Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  3. Tom Jones, published in 1749, shocked Dr. Johnson among others because it shows both men and women as sexual beings, and regards their sins in these matters as of relatively little importance when weighed against cruelty, snobbery, avarice, meanness and hypocrisy. This is also the view of Squire Western, the hard hunting, drinking and swearing father of the heroine, who was by tradition drawn from a grandfather of the Austens’ neighbour, John Harwood of Oakley Hall, where Fielding was a visitor. See JA’s nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt, p. 65.

  4. Henry’s plan, like most of his activities, was a complicated one, and involved seeking help from various people. The Chawton living had been in the gift of Thomas Knight, his brother Edward’s adoptive father, who died in 1794. Knight had presented the Steventon living to the Revd. George Austen and then to his son James, and the Chawton living to another distant relative, J. R. Papillon, but with the proviso that, if any of them should refuse, they should be offered to Henry Austen next. Henry knew that Papillon already had one parish in Kent, and hoped to persuade him that he would be better off staying there. He started negotiations through Mrs. Lefroy, who was acquainted with all those involved.

  5. 24 Feb. 1796 Henry repays £35.16s. to his father, but on 25 Feb. he borrows £156 from Eliza. Hoare’s Bank archive, ledger 51.

  6. JA to CEA, 23 June 1814, the subject then being Henry’s attendance at White’s Club.

  7. Cited in J. H. and Edith C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (1906), p. 29. Note also 8 Dec. 1795, “Punished P. C. Smith forty-nine lashes for theft.”

  12

  DEFENCE SYSTEMS

  1. Quoted by R. W. Chapman, Facts and Problems (1948), as part of a letter written by Thomas Edward Preston Lefroy to James-Edward Austen-Leigh, 16 Aug. 1870. The nephew wrote, “As this occurred in a friendly and private conversation, I feel some doubt whether I ought to make it public.”

  2. Lefroy MS, in possession of Admiral Sir Francis Austen’s great-grandsons.

  3. The MS is now at St. John’s College, Oxford, MS 279.

  4. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 3 May 1797, AP, p. 159.

  5. HRO 23M93/60/3/1.

  6. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 3 May 1799, AP, p. 159.

  7. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 13 Dec. 1796, AP, p. 156.

  8. Mrs. Cassandra Austen to Mary Lloyd, 30 Nov. 1796, AP, p. 228.

  9. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 30 Dec. 1796, AP, p. 157.

  10. Information from Clive Caplan, “The Military Career of Captain Henry Thomas Austen of the Oxfordshire Regiment of Militia, 1793–1801.”

  11. Eliza de Feuillide to Warren Hastings, 28 Dec. 1797, AP, p. 168.

  12. Clive Caplan gives his monthly pay as Adjutant, Capt. Lieut. and Paymaster, totalling £281.4s.0d. a year.

  13. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 11 Dec. 1797, AP, p. 167.

  14. Eliza Austen to Philadelphia Walter, 16 Feb. 1798, AP, p. 169.

  15. Eliza Austen to Philadelphia Walter, unpublished letter, 16 Feb. 1798, HRO microfilm.

  16. Eliza Austen to Philadelphia Walter, 16 Feb. 1798, AP, p. 169.

  13

  FRIENDS IN EAST KENT

  Some of the information for this chapter comes from the unpublished diaries of Lady Knatchbull (Fanny Austen, later Knight) held at the Kent County Archives in Maidstone.

  1. JA to CEA, 22 Jan. 1801. Mrs. Knight was forty-eight at the time.

  2. JA to CEA, 18 Dec. 1798.

  3. In a letter to CEA, 20 June 1808. We do not know when Mrs. Knight’s allowance to JA began, but it was probably not before the death of Mr. Austen in 1805.

  4. The key to the park is mentioned in Fanny’s diaries.

  5. The game known as Bullet pudding, as described by Fanny, was played like this: You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up into a sort of pudding with a peak at top, you must then lay a Bullet at top & everybody cuts a slice of it & the person that is cutting it when the Bullet falls must poke about with their noses & chins till they find it & then take it with their mouths which makes them strange figures all covered with flour but the worst is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose & mouth & choking you.

