted standards was something many of its earliest readers were particularly pleased with. Jane Austen noted that the publisher himself, Mr. Egerton, “praised it for it’s Morality.” Others mentioned the “pure morality,” enthused over its “moral Tendency,” and found its attack on the modern system of education admirable; its “excellent moral,” “sound treatment of the Clergy” and the “strong vein of principle” running through the whole book were all lauded.5 When a second edition was discussed, Austen’s nephew James-Edward urged her to produce a further volume “in which the example of useful, and amiable married life may be exhibited in the characters of Edmund & Fanny.” 6