Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  It can also be the function of creation. On the morning of 15 July, St. Swithin’s Day, which was very rainy, and also the day fixed for the annual Winchester races, Jane dictated twenty-four lines of comic verse to Cassandra; she had most likely been writing them in her head for some time, to occupy herself as she lay in bed, but it was still a feat for someone as ill as she was. The verses imagine St. Swithin laying a curse on the Winchester races. “Venta” is an old name for Winchester, already used by James in a poem which may have set her mind to work; Jane makes the saint scold the citizens for setting up races without seeking his permission:

  “Oh! subjects rebellious! Oh Venta depraved

  When once we are buried you think we are gone

  But behold me immortal! By vice you’re enslaved

  You have sinned and must suffer, then farther he said

  These races and revels and dissolute measures

  With which you’re debasing a neighbouring Plain

  Let them stand—You shall meet with your curse in your pleasures

  Set off for your course, I’ll pursue with my rain.”

  Cassandra put “gone” at the end of the second line, where the rhyme clearly calls for “dead”; but either Jane could not say the word, or her sister could not bring herself to write it down.3 In the evening of the same day Cassandra noted “a visible change” in her charge; “she slept more & much more comfortably, indeed . . . she was more asleep than awake. Her looks altered & she fell away, but I perceived no material diminution of strength & tho’ I was then hopeless of a recovery I had no suspicion how rapidly my loss was approaching.” 4

  On 17 July the sun shone all day until the evening, when rain again set in for the night. Mary’s diary reads: “Jane Austen was taken for death about 1⁄2 past 5 in the Evening.” What she meant was that Jane had a seizure of some kind and became alarmingly faint; Cassandra, who was out on an errand, arrived back at quarter to six to find her conscious, and the two sisters talked quietly together about the seizure. Mr. Lyford was sent for, and pronounced her close to death; he believed, it seems, that a large blood vessel had given way.5

  Lyford administered something—Cassandra does not say what, but it would have been laudanum—to ease his patient. She knew herself to be dying before it could take effect. “During that half hour was her struggle, poor soul! she said she could not tell us what she suffered, tho’ she complained of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death & some of her words were ‘God grant me patience, Pray for me oh Pray for me.’ Her voice was affected but as long as she spoke she was intelligible.” So Cassandra described the last half hour before her sister lost consciousness.

  Cassandra settled herself with a pillow on her lap supporting Jane’s head, which her last struggle had left half off the bed. Cassandra was unwilling to move her at all, but after six hours sitting like this she allowed Mary to take her place for two hours at one in the morning, returning to her post at three. An hour later Jane was dead: “in about one hour more she breathed her last. I was able to close her eyes myself & it was a great gratification to me to render her these last services.”6 Later Cassandra found the magnificent words partly quoted earlier, in which she was able to express the intensity of her feelings; and which deserve to be read again. “She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.”

  Mary Austen’s diary page: “Jane Austen was taken for death”

  Mary’s diary for 18 July read more prosaically. “Jane breathed her last 1⁄2 after four in the Morn. only Cass & I were with her. Henry came.” It was Henry surely who sought permission for their sister to be buried in the cathedral; splendid as it is, she might have preferred the open churchyard at Steventon or Chawton. But Henry knew the Bishop from his recent examination for ordination; Mrs. Heathcote was also well known to the Dean, Thomas Rennell, through her late husband; and Rennell was a friend of the Chutes and through them James Austen, so there was no difficulty. The funeral had to take place early in the morning not to interfere with the regular daily services of the cathedral, and was fixed for 24 July. Until then Jane’s body lay in its open coffin with a “sweet serene air over her countenance,” in one of the small rooms in College Street. Cassandra cut several locks of her hair to keep and to give away. 7

  Edward and Francis arrived in Winchester on 23 July. Charles could not come, and James felt too unwell to do so, but on the day itself his son James-Edward rode the fourteen miles from Steventon to Winchester very early in brilliant morning sunshine.8 The coffin was closed and placed on a low bier with a pall over it, to be wheeled along College Street, through Kingsgate and the Close, and so into the cathedral, the three brothers and one nephew walking beside it as the only mourners. A brick-lined vault was ready in the north aisle of the nave, and the Precentor, Thomas Watkins, read the solemn service. A temporary stone was laid while the final one with its epitaph was prepared. She was the third and last person to be buried in the cathedral that year; the arrangements were so relaxed that the entry in the cathedral register gives the wrong date, 16 July, for the funeral.