  6. Why he went without Eliza is not known. She was on friendly enough terms with the Edward Austens to entertain them in London. She did visit Godmersham in Oct. 1801, but then not again until 1809, after the death of Elizabeth, which may suggest that the sisters-in-law did not get on.

  7. Copied from papers in possession of Alwyn Austen, which attribute the poem to Henry Austen.

  8. Quoted by Deirdre Le Faye in A Family Record, pp. 161–2, from the Lefroy MS; and “Anna Lefroy’s Original Memories of Jane Austen,” Review of English Studies, NS xxxix, 155, Aug. 1988, p. 419.

  9. This letter from Fanny, then Lady Knatchbull, to her younger sister Marianne was first printed in the Cornhill magazine, 973, Winter 1947/8, pp. 72–3, “courtesy of Lord Brabourne and Mr. Edward Rice,” according to the editor, Peter Quennell (but they were both long dead).

  10. JA to CEA, 23 June 1814.

  11. Information about the marginal comment in the Goldsmith from Park Honan’s Jane Austen: Her Life (1987), p. 58 of 1989 edition; her copy of the Goldsmith is in private possession.

  Her silence on politics and public events is described by her niece Caroline, who was admittedly only ten when JA died, in My Aunt Jane Austen , p. 9. The full passage reads:

  The general politics of the family were Tory—rather taken for granted I suppose, than discussed, as even my Uncles seldom talked about it—and in vain do I try to recall any word or expression of my Aunt Jane’s that had reference to public events—Some bias of course she must have had— but I can only guess to which quarter she inclined.

  For her dislike of William Chute, MP, see p. 95.

  12. The lines are from Book III of Cowper’s The Task, “The Garden.”

  13. All quotes from Chapter 1 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft.

  14. Robert Bage (1728–1801) was a Derbyshire businessman, a papermaker like the Portals and an iron manufacturer. He took up writing in his fifties after a business failure, published several novels before Hermsprong (his most successful book) and, like Charlotte Smith, brought down disapproval for allowing female characters to “recover” from rape and adultery, rather than pine and die in the accepted manner.

  15. See below, pp. 313–4, for her references to Anne Grant’s Letters from the Mountains. JA mentions this popular work which attacked Wollstonecraft several times, but avoids giving any opinion on it. It was, I believe, the first to suggest that women were unfitted to sit in Parliament on the grounds that “a third of the female members will be lying-in, recovering, or nursing.”

  14

  TRAVELS WITH MY MOTHER

  1. Quoted by Deirdre Le Faye in A Family Record, p. 101, from Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s notes on family history written between 1880 and 1885.

  2. Eliza Chute’s diary for 1798 records her riding with “Lady F” on 22 Oct., HRO 23M93/70/1/6.

  3. Jane Leigh-Perrot to Montague Cholmeley, 10 Oct. 1799, AP, p. 188.

  4. Montague Cholmeley to Jane Leigh-Perrot, 11 Jan. 1800, AP, p. 198.

  5. Park Honan ( Jane Austen, Her Life, 1987) quotes R. A. Austen-Leigh’s private notes about Jekyll’s belief that Mrs. Leigh-Perrot was a kleptomaniac and did steal the lace, pp. 150–51. Sarah Markham gives the account of Mrs. Leigh-Perrot stealing a plant in Jane Austen Society Report for 1991, drawn from her own book A Testimony of Her Times: Based on Penelope Hind’s Diaries and Correspondence 1787–1838 (1990). She quotes from a letter describing Mrs. Leigh-Perrot as being “of lace-stealing notoriety,” and gives some verses written by a Bath magistrate on the alleged plant stealing:

  To love of plants who has the greatest claim,

  Darwin the Bard or Perrot’s wily Dame?

 
Decide the cause, Judge Botany, we pray,

  Let him the Laurel take and her the Bay.

  6. We know about Mrs. Lefroy’s straw manufactory because Eliza Chute’s mother wrote asking for advice from her, hoping to set up something similar herself. Unpublished letter, n.d., HRO 23M93/70/3/16. Eliza Chute to Eliza Gosling, 29 Sept. 1800, unpublished letter, HRO 23M93/74/1/3.

