Jane Austen herself was far from confident that Emma would be well received. Some of her fears were expressed to Mr. Clarke in December 1815: “My greatest anxiety at present is that this 4th work shd not disgrace what was good in the others . . . I am very strongly haunted by the idea that to those readers who have preferred P & P it will appear inferior in Wit, & to those who have preferred MP. very inferior in good Sense.”13 The first responses from readers were not reassuring. Out of the forty-three “Opinions” of Emma she noted down, twelve were distinctly hostile, and only six gave unreserved praise. Four said they liked it best of her works so far—two being her brothers Francis and Charles—but, just as she had feared, seventeen said they preferred Pride and Prejudice. Within the family, Mrs. Austen was one of these. At least she thought it “more entertaining” than Mansfield Park, whereas Cassandra was one of nine who expressed a preference for Mansfield Park. Fanny could not bear Emma herself, although Anna, perhaps because she was prone to trouble herself, preferred her to all the other heroines. Alethea Bigg, who read it twice in quick succession, was bored by the match-making theme and by Harriet Smith, and liked it less than the earlier books. Edward “preferred it to MP.—only”; her nephew Edward also kindly pointed out that she had made Mr. Knightley’s apple trees blossom in July. Henry was in no state to give an opinion, but one smart London friend of his, Sir James Langham, “though it much inferior to all the others,” and another, a Miss Isabella Herries Jane had dined with and thought clever and accomplished, “did not like it— objected to my exposing the sex in the character of the heroine.” Austen was close to exasperation in noting Miss Herries’s further complaint, that she had “meant Mrs. & Miss Bates for some acquaintance of theirs—people whom I never heard of before.” James and Mary Austen communicated their joint failure to like it “as well as either of the 3 others. Language different from the others; not so easily read.” They must also have passed on the view of Mary’s cousin, Jane Murden, who pronounced it “certainly inferior to all the others.”
Murray allowed his author twelve complimentary copies, a subject on which she expressed herself sardonically to Cassandra, noting that “all the twelve Copies . . . were to have been dispersed among my near Connections—beginning with the P.R. & ending with Countess Morley”—who were of course Murray’s choices.14 She felt obliged to send one to the Prince’s librarian, but after that all her copies went to the family—all that is but one, which went to Anne Sharp, confirming her unique position as the necessary, intelligent friend. From Anne she wanted frankness, having already begged her to be “perfectly honest” in giving her opinion of Mansfield Park. Now even Anne’s verdict was disappointing. She like Emma “better than MP.—but not so well as P. & P.—pleased with the Heroine for her Originality, delighted with Mr. K—& called Mrs. Elton beyond praise—dissatisfied with Jane Fairfax.” Sharp Miss Sharp touched here on a weak spot: Jane Fairfax is a thinner character than the girl who behaves so outrageously as to enter into a secret engagement and correspondence should be. Her criticism was to be taken seriously, and pondered.
There was a different sort of interest—and amusement—in writing down merely insulting remarks by dim-witted acquaintances. Among Hampshire neighbors, one woman found Emma “too natural to be interesting,” and Jane’s “dear Mrs. Digweed” “did not like it so well as the others, in fact if she had not known the Author, could hardly have got through it.” Dear Mrs. Digweed indeed. A Mrs. Dickson “thought it very inferior to P. & P.—Liked it the less, from there being a Mr. & Mrs. Dixon in it.” Another “Read only the first & last Chapters, because he had heard it was not interesting.” “The Authoress wrong, in such times as these, to draw such Clergymen as Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton.” To make up for the nonsense, there was praise from her brothers, especially Charles, who read Emma through three times in quick succession; and the verdict of the great Mr. Jeffery of the Edinburgh Review, who was “kept up by it three nights.” Yet the Edinburgh ran no review.