  After this the will was read. Jane made Cassandra her executrix and left her everything but for two legacies of £50. Nothing for nephews and nieces; but £50 for Henry, to mark his special place in her heart, his help in getting her books published, and his present poverty. The other £50 was for Madame Bigeon, Eliza’s old retainer. It is a very striking provision, this legacy to an old Frenchwoman with no claim on her but that of friendship, hardship and long service to her cousin and her cousin’s child; but then Jane had always been good at noticing those who were overlooked by others.

  A few days later the Salisbury and Winchester Journal printed an obituary: “On Friday the 18th inst. died, in this city, Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Rev. George Austen, Rector of Steventon, in the county, and authoress of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Her manners were gentle, her affections ardent, her candour was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.”9

  The family scattered to their homes. James and James-Edward both turned to poetry and wrote memorial lines. They may also have helped Henry prepare the inscription for the fine black marble grave stone, in three pious, rolling sentences that contrive to omit her greatest claim to fame:

  In Memory of

  JANE AUSTEN,

  youngest daughter of the late

  Revd GEORGE AUSTEN,

  formerly Rector of Steventon in this County

  she departed this life on the 18th July 1817,

  aged 41, after a long illness supported with

  the patience and the hopes of a Christian.

  The benevolence of her heart,

  the sweetness of her temper, and

  the extraordinary endowments of her mind

  obtained the regard of all who knew her and

  the warmest love of her intimate connections.

  Their grief is in proportion to their affection

  they know their loss to be irreparable,

  but in their deepest affliction they are consoled

  by a firm though humble hope that her charity,

  devotion, faith and purity have rendered

  her soul acceptable in the sight of her

  REDEEMER.

  Cassandra sent out letters and mementoes of her sister, to Anne Sharp among others; and life went on. Caroline was sent to school in Winchester. Edward took his daughters Fanny and Lizzy to Paris. Henry stood in for James’s clerical duties at Sherborne St. John for several weeks in September, as Mrs. Chute noted in her diary; she also described how, in December, a performance of The Rivals was put on at The Vyne, where James-Edward Austen was a regular visitor. It was thirty-four years since “some young Ladies and Gentlemen at Steventon” had put on the play in their barn, with
Henry speaking the prologue written by James, to the delight of an eight-year-old Jane Austen.

  25

  Postscript

  Cassandra’s grief did not prevent her from acting efficiently as her sister’s executrix. Five months after Jane’s death the two completed manuscript novels, Catherine and The Elliots, were published together.1 She and Henry agreed on much improved titles, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and Henry dealt with Murray. He also wrote the biographical note often referred to in the pages of this book. It is dated “London, Dec. 13, 1817”; a week later, still in London, he added a postscript, giving passages from two of her letters. He described her character as without fault, praised her wit, her modesty where her work was concerned, and her placidity of temper. As befitted a clergyman, he also laid great emphasis on her piety. It is a loving and polished eulogy; his claim that she suffered nothing worse than “little disappointments” in her life, saw all her wishes gratified, and never uttered a severe expression must be taken as too polite to be the whole truth.

  Egerton issued a third edition of Pride and Prejudice, squeezed into two volumes; its popularity was assured. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were favourably reviewed in the Edinburgh Magazine, with the sage prediction that once readers had had enough of the romances of Scott, Byron, Edgeworth and Godwin, “the delightful writer of the works now before us, will be one of the most popular of English novelists”; but the British Critic sourly lamented Austen’s “want of imagination.” 2 For a year Murray’s edition sold well, making £500 for Cassandra. After that sales fell off, and in 1820 he remaindered the last 282 copies. 3 Fifteen years went by before another publisher was willing to reprint in England. In France all six of the novels had appeared by the mid-1820s. They were the first illustrated editions, charmingly done; and the title given to Emma—La Nouvelle Emma, ou les Caractères Anglais du Siècle—suggests that Austen was taken by the French as a guide to the baffling nature of their English neighbours.