  7. Information from Patrick Piggott’s The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen (1979), p. 156.

  8. All but the last sentence quoted from Eliza’s letter, Eliza Austen to Philadelphia Walter, 29 Oct. 1799, AP, pp. 172–4. The last sentence, cut in AP, I have taken from microfilm of letter in HRO.

  15

  THREE BOOKS

  1. The two cancelled chapters of Persuasion are the only manuscripts relating to the six published novels to have survived (see p. 253).

  2. R. W. Chapman argues that Pride and Prejudice must have been substantially rewritten in 1812, on the grounds that he believes JA used an almanac for 1811 in constructing its chronology, as suggested by Sir Frank MacKinnon; but it is no more than a possibility. Also see n. 5, Chapter 22.

  3. For that reason, perhaps, it was omitted from the film version of Sense and Sensibility.

  4. Sir William East (1738–1819) of Hall Place, Hurley, Berks., was a neighbour in Berkshire both of the Leigh-Perrots and of the Mrs. Cotton with whom Mary Wollstonecraft stayed after her second suicide attempt in 1796. See William Godwin, first edition of his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), Chapter 8, “1795, 1796,” pp. 143–4: “Her present residence among the scenes of nature, was favourable to this purpose [i.e., casting off her attachment to Imlay]. She was at the house of an old and intimate friend, a lady of the name of Cotton, whose partiality to her was strong and sincere. Mrs. Cotton’s nearest neighbour was Sir William East, baronet; and, from the joint effect of the kindness of her friend, and the hospitable and distinguishing attentions of this respectable family, she derived considerable benefit.” This passage was cut from the second edition of the memoir, after the first edition had been greeted with violent disapproval and mockery of Godwin’s frankness. No doubt Sir William East preferred not to be publicly associated with Wollstonecraft after this.

  There are several known links between Easts and Austens. Sir William’s son Gilbert was the Steventon pupil to whom Mrs. Austen sent the poem quoted above. According to Jane Leigh-Perrot’s letter of Jan. 1800 (AP, pp. 198– 201), Sir William expressed support for her in her shop-lifting ordeal (see pp. 149–51) and “wished it lay in his power to be of any service as well through the Regard he felt for us as to show his detestation of so much Villainy, for almost a similar Case had nearly involved Lady East in the distress that I was thrown into.” And a portrait of “Sir Wm East” is mentioned by JA as hanging at Steventon in 1801.

  5. JA owned one such manual in French by the Marquise de Lambert—probably another gift from her cousin Eliza—which is insistent on the point that young ladies should never experience love, which might interfere with their parents’ marital plans for them. It advises avoiding plays, music, poetry and the reading of romances, i.e., novels, and describes falling in love as “the most cruel situation a rational person can be in.” Madame de Genlis’s stories also condemn passionate feeling, which is presented as wholly destructive and inappropriate in a woman.

  Anne Radcliffe also took up the question of excessive sensibility in her Mysteries of Udolpho, well known to JA, and published in 1794. Emily, the heroine, is specifically warned by her dying father against its dangers. He tells her, “Those who really possess sensibility ought to be early taught that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery or delight from every surrounding circumstance . . . beware of priding yourself on the gracefulness of sensibility. If you yield to this vanity, your happiness is lost for ever.” There is a good deal more along these lines, and a central theme of the book is Emily’s attempt to follow her dead father’s advice through her subsequent trials, which include cruel treatment by her guardians, and the apparent faithlessness of her lover. Udolpho is set in a different century and country, and told in a different style, but there was more to it than Gothic effects and romantic evocations of scenery, and it offered more than one theme taken up by JA.

  6. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (1939), p. 30.

  7. Mary Lascelles, “Jane Austen and the Novel” in John Halperin (ed.), Bicentenary Essays (1975), p. 241.

  8. See diaries of Fanny Austen for 5 Aug. 1805, “I slept half with Mama & half with Sackree [the family nurse], for Papa came home late in the evening & I was obliged to be pulled out of bed.” She was twelve. Kent County Archives U951 F24/2.