Murray had reservations of his own. He sent a copy to Walter Scott, suggesting he should write something about it in the Quarterly Review , but introducing it with a remark that consigns him to that circle of the Inferno reserved for disloyal publishers. “Have you any fancy to dash off an article on Emma? It wants incident and romance does it not?” Scott did dash off something, praising Austen somewhat faintly for “copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life,” and more warmly for her “quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect.” He found Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates tiresome, and he did not mention Mansfield Park at all, to Jane’s considerable, and justifiable, disappointment. His unsprightly summaries of the plots of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice did them no service. Almost half his review was devoted to a general discussion of the novel, and he ended with a paean to the virtues of romantic love as against the “calculating prudence” that he discerned in some of Austen’s heroines.
Nearly ten years after her death, Scott arrived at a higher opinion of her work. “That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.”15 The vitality of her voice made him do what everyone has done ever since, assimilate her to the twenty-year-old heroines of the books—Elizabeth, Elinor, Emma—by writing of her as a “young lady;” although she was dead, and had been forty when he reviewed her much less kindly in the Quarterly .
23
The Sorceress
The first year after the peace that followed Waterloo brought a series of disasters for the Austen family. In February 1816 Charles’s ship was wrecked in the eastern Mediterranean, where he was pursuing the real pirates Byron glamorized for his Corsair. Back in England, Charles found himself poor, struggling to bring up his motherless family; he did not get another command for ten years. His eldest daughter, Cassy, was taken to live at Chawton with her aunts for months at a time, just as Anna had gone to her aunts at Steventon after her mother’s death twenty years earlier; and the second little girl, Jane’s god-daughter Harriet, fell seriously ill with water on the brain.
Frank remained on half-pay of £200 a year, and had considerable savings invested, so even with a family addition every two years he managed reasonably well. He was also a partner in Henry’s bank.1 At the end of 1815, however, the Alton branch of the bank failed; and on 15 March the other branches, the London bank and the army agency all crashed. They were casualties either of the general economic trouble of the post-war period or of the particular untrustworthiness of some clients; probably a mixture of the two, with Henry’s too ready optimism another factor. The result was that Henry was declared bankrupt. Whatever money Eliza had left him went with the rest, and the failure involved his Uncle Leigh-Perrot and brother Edward in paying out the large sums—£10,000 and £20,000—they had guaranteed for him only a year before; so fast had the whirligig turned and thrown him down. Frank and James both lost smaller amounts, and even Jane saw £13 of her profits from Mansfield Park disappear. Neither Henry nor Frank was now able to keep up his annual contribution of £50 to their mother’s household; this, and the threat hanging over Edward, put some strain on the finances at Chawton cottage.2
Austen accounts of Henry’s crash are reticent. In the first Memoir it became “some family troubles.” At Steventon, Mary Austen’s diary for 15 March has “Henry’s bank stopped payments” and the next day “first heard of Henry being a bankrupt.” At the end of the year Fanny wrote in her diary, “The principal event of this year has been the failure of Uncle H Austen’s Bank & consequent distress to most of the family.” Caroline recalled with amazement later how unaffected Uncle Henry himself seemed when he appeared at Steventon; as cheerful as eve
r, not at all like a ruined man. His bounciness under every sort of affliction makes you wonder whether the tough Austen infant regime had in his case immunized him against distress.
Jane Austen wrote to Murray on 1 April asking him to communicate with her at Chawton in future, “in consequence of the late sad Event in Henrietta Street.” There would be no more London trips for her; Henry had to give up Hans Place and Henrietta Street at once. Madame Bigeon and her daughter, with nothing to keep them in London, took themselves to France to see how their country was faring after two decades of revolution and war; they found only poverty and misery, and were back in London in September, their own prospects grim.3 Without any thought that his popularity might have suffered, Henry turned to his family for support. “My uncle had been living for some years past at considerable expense, but not more than might become the head of a flourishing bank,” wrote Caroline, “and no blame of personal extravagance was ever imputed to him.”4 His Uncle and Aunt Leigh-Perrot were the only ones to hold his failure against him. In Kent and in Hampshire he was welcomed as warmly as ever; and in July he travelled to France with two of Edward’s sons, financed by Edward no doubt, and hoping to claim what was still owed to Eliza. It proved a useless quest; in France no one was likely to accept an unenforceable claim made by an Englishman, and least of all in 1816.
