Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Her nieces were demanding attention as they grew up, following and not following in Cassandra’s and her footsteps. Fanny, since the age of fifteen, had been a mother to her brothers and sisters and a companion to her father; now she was having doubts about a love affair, and wanted advice. Anna, clever and headstrong, was filling the time before she could be married by writing a novel. Jane was an exemplary aunt to both, attentive and ready to give good counsel, both emotional and technical. She urged Fanny neither to expect perfection in a suitor nor to marry without affection; and Anna, to get her facts right, avoid phrases like “a vortex of dissipation,” and remember that in fiction “One does not care for girls till they are grown up.” And she made her famous remark, “You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” It was exactly what she was working on in Emma .

  She was at Hans Place when news came of the death of Charles’s wife Fanny, following the birth of another daughter. Fanny was twenty-four, the fourth and youngest of the melancholy sequence of sisters-in-law to die. Her epitaph in Kentish Town Church ends, “Sleep on dear Fair one, wait the Almighty’s Will / Then rise unchang’d, and be an angel still.” The baby died a few weeks later, the three remaining little girls went to their Palmer grandparents, and Charles took a posting at sea. Small wonder that, as Jane commented when she next saw the children, “that puss Cassy . . . does not shine in the tender feelings . . . more in the Mrs. Siddons line.” Cass was the eldest, and all of six years old.

  The security of Chawton cottage was suddenly threatened this year by a law suit brought against Edward and his right to the Chawton estates. Should it succeed, Mrs. Austen and her daughters would be once again looking for somewhere to live: a grim prospect. The suit was all the worse for being brought by neighbours, the Hinton family of Chawton Lodge, with whom the Austen ladies at the cottage considered themselves on cordial terms. They were claiming that a deed disentailing the Chawton estate at the beginning of the century had been inaccurately drawn up, making them, and not Edward, the rightful heirs to the great house and all its lands. His wealth would be halved if he lost, leaving him with nothing but Godmersham, as well as depriving his mother and sisters of their home. A writ was served on Edward in October 1814, beginning a legal wrangle that was to last for several years.9

  This trouble may have cast a shadow over Anna’s marriage to Ben Lefroy, which took place from her father’s house at Steventon in November. Anna was eager to leave home, and her father and stepmother relieved to see her go. A description of the wedding by Anna’s half-sister Caroline, who was nine and acted as bridesmaid, was not written until many years later, but gives an exceptionally vivid impression of the occasion and the setting, which had changed little since Aunt Jane’s childhood.

  My brother [ James-Edward] had come from Winchester that morning, but was to stay only a few hours. We in the house had a slight early breakfast up stairs; and between 9 and 10 the bride, my mother, Mrs. Lefroy, Anne [Ben’s niece] and myself, were taken to church in our carriage. All the gentlemen walked. The weather was dull and cloudy, but it did not actually rain. The season of the year, the unfrequented road of half a mile to the lonely old church, the grey light within of a November morning making its way through the narrow windows, no stove to give warmth, no flowers to give colour and brightness, no friends, high or low, to offer their good wishes, and so to claim some interest in the great event of the day—all these circumstances and deficiencies must, I think, have given a gloomy air to our wedding. Mr. Lefroy read the service, my father gave his daughter away. The Clerk of course was there, altho’ I do not particularly remember him; but I am quite sure there was no one else in the church, nor was anyone else asked to the breakfast, to which we sat down as soon as we got back. I do not think this idea of sadness struck me at the time; the bustle of the house, and all the preparations had excited me, and it seemed to me as a festivity from beginning to end. The breakfast was such as best breakfasts then were: some variety of bread, hot rolls, buttered toast, tongue or ham and eggs. The addition of chocolate at one end of the table, and wedding cake in the middle, marked the speciality of the day. I and Anne Lefroy, nine and six years old, wore white frocks and had white ribband on our straw bonnets, which, I suppose, were new for the occasion. Soon after breakfast, the bride and bridegroom departed. They had a long day’s journey before them, to Hendon; the other Lefroys went home [to Ashe]; and in the afternoon my mother and I went to Chawton to stay at the Great House, then occupied by my uncle Captain Austen and his large family [Frank, Mary and five children at this date]. My father stayed behind for a few days, and then joined us. The servants had cake and punch in the evening, and I think I remember that Mr. Digweed walked down to keep him company. Such were the wedding festivities of Steventon in 1814!10

  It was very much the Austen style, such as Mrs. Elton sneers at in Emma, with her “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!” But you do not have to be Mrs. Elton to find it sad that even old Mrs. Austen, who loved Anna above all her grandchildren, was not present to see her married; nor a single Austen aunt or uncle. And when Jane, on her next London trip, visited Anna in Hendon, she blamed her for ordering a piano (“they will wish the 24 Gs [guineas] in the shape of Sheets & Towels six months hence”) and accused her of secret extravagance on a purple pelisse: “She is capable of that you know,” she told Fanny, allowing herself to sound for once like a malicious old aunt. What had Anna done to deserve all this? Nobody said. Her Aunt Jane’s sour comments were an aberration, and she was soon writing sweetly to Anna again.

