Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  While Jane was working on Mansfield Park, Eliza became ill. Breast cancer tends to run in families, and her illness was almost certainly the same as her mother’s. It meant she knew what she had to undergo from the moment she was aware of the first symptoms, and could watch herself as though in a mirror held up to her mother’s experience; a terrible prospect lay before her. After her death in the spring of 1813, Jane said that it had been a “long and dreadful illness” and that Henry “very long knew that she must die, & it was indeed a release at last.” Henry also referred to the length and severity of her suffering in the epitaph he wrote for her. How long is very long? Eighteen months at least, possibly two years. The chest cold she suffered from in the aftermath of her musical party may have been a sign of something worse, although at the time it only prevented her from walking in Kensington Gardens to see the lilac and chestnut trees in bloom.

  During this visit, Jane invited her to Chawton for a summer visit, and in August she arrived as planned to stay for two weeks. Cassandra commented on how well she looked, better than she had ever seen her, and for a week they enjoyed themselves quietly.18 Then the house was invaded by Charles, newly arrived in England with his unknown wife and tiny daughters—aged three and one—after an absence of seven years. As Cass said, the house was “running over,” but Eliza stayed for another cheerful, noisy week. Then she went on to Godmersham, escorted by Henry; he went shooting with the boys and drove to Canterbury with Edward while she walked with Fanny. “Mrs. HA & I had a tête-à-tête, how agreable!” wrote her niece; evidently not quite agreeable enough, though: “Mrs. HA and I get on a little, but we never shall be intimate.”19 Something about Eliza jarred with many of the Austens, whether it was simply her style they mistrusted—too clever, foreign and frivolous—or some suggestion of a deeper dereliction.20 “A clever woman, and highly accomplished, after the French rather than the English mode”—the description of her in the first Memoir of her Cousin Jane—is distinctly cautious. Eliza was as British as they were by blood and had been educated in England, but “French” was well understood to mean something different and not quite up to the standards prevailing in England, and conveniently expressed what they felt about her.21 Perhaps she took a light-hearted attitude towards religious observance. Whatever the reason, suspicion of her remained part of the family tradition. The 1913 Life and Letters describes Henry as having “a certain infirmity of purpose in his character that was hardly likely to be remedied by a marriage to his very pleasure-loving cousin.”22 To fix the label of pleasure-loving on a woman who suffered so much pain, in her own person, through her mother, and over many years with her only child, seems somewhat less than just.

  At Godmersham, Henry took Fanny riding, and on another day drove his wife to Saltwood Castle. After this she went on alone to Ramsgate for two weeks of sea air; he returned to London, fetching her home in mid-October. By now she can have been in no doubt that she was ill. Her best supports as the disease progressed were her French companions—for they had become something more than servants—Madame Bigeon and Madame Perigord. Henry was a true tough Austen, as Jane perceived: “his Mind is not a Mind for affliction. He is too Busy, too active, too sanguine.” Eliza was over fifty, and he was in his prime, and much occupied with his bank; Francis became a partner in 1812, bringing in prize money and contacts.23 With only two letters of Jane’s for that year we know nothing but that Edward and Fanny “dined quietly” in Sloane Street in May, when they also saw Mrs. Siddons, and made more theatre and opera visits, and Henry visited them in Kent in June. In September he was briefly at Steventon, and in December he was again entertaining Edward and Fanny with theatre visits and shopping in London. At that point Fanny’s diary is silent on the subject of “Mrs. HA,” whose condition must by now have been very wretched.

  Henry was in Oxford in February 1813, but as Eliza visibly approached her end in April, he hurried to Chawton and took Jane back to London to be with her. This was on the 22nd; three days later she died. Jane remained in London for another week, then travelled back to Chawton, taking Mme Perigord with her to stay at the cottage.24 Gratitude for the nursing of Eliza was a good reason for the invitation, but it was an unusually friendly gesture to a brother’s employee; another sign of her particular sympathy for working women in their hard lives.