Now the Church, that most useful stay in time of trouble, became interesting to Henry once more. He remembered the plan he had abandoned twenty-five years earlier and wrote to Brownlow North, Bishop of Winchester, expressing his wish to be ordained. The Bishop, in his seventies and much more interested in botany than theology, was not severe in his examination of the middle-aged candidate. Putting his hand on a Greek Testament, he said, “I dare say it is some years since either you or I looked into it”; and by the end of the year, Henry was appointed to the curacy of Chawton. It gave him fifty-two guineas a year, which was a good deal better than nothing, and allowed him to keep his own horse.5
Early in this difficult year Jane began to feel unwell in some unspecified way. Neither she nor anyone else took much notice; she may have put it down to turning forty. Her protégée Miss Benn gave them a reminder of mortality by dying in January, at the age of only forty-six; but Jane had smiled at her mother’s hypochondria for too many years to allow herself to complain of illness at half her age.6 She kept busy, working on The Elliots—her working title for Persuasion. She also recovered the manuscript of Susan (Northanger Abbey) from Crosby for the original £10 and went through it, changing the heroine’s name to Catherine, and writing a note explaining that it dated back many years, having been finished in 1803. It was now in its final form, although without its final title. But “Miss Catherine,” as she named it to Fanny, stayed on “the Shelve.”
Looking at the letters for this period, you wonder that she had a moment to do anything but attend to her brothers’ children. In April, Charles’s little Cass was staying at the cottage, and was taken to Alton Fair with Francis’s Mary-Jane, and possibly James’s Caroline too. Anna and her husband had moved back to Hampshire, renting half a farm-house from an Alton shopkeeper (the other half was lived in by the farm manager). It was within easy walking distance of Chawton, and Anna was always eager to see her aunt, and could do with any help on offer; she was already six months pregnant again when her first daughter was christened in April. In May, Edward and Fanny spent three weeks at the cottage; Fanny’s diary shows that she walked frequently with “At: Cass” but only once with “At: Jane.” Something was amiss with her, and immediately after this visit both aunts set off to try the effect of the waters at Cheltenham, dropping Cassy at Steventon on the way, and promising to collect her again on their return in June.
Cheltenham had great cachet as a fashionable spa town with every amenity, assembly rooms, concerts, a theatre, gaming houses and libraries; but Cassandra was taking Jane for strictly medical reasons. The regime was that you walked to the well from your inn or lodging house early in the morning, and took a pint or two of the salty water before breakfast.7 Perhaps Jane thought it did her some good; at all events, Cassandra went back to Cheltenham later in the year with Mary Austen, who believed herself unwell. On this later occasion Jane was left in charge of entertaining Frank and all his family to meals, as well as several other visitors. Small wonder that Caroline “did not often see my Aunt with a book in her hand.”8 Jane wrote what almost sounds like a complaint to Cassandra during her absence with Mary, saying she needed “a few days quiet, & exemption from the Thought & contrivances which any sort of company gives.—I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House . . . Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb.”
She began to have a pain in her back. Yet in spite of this, and of the almost uninterrupted family visits, and the cold and rainy summer— 1816 suffered the worst for decades—which made it harder than usual to keep children entertained, she finished writing Persuasion on 18 July. Or rather, she wrote “Finis” and then became dissatisfied with its two concluding chapters. Because of this dissatisfaction, these are the only piece of manuscript from her finished novels to survive (they are now in the British Library). It makes them precious and poignant; it also shows a remarkably tight and economical habit of composition. The dialogue runs continuously, without paragraphing, closely packed in. The abbreviations show how she hurried and kept to essentials: “P. Office” for Post Office, “Capt. W.,” “Adml,” “Mr. E.” Many nouns are capitalized in the old-fashioned way, “Bliss,” “Fatigue,” “Headake,” “Providence”; some underlined as well, as though she paused to think of their significance and stress it: “Persuasion,” “Duty.” The hand, like that of the letters, is clear, tidy, flowing, and the crossing out and corrections very neat.