  On Christmas Day Mrs. Austen also wrote to Anna to tell her, “I have just finished Waverley, newly published by Scott, which has afforded me more entertainment than any modern production (Aunt Jane’s excepted).” 11 She was still, at seventy-five, as sharp as a needle. On Boxing Day she said goodbye to both her daughters while they went off to see old friends and neighbours; first to Winchester to stay with Alethea and Elizabeth in their new home in the cathedral close. They went on to James and Mary at Steventon, where there was a Twelfth Night cake with a dance for the young ones, and another party to draw for cake at the Bramstons at Oakley Hall, to which the Chutes also came; a dinner with John Portal and his wife at Laverstoke, an overnight stay with the Lefroys at Ashe; and Tom Chute came twice for dinner at Steventon. He had a parish in Norfolk, presented to him by his family when he left the militia to be ordained; and every winter he brought his horses from East Anglia to Hampshire to hunt from The Vyne alongside his brother and James Austen, and young James-Edward Austen too, when the Winchester term allowed.

  More material for Madame de Staël’s yawns in this collection of middle-aged Hampshire neighbours who had known one another now for over twenty years: the widow with her boy at Winchester and her clever unmarried sister, the Member of Parliament who never spoke in the House, the hunting squires and clergymen with their families, the land-owning businessmen who made £5 notes for the government, the dull women with their cakes and their conservatories. It was also as far as possible from the world Jane was constructing in Emma: a Surrey village that had no basis in any real place, a heroine of twenty, handsome, clever and rich, with a father as foolish as Lady Bertram, a sister married to a London lawyer, a model improving estate-owner for a neighbour, a scheming, oily, unpleasant young clergyman, and a large girls’ school in the neighbourhood. Also, of course, a subplot concerning a poor beauty called Jane who breaks the rules of her society and nearly pays the price by becoming a governess, the English equivalent of the slave trade. Jane went back to Chawton and finished writing on 29 March 1815; her last chapters were written as Madame de Staël’s enemy, Napoleon, escaped from Elba, marched north collecting his soldiers, and re-established his power in Paris.

  Mansfield Park had sold out, but Egerton refused to print a second edition. If he was shown Emma on its comp
letion, as seems likely, he delayed, dithered and failed to make a good enough offer; and that was the end of his association with Jane Austen. But it was not until the autumn, after she had already started on another novel, that Emma was accepted by a new publisher, John Murray. Murray was the founder of the Quarterly Review and the publisher of Byron, and he had Austen’s manuscript read by William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly, who found “nothing but good” to say of it, and indeed of her earlier work. Gifford offered to do a little work on the text to tidy it up, and Murray to buy the copyright, with the copyrights of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility thrown in, for £450. Henry refused this on behalf of his sister. Then he was taken ill; and she settled for publication on commission, Murray to have 10 per cent of the profits. He would also produce a new edition of Mansfield Park.

  Printing began, while Henry’s illness grew worse. The doctors were so alarmed that Jane sent urgently for James and Edward. Both set off at once, James collecting Cassandra on the way. All three arrived at Hans Place to find Henry apparently on the point of death, suffering from what was called a “low fever.” Madame Bigeon had five Austens to look after and for a week Hans Place was a house of fear. Then, as quickly as the trouble had arrived, it dissipated, and Henry began to mend. James went home, Edward sent his daughter a “comfortable letter” on 2 November, and went back to Kent the next day. Henry remained weak and in need of care, but he was out of danger.

  One of the doctors called in was a court physician; and when the crisis was over, he told Jane that the Prince Regent was an admirer of her novels, and reported to the Prince that she was in London. The result was that the Prince’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke, was told to call on her and invite her to visit the library at Carlton House. This she did, on 13 November. She remained entirely silent on the subject of its splendours and equally so on her feelings about the visit; but Mr. Clarke was also deputed to convey to her that she might dedicate her next book to the Prince. The result appeared at the front of Emma.

  Such a lavish supply of three Royal Highnesses and one Prince Regent was not her idea. She had proposed a simple formula on the title-page, to read “Emma, Dedicated by Permission to H.R.H. The Prince Regent” until John Murray put her right. He must have supplied the copy as it appeared, on a separate page of its own. Martha Lloyd teased Jane about her mercenary motives in making the dedication; in fact she had resisted the idea until it was pointed out that a royal suggestion was a royal command. Murray was happy, of course, and printed 2,000 copies, her largest edition yet, at twenty-one shillings for the three volumes.12

  The Prince himself did not trouble to write his thanks for the dedication. Royal etiquette did not demand it; nor did he feel it necessary to give any indication that he had actually read Emma. He received his specially bound copy in London in December 1815 and his librarian wrote to Jane three months later, on 27 March 1816, from Brighton. “I have to return you the Thanks of His Royal Highness the Prince Regent for the handsome Copy you sent him of your last excellent Novel . . . Lord St. Helens and many of the Nobility who have been staying here, paid you the just tribute of their Praise.” But what, we should like to know, and Jane Austen must have wondered, did the Prince himself think of Miss Woodhouse and Frank Churchill? A word of thanks, sent many weeks after its delivery, for “the handsome Copy . . . of your last excellent novel” leaves a good deal to be desired as a response. “Whatever he may think of my share of the work, Yours seems to have been quite right,” wrote Jane, dry as ever, to Murray.