  The funeral took place after the two women had left. Mrs. James Austen’s diary entries tell their own small story. “Saturday May 1 Tyger [the Steventon cat] had young ones. Mrs. H. Austen was buried. Sunday May 2 Put on mourning.” Neither James nor Edward attended their cousin’s funeral in Hampstead. Henry had her buried beside her mother and her son: “Also in memory of Elizabeth wife of H. T. Austen Esq. formerly widow of the Comt. Feuillide a woman of brilliant generous and cultivated mind just disinterested and charitable she died after long and severe suffering on the 25th April 1813 aged 50 much regretted by the wise and good and deeply lamented by the poor.”25 It is noticeable that the epitaph makes no mention of Christian faith, only of her charity.

  There were other deaths to preoccupy the Austens. Good, generous Mrs. Knight had died in October 1812. Edward, as heir, was now obliged to change his name to Knight, along with all his children’s, to Fanny’s considerable disgust (“How I hate it!!!!”). Early in 1813 two Steventon neighbours also died. Mr. Bigg-Wither left his daughters well provided for, but Alethea and Elizabeth Heathcote had to leave Manydown. Mary Austen dined with them there for the last time in July. Another Steventon neighbour, old Mr. Harwood at Deane, died at the same time, leaving his family nothing but debts and mortgages. The younger Mr. Harwood was a clergyman, and “If Mrs. Heathcote does not marry & comfort him now I shall think she . . . has no heart,” wrote Jane. He had loved Elizabeth Bigg since she was a girl, seen her married to Heathcote and then widowed, reviving his hopes; now he could not offer her anything but poverty. She liked him, but not well enough for that. He sold some land and struggled on at Deane, and she moved to the cathedral close in Winchester, where she and Alethea took a house together.

  Edward and what Jane now referred to as his Harem were at Chawton House for the whole of the summer of 1813, while Godmersham was given up to house painters. Henry carried Jane off to Sloane Street again in May, where Mesdames Bigeon and Perigord were organizing his move to Henrietta Street in Covent Garden; he was going to try living above his office. “Mrs. Perigord arrived at a 1⁄2 past 3—& is pretty well, & her Mother, for her, seems quite well. [Madame Bigeon was asthmatic.] She sat with me while I breakfasted this morn/g—talking of Henrietta Street, servants & Linen, & is too busy preparing for the future, to be out of spirits.”

  The secret of Jane’s authorship was beginning to be more generally known. A Miss Burdett, possibly a sister of the reformer Sir Francis Burdett, wanted to be introduced to her. “I am rather frightened by hearing that she wishes to be introduced to me. If I am a wild Beast, I cannot help it. It is not my own fault,” Jane complained, meaning that she was not responsible for becoming an exhibit in the parade of London society. What she did enjoy was visiting exhibitions with Henry and looking for portraits of Mrs. Bingley and Mrs. Darcy; the first she found, “exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in Yellow.” But Mrs. D. was not to be found: “I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye.—I can imagine he wd have that sort of feeling—that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.” It is as close as she ever came to sentimentality.

  Henry talked of a drive to Hampstead, but if they visited the three graves there is no account of it. She was no more given to prolonged grieving for the dead than he was, and her letters are cheerful. She enjoyed being on her own in London, and driving about in her rich brother’s open carriage: “I liked my solitary elegance very much, & was ready to
laugh all the time, at my being where I was.—I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading about London in a Barouche.” And she was as sharp as ever. Visiting Charlotte Craven, a cousin of Martha Lloyd’s, at her smart girls’ school, she found “her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any Education,” and the room in which they sat “full of all the modern Elegancies—& if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the Mantlepeice, which must be a fine study for Girls, one should never have Smelt Instruction.”

  Mansfield Park was finished in the summer. Henry was often at Chawton, and the Charles Austens visited with a new baby daughter. Jane read Pride and Prejudice aloud to Fanny. “At:” is Fanny’s abbreviation for “Aunt,” and “At: J. A. as Mr. Darcy” she wrote in her diary on 21 May: it must have been something to hear. Fanny took to running down to the cottage early in the morning to spend more time with this newly revealed and amazingly clever Aunt Jane. “At: J & I had a delicious morning together.” On 5 June “At. Jane spent the morn/g with me & read P & P to me and Papa.” “Ats C & J. came to read before breakfast, & the latter breakfasted . . . I spent the afternoon at the cottage.” “Cottage dined here. Aunt J came early.” There is even a unique reference to Aunt Jane on horseback: “Monday 5 July. Aunt Jane & I rode out with Papa to Chawton Park.” Fanny’s diary also shows that Aunt Jane had a troublesome and persistent pain in her face this summer; and that although she made light of it, she often chose to sleep at the big house rather than to walk back to the cottage in the chilly night air at the end of the evening. It did not clear up until the autumn.