  9. JA to CEA, 3 July 1813.

  10. JA to CEA, 15 Sept. 1796.

  11. Marilyn Butler, in her introduction to Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics, 1995), points out that Johnson’s defence of the novel, in the Rambler (no. 4), was certainly known to JA; and she suggests that his paragraph in the same essay, mocking ignorant young women readers of novels who are “open to every false suggestion and partial account,” is a likely starting point for Northanger Abbey.

  16

  TWENTY-FIVE

  1. Caroline Austen, daughter of James and Mary, gave her mother’s account to her brother James-Edward in a letter, 1 Apr. 1869, quoted by Chapman in his Facts and Problems. Chapman did not doubt its veracity.

  2. See Robin Vick’s “The Sale at Steventon Parsonage,” Jane Austen Society Report (1993), pp. 13–16. JA’s remarks about the price of the books in letters to CEA, 12 May 1801 and 21 May 1801.

  3. Lines from one of a group of MS poems by James Austen copied in unidentified hand, and thought to be written in 1814. HRO 23M93/60/3/1.

  17

  MANYDOWN

  1. Cited by Deirdre Le Faye in A Family Record, p. 121, taken from the Lefroy MS.

  2. Sir John Lambert was known to Eliza as the Chevalier Lambert when she and her mother stayed with him in Paris. It is quite plausible that she and Henry met him in 1802 or 1803 when they went to France to claim her rights in the Capot de Feuillide estates, and that he took advantage of the peace to return to England. Henry was in touch with the Lambert family again later, as is clear from his account at Hoare’s Bank.

  3. A story from a few years later demonstrates this. In dispute with Winchester Cathedral Chapter about the right to cut timber in his park, Harris invited all the Canons, all of whom were friends, to dinner. He told his butler to mix up several of his very good wines into a punch and served it to them. The mixture was disgusting. When the Canons had tried to drink it, he addressed them, “Gentlemen, my punch is like you. In your individual capacity you are all very good fellows, but in your corporate capacity you are very disagreeable.” JA might well have appreciated the joke.

  4. There may just possibly have been a proposal in 1805 from the Revd. Edward Bridges, a brother of Edward Austen’s wife Elizabeth, and a few years younger than Jane, whom she had known since the mid-1790s. She at any rate mentioned his particular attentiveness to her, mostly in ordering toasted cheese for her supper at Goodnestone one evening, it must be said. Three years later, in 1808, she recalled (to Cassandra) an “invitation” from him which she had been unable to accept. It is clear from the letters that she liked him, and he got on well with her brothers, but he held no romantic interest for her. If there was a proposal, no one in either family was informed and there were no regrets. She sent warm congratulations when he became engaged to someone else, and pitied him when his bride turned out to be a hypochondriac. “She is a poor Honey—the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who liked her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else,” she wrote to Francis, 25 Sept. 1813.

  5. JA to CEA, 21 Apr. 1805, just after the death of Mr. Austen.

  6. Jane Austen’s great-niece Fanny Lefroy (granddaughter of James Austen through his daughter
Anna) wrote in 1883 in Temple Bar magazine (lxvii, p. 277) that she began writing The Watsons “somewhere in 1804.”

  7. The passage about the fox-hounds has been deleted in the manuscript. It could be a recollection of Mr. Chute, who occasionally persuaded his wife to come and take a look at the hunt, and may well have pressed its charms on other women in the neighbourhood.

  8. Jane Austen and Her Art, pp. 99–100.

  9. Eliza Austen to Philadelphia Walter, 29 Oct. 1801, AP, pp. 174–5.

  10. Henry Austen to Warren Hastings, 5 June 1802, AP, p. 177.

  11. JA to Francis Austen, 30 Jan. 1805, AP, pp. 235–6.

  12. Archives du Ministère des affaires Etrangères, Quai d’Orsay, L 20.

  13. As already noted, the unpublished diaries of Lady Knatchbull (as Fanny ultimately became) are in the Kent County Archives, U951 F24/1. They start in 1804.

  18

  BROTHERLY LOVE

  1. Francis wrote to Mary Gibson from the Canopus when he already suspected he was going to miss the Battle of Trafalgar. He put his feelings very well: “I do not profess to like fighting for its own sake, but if there has been an action with the combined fleets I shall ever consider the day on which I sailed from the squadron as the most inauspicious one of my life.”