  Not long after Jane’s death James began to show signs of illness. Like her, he resisted it, determined to continue to ride about the countryside he loved as long as he was strong enough to get on a horse; when he could no longer manage that, he had himself carried out of the house into the open air. He gave up the struggle in November 1819, took to his bed, and died in December. His death meant that his widow Mary and children, James-Edward and Caroline, had to leave Steventon; Henry was to take over the parish and move into the rectory. He planned to take pupils as his father had done, and was also about to marry again. According to Caroline, he “paid my mother every due attention, but his own spirits he could not repress, and it is not pleasant to witness the elation of your successor in gaining what you have lost.”4 So history repeated itself, and Caroline and her mother set off sorrowfully for Bath. The following April, Henry married Miss Eleanor Jackson, about whom no one has found much to say except that she was the niece of the Mr. Papillon who was always supposed to be about to propose to Jane, and that she made Henry a quiet and loyal wife.

  Henry was the last Austen to live in the Steventon family home. He was displaced in the parish by his brother Edward’s son William Knight, who took over in 1823. At this point Edward, as landlord, decided that the old house was not worth the repairs it needed. He had always been the brother with a head for business, and proved it now; Mr. Austen’s rectory, with its strawberry beds and sweep at the front, was knocked down, and a solid, square rectory put up on another site near by. William brought a local bride to his new rectory, Caroline Portal, daughter of the Austens’ old friend and neighbour John Portal. They had eight children in twelve years, and the eighth baby killed her; his brother Edward’s wife died of her seventh child about the same time, two more casualties of the unquestioned custom of bearing a baby every eighteen months.

  James’s son James-Edward was also ordained, a year after his cousin William, in 1824, but there was no living for him. He had to become a mere curate; he gave up his early attempts to write novels, and lived the life of a “hunting, fishing, dancing young man” (his own description), putting in regular attendance at balls, the races and the theatre. He was charming, good-looking and lucky, and like William he found his bride through old connections, marrying Mrs. Chute’s niece Emma Smith, whom he had first met at The Vyne. Eliza Chute wrote to her niece, “I must consider your marriage with him as in some degree under my auspices . . . He certainly is a very agreeable companion, cheerful, lively, animated, ready to converse, willing to read out loud, never in the way and just enough of poetry and romance to please me and yet not to overlook sober reason.” 5 She offered the young couple an allowance, and his Great-Aunt Leigh-Perrot also looked favourably on the match; eight years later he inherited her Berkshire house, Scarlets, along with a substantial sum of money. He and his Emma were both blessed with cheerful temperaments, and brought up a large and gifted family of three daughters and seven sons; the boys were kept at home until they were thirteen, before going to various public schools, Eton, Winchester and Harrow. Emma survived the ten births, and James-Edward went on to produce, instead of novels, first a history of the Vyne hunt, and then the earliest Memoir of Jane Austen. This was in 1869. Before he began to write, he went back to Steventon to look over the old sites; and he had substantial help from both his clever sisters, Anna—widowed, and eking out a penurious existence—and Caroline, who did not marry.