  In August, Henry paid a visit to Warren Hastings, but “Mr. Hastings never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree.” This is Jane’s account, given her by Henry. If it means that he did not mention the death of his god-daughter, it is surprising in a man who was known for his loyalty to old friends. If it meant more, Jane did not see fit to elaborate; but Eliza had been too large a presence in her life to be blotted out. Madame Bigeon and her daughter also had memories of her going back twenty years, and Jane did not forget them either.

  For Mansfield Park she did something she had not done before, which was to collect and write down the opinions of her readers. It was her early version of a cuttings book, only they were not printed reviews she collected—there were in fact none for Mansfield Park—but opinions delivered in private letters or conversation, which she then set down in her own hand. These “Opinions,” which exist only for Mansfield Park and Emma, are some of the most fascinating personal documents she left, as much for what they tell us about her as for what they say about the books. To begin with, they prove how much it meant to her to have reactions to her work; although she had feared it, the breaking down of anonymity was wholly to the good. Then they demonstrate that she was detached enough to write down rude remarks as well as praise, and without adding any defensive replies of her own. When Mrs. Augusta Bramston of Oakley Hall “owned that she thought S. & S.—and P. & P. downright nonsense, but expected to like MP. better, & having finished the 1st vol.—flattered herself she had got through the worst,” it is pretty clear that Austen is rejoicing in Mrs. Bramston’s extraordinary folly rather than feeling wounded; and something like Olympian laughter arises from the page. On the other hand, you can be sure that when Miss Sharp expressed her preference for P. & P. over MP, she took careful and conscientious note of her view. Her collecting and transcribing, and the mixture of seriousness and silliness that characterizes the result, make the whole enterprise particularly endearing: even authors who know with part of their minds that they are among the great must also doubt themselves. On good days they laugh like gods; on bad days they turn back to the bad reviews and crass comments, and shiver. Jane Austen was surely no different.

  22

  Dedication

  In July 1813, as she came out of mourning for Eliza, her situation was this: Sense and Sensibility had sold out, bringing her a profit; Pride and Prejudice was a clear hit; she had completed Mansfield Park; and ideas for her next book, which was to be Emma, were taking shape. She was thirty-seven, and her mind was in an extraordinary state of energy and inventiveness. Her letters over the next two years are lively, rapid, tightly packed as ever, and cheerful. Not only was she full of creative vigour and confidence, she was also rejoicing in being richer than she had ever been; which is not to say she was rich, but that she had money she need not thank anyone else for. “Do not refuse me. I am very rich,” she urged Cass after sending her a present of dress material.

  Henry also thrived, at his own very much grander level. So successful was his bank, and so influential his friends, that he got himself appointed Receiver General of taxes for Oxfordshire; very large sureties were required for this position, and his Uncle Leigh-Perrot happily stood for £10,000, while Edward guaranteed another £20,000. He had become a merry bachelor again, and Jane was amused to see him involved with several women. One was the Miss Burdett who had already asked to meet her, a friend of his partner James Tilson’s wife Frances, and an admirer of Jane’s novels.1 Another was “young, pretty, chattering, & thinking cheifly (I presume) of Dress, Company, & Admiration.” She played chess with Henry; Jane was not a chess player and felt she had “not two ideas in common” with her. A third was a widow in Berkshire; Henry had a way of spreading his attentions, and he was eager for Jane to know them all. He was also unable to resist blabbing about her authorship; she forgave him, and began to grow used to it, but would not be taken to literary gatherings. An attempt to introduce her to the French writer Madame de Staël, who was in London meeting everyone in the winter of 1813/14, was firmly refused. Later, de Staël expressed her view that Austen’s novels were vulgaire , too close to the English provincial life she detested for its narrowness and dullness, its emphasis on duty and stifling of wit and brilliance. Brilliant as she herself was, she could not find interest in the small scale; and her English was perhaps simply not good enough to allow her to enjoy brilliance of a different kind.2