  The Prince’s librarian was not much of an improvement on the Prince, but he was determined to show his own appreciation of Jane Austen’s genius, and hit on the wonderful idea of recommending subjects for her next book. First he urged her to write a novel about an English clergyman not entirely unlike himself. He had been a naval chaplain: so why not “Carry your Clergyman to Sea as the Friend of some distinguished Naval Character about a Court”? (Did he have the Duke of Clarence in mind perhaps?) Or why not “describe him burying his own mother—as I did,—because the High Priest of the Parish in which she died—did not pay her the respect he ought to do. I have never recovered the Shock”? Austen dealt tactfully with Mr. Clarke’s suggestions, pleading her own incapacity as an “unlearned, & uninformed Female” without knowledge of the science, philosophy or classical and foreign languages which would be necessary for such an enterprise. His next recommendation was that she should write a Romance based on the House of Saxe-Coburg, as a tribute to Prince Leopold of that house, about to marry the Prince Regent’s daughter Charlotte. Again, Austen made the polite excuse that such a project was beyond her powers.

  Mr. Clarke did manage to inspire her none the less. The result was the Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters, three pages in which she followed his advice, mixing in other suggestions from well-meaning friends. The Plan offers a faultless heroine, daughter of a widowed country clergyman, who uses up Volume I telling the story of his life, which includes Mr. Clarke’s ideas of a chaplaincy to a “distinguished Naval Character about the Court” as well as the burial of his mother. The heroine contrives to remain beautiful, elegant and “living in high style” while being driven across Europe, starved and persecuted by unworthy admirers, and cruelly slighted by the hero until the very last moment, when he turns out to have loved her after all. Austen is defending her own taste and methods as she goes along, and enjoying the fun of dragging Mr. Clarke at her chariot wheels.

  Emma, with its far from faultless heroine, is generally hailed as Austen’s most perfect book, flawlessly carried out from conception to finish, without a rough patch or a loose end. It offers a world as carefully and satisfactorily enclosed as any in Racine’s plays. It springs a real surprise the first time you read it, so that, as has often been pointed out, the pleasures of a detective story are added to the study of human psychology. Every reading increases understanding and appreciation of its structure and subtlety; like a string quartet or a sonata, it grows in the mind with each new encounter.

  Emma shares with Fanny Price the inner voice which tells her exactly what to do. I sometimes think Austen may have had her first flash of an idea for Emma as she wrote Fanny’s words to Henry Crawford, “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be,” and was struck with the comic possibility of an inner voice which turns out to be consistently wrong. Emma’s inner guide tells her, for instance, to take up Harriet Smith, an unsuitable friend whose life she proceeds to do her very best to wreck. It tells her to misread Mr. Elton’s attentions to her, obvious as they are to other people. It tells her to slight Jane Fairfax, to concoct a deeply discreditable story about her, and pass it on to a mere acquaintance, Frank Churchill, who uses it for his own purposes and to hurt Jane. It tells her to flirt with Churchill as heartlessly as he flirts with her, and with no intention of accepting him when he proposes, as she confidently expects him to do.

  Emma is not ready for a male suitor because she does not want anyone to encroach on a position which allows her to queen it over the little society in which she lives. She half falls in love with Harriet because her life is becoming dull and she needs something to occupy her, although Harriet is a dim-witted, sycophantic girl with no shred of interest beyond possessing a mildly pretty face, and the fact that she is illegitimate and of unknown parentage. Even about this Harriet shows not a spark of curiosity: something quite hard to believe, however dull she is meant to be. Fortunately her stupidity, and the persistence of her suitor, save her from the humiliation and unhappiness Emma’s guidance has contrived for her.

  Emma is blind to everything she does not want to see, and is enlightened only when her mistakes are shown up, and the good advice of her brotherlike lover is accepted. Austen’s revelation of the unacknowledged sexual tension between her and Mr. Knightley is a marvellous touch; her helpless tears on the way back from Box Hill after his reproach are the tears of a woman whose body is telling her what her min
d has not yet caught up with. “Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.” Having started as one whose pleasure is all in thinking, manipulating and imposing her will, she is discovering another pleasure in the passionate surrender of her will. At the end Emma says she will never address her husband as George, even though he invites her to, except on the one day which she blushes to mention; after that he will always be Mr. Knightley, preserving the master–pupil relationship which is so satisfying—even delicious—to her. If this makes Emma begin to sound like a D. H. Lawrence heroine, it is an indication of Austen’s power to imagine experience outside her own, and to set it down with perfect sureness of touch.