Before discarding the two chapters, she worked over them once, toning down Anne Elliot’s feelings of “Triumph” at being right where her godmother Lady Russell had been wrong, and deleting altogether a rare interpolation in her own voice. It goes like this:
Bad Morality again. A young Woman proved to have had more discrimination of Character than her elder—to have seen in two Instances more clearly what it was about than her Godmother! But on the point of Morality, I confess myself almost in despair after understanding myself to have already given a Mother offence—having already appeared weak in the point where I thought myself most strong and shall leave the present matter to the mercy of Mothers & Chaperons & Middle-aged Ladies in general.
These were first thoughts, Austen talking to herself, laughing at the people who combed her work for a “moral tendency” and set out to use her novels as primers for good behaviour. This was never her aim in writing; “Mothers & Chaperons & Middle-aged Ladies” were Hannah More’s province, not hers. When she wrote “on the point of Morality, I confess myself almost in despair,” she was mocking, as artists may mock when they see their work reduced by narrow approaches and definitions. But the passage was too strong; it stuck out of the narrative, a rude disclaimer; and it went.
Then she decided to rewrite the two final chapters entirely. It took her three weeks, and the rewriting was masterly. What now? She put the manuscript aside and did nothing with it for six months. She may have thought of revising further; at some point The Elliots became Persuasion, although we don’t know when, or even whether the name was her idea. But it was not until the following March (1817) that she told Fanny in a letter that she had “something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence.” Ten days later she wrote, again to Fanny, that Henry had inquired whether she had anything, and “I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it.” The delay is mysterious; perhaps her energy was simply at too low an ebb for dealing with publishers. Emma had made £221.6s.4d . profit, but Murray offset this against the losses on his edition of Mansfield Park, so that in February she had received only the depressingly small amount of £38.18s. Money was more impor
tant to everyone at the cottage than it had been. “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor,” she reminded Fanny, who was hesitating over suitors.
Persuasion is an extraordinary book on many counts. In one light it can be seen as a present to herself, to Miss Sharp, to Cassandra, to Martha Lloyd, even to the memory of poor Miss Benn; to all women who had lost their chance in life and would never enjoy a second spring. But it is also a remarkable leap into a new mood and a new way of looking at England. The friendly characterization of the naval officers is more than a compliment to Francis and Charles Austen; it points approvingly towards a society in which merit can rise. There is a remarkable portrait of a distinctly new woman, Mrs. Croft, tough, humourous, middle aged and clearer headed than her husband the Admiral; and right in her judgements where the defenders of old-fashioned values of prudence, rank and family turn out to be wrong. Then again there is a strain of romanticism which has hardly appeared since it was rapped over the knuckles in Sense and Sensibility, and is now at the centre of Anne Elliot’s wholly admirable character.
There are also undeniably rough, cold and undeveloped patches in the book. The Elliot family, Anne apart, are close to caricature, and the plotting around Mrs. Clay, Mrs. Smith and Mr. Elliot is put together without finesse. Persuasion is “at once the warmest and the coldest of Jane Austen’s works, the softest and the hardest,” wrote Reginald Farrer in 1917, getting it right as usual.9 (For those who need reminding, the plot is summarized in the endnote.10) The warmth and softness of the book is all Anne Elliot’s, in her responses to people, landscape and season; she and Marianne alone among Austen heroines cherish the beauty and sadness of autumn. They are quick to think of apposite lines of poetry, and sympathetic to those who share their responses: Marianne to Thomson and Cowper, Anne to Scott and Byron. To Anne the autumn fields, the sea at Lyme and the coast, with its “green chasms and romantic rocks,” the sight of the “black, dripping, comfortless verandah” on her sister’s house in late November, all speak with powerful voices; and, unlike Marianne, she is not mocked for finding that such things as dead leaves speak to the heart.
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