  Jane’s life continued on its small scale, although she was often with Henry in London, dealing with publishers, enjoying the company of his circle of colleagues and well-to-do friends, and joining him in many visits to the theatres conveniently clustered around Henrietta Street. In September 1813 she was there with Edward and his three eldest daughters, all on their way from Chawton to Godmersham. Although she had her own money, she was pleased when “kind, beautiful Edward” gave her another £5 out of his “East Kent wealth” to spend. Looking across the drawing room at her two brothers in the evening, she used a word of her own to describe them: they were deep in “a comfortable coze,” she wrote. 3 She took the girls to the dentist (“I would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth & double it”), and Lizzy and Marianne were now old enough for theatre-going. They were taken on two successive nights, and particularly enjoyed a version of the Don Juan story, The Libertine. “I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust,” wrote their aunt on her own account.4

  In Kent she saw Charles with his wife and three daughters, and deplored their failure to look like Austens: “I never knew a Wife’s family-features have such undue influence,” she complained. Edward, as a visiting magistrate, took her round Canterbury Gaol, but if he hoped to give her material for a novel, the visit was a failure. At Godmersham she savoured the luxury of meals especially brought to her on trays, and a fire lit in her bedroom before breakfast. She dined at Chilham Castle, and expressed herself content to leave off being young and sit by the fire, drinking as much wine as she liked. How Madame de Staël would have yawned. There was a ball, with very little dancing, according to Fanny; it was the last Jane attended. She was about to be thirty-eight, and described herself and Cass collectively as “we, the formidables.” In November she was back in Henrietta Street. Egerton expressed his willingness to publish Mansfield Park , but was not prepared to risk his own money and wanted to revert to the
commission arrangement; he was shrewd enough to see that it would not be as popular as Pride and Prejudice, which he was putting out in a second edition.

  The winter of 1813 was as harsh as the winter of her birth, and became a good midwife to Emma, allowing her the whole of January and February uninterrupted at Chawton to think and write. “Emma begun Jany 21st 1814, finished March 29th 1815,” wrote Cassandra exactly in her memorandum. These precise dates suggest either that she kept a note from the manuscript or—more likely—that Jane kept a diary, as other women in the family did, in which she entered the starting and finishing dates of her last two books; enabling Cassandra to draw on her entries before she destroyed them.5

  There was still snow about when Henry fetched Jane to Henrietta Street again at the beginning of March. Edward and Fanny joined them, Jane read Byron’s The Corsair and they all went to Covent Garden to see Mrs. Jordan, at fifty-one still “superlative”: the word is Byron’s, who saw her three nights after the Austen party. They saw her play Nell in The Devil to Pay on 7 March. “I expect to be very much amused,” wrote Jane before the performance, and she was indeed “highly amused with the Farce.” The rest of the evening, Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes , with no Mrs. Jordan (it demanded two castrati), was a disappointment to them all.6

  Back to Hampshire again in April, when the “glorious news of Buonaparte vanquished and dethroned” arrived. At Alton there were illuminations for the victory, and supper was provided for the poor. 7Mansfield Park was published, without fanfare, on 9 May. Henry came down for his birthday in June, and took Cassandra back to London with him; he celebrated the victory by attending a ball given by White’s Club at Burlington House. Jane was impressed, slightly shocked, indulgent: “Henry at Whites!—Oh! what a Henry.”8 Like Elinor with Willoughby, she felt his charm too keenly to judge him as she would anyone else, whether for worldliness, unreliability or flirting. He was restless. He decided to move back to his old Chelsea haunts, and took a house in Hans Place, No. 23. Madame Bigeon and her daughter continued to look after him; after so many years of intimacy, they had become more like a part of the family than servants. When Jane went to London again her letters mention an “appointment” with Madame Bigeon, and discussions about who should provide Henry with raspberry jam; Madame Perigord took clothes to the dyer for her, and found her some plaited willow for making a hat. Otherwise Henry kept only a manservant and one maid at the Hans Place house. Jane was pleased by the attic bedroom she was allotted for her visit, and by a cool downstairs room that opened into the garden. Staying with Henry in August, she describes herself walking in and out between house and garden; it is very much what someone settling down to write does, getting up, pacing, thinking, returning to the page she is working on.