  Austen’s reputation had advanced only slowly, and her sales remained small. Richard Whateley, later Archbishop of Dublin, published an admiring account in 1821 in the Quarterly Review in which he stressed the Christian basis of her morality. Walter Scott’s high praise in his journal entry appeared in print in 1837. In 1843 Macaulay hailed her supreme skill in drawing characters who appear both commonplace and unique, which he found akin to Shakespeare’s; this was in an article on Fanny Burney for the Edinburgh Review. While these were big critical names and ensured her a following, she was not a popular author at the level of Scott, Thackeray or Dickens. During the 1850s visitors began to seek her grave in Winchester Cathedral; the verger did not understand why anyone wanted to see it.6 And while George Henry Lewes praised her steadily through the 1850s, singling out her dramatic powers especially, he expected her to find appreciation only within a “small circle of cultivated minds.”7 One of the cultivated minds was that of George Eliot, whose debt to Austen is clear in the first section of Middlemarch. Another woman novelist, Julia Kavanagh, wrote a sharply perceptive account of Austen’s work in 1862: “If we look into the shrewdness and quiet satire of her stories, we shall find a much keener sense of disappointment than joy fulfilled. Sometimes we find more than disappointment.”8

  This was not at all the view of her memoirist nephew. His beautifully composed portrait of a gentle, cheerful, domestic woman, whose writing was essentially an amateur activity, found immediate favour with the Victorian public and greatly increased critical interest in the novels, and their popularity. New editions began to appear, and by the end of the century there were many, cheap and illustrated, on sale: Dent’s in 1892, Macmillan’s with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations in 1897, Nelson’s in 1903, Everyman’s in 1906, Oxford World’s Classics in 1907. In 1923 R. W. Chapman’s editions, with the text based on collation of the early editions, began to be issued. As to paperback editions: from 1864 Tauchnitz of Leipzig issued all six of the novels in paperback in his Collection of British Authors, but English paperbacks did not appear until shortly before the Second World War. Pride and Prejudice was the first, published as a Penguin Illustrated Classic in May 1938. Northanger Abbey appeared in May 1943, and Persuasion in September of the same year. Emma and Mansfield Park were not published in paperback until 1966, Sense and Sensibility at last in 1969. In America the paperbacks came late too, Houghton Mifflin starting with Pride and Prejudice in 1956. In the 1990s you can buy virtually disposable copies, paying £1 for an Austen novel on a station bookstall and throwing it away at the end of the journey if you can bear to. With films and televisio
n, sequels, prequels and examination syllabuses, Austen has become very big business.

  Henry never made any money again. On giving up Steventon to his nephew William, he moved to Farnham in Surrey, where he taught at the grammar school, and became curate of Bentley. His trail is not easy to follow. Old acquaintances from his palmy days gave him various chaplaincies; he may have gone to Germany in connection with one, and seems to have travelled in France again. In 1825 his attempt to win something from the de Feuillide estate ended, dismissed by the court at Agen. He dabbled in different interests, publishing a well-researched sermon about the persecuted Protestant sect of the Vaudois, intended to raise money to help them; and having Bentley Church partly rebuilt at public expense. It was somehow typical that the rebuilding was faulty, and had to be pulled down again after his death. His one effective action was in negotiating with the publisher Richard Bentley about a new edition of his sister’s novels.

  This was in the summer of 1832. Henry described himself as “joint proprietor” of the copyright with Cassandra, which was not strictly the case—she was sole proprietor according to the terms of Jane’s will— but she no doubt agreed to the description to make it easier for him to deal with Bentley.9 She owned five copyrights, for which Henry asked £50 each, a total of £250. Bentley beat him down to £210, because he had also to pay Egerton’s heirs for Pride and Prejudice to complete the set. He was a shrewd publisher, and asked for more biographical material about “the Authoress.” Henry offered very little, repeating his phrase “my dear Sisters life was not a life of events”; and he went on, “Nothing like a journal of her actions or her conversations was kept by her or others. Indeed the farthest thing from her expectations or wishes was to be exhibited as a public character under any [?] circumstances.” Either Henry had failed to preserve any of the many letters Jane must have sent him and Eliza or, like Cassandra, he was not prepared to let them be seen by other eyes; the former seems more likely. Bentley hoped for a portrait too; Henry explained that the only one he could find was a study in which her face was concealed, which must have been Cassandra’s watercolour of 1804 showing only a back view of a seated figure; and, understandably, it was not used. The six novels were put out in one volume each, in Bentley’s “Standard Novels” series, and reprinted several times over the following decades.