Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  10. Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?” (1957).

  11. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” written for the Pelican Guide to English Literature, first published in the Partisan Review, Sept.–Oct. 1954 and reprinted in The Opposing Self (1955).

  12. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (1986), p. 156. He also blames London (p. 141): “It is London that has made and formed the attractive Crawfords, who very nearly bring total ruin to the world of Mansfield Park. For if Mansfield, at its best, perfects people, London, at its worst, perverts them.”

  13. Roger Gard, Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (1992), p. 144. An excellent book.

  14. The Shakespearean comparison comes readily to mind, because, of all Austen’s books, Mansfield Park shows most traces of Shakespeare. Eliza and Henry, to whom Jane was close during the period in which she planned the book, were keen theatre-goers and knew their Shakespeare and, as we have seen, he enjoyed reading aloud, exactly as Henry Crawford does. Lady Bertram tells Crawford his reading is as good as a play, and he says how much he would like to play Shylock or Richard III. The Bertram brothers have also from boyhood read Shakespeare with their father, and Fanny often reads to Lady Bertram out of the volumes of Shakespeare in the drawing room. When the young people wander in the wilderness at Sotherton, avoiding and pursuing one another at cross purposes, the resemblance to the lovers in the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is obvious; what is more, it leads on to theatricals, in which lovers are again divided and humiliated, and even those who would expect to remain aloof find themselves drawn in, as Titania was. When Edmund urges Fanny to accept Crawford, her cry of “Oh! never, never, never; he never will succeed with me” is a reminder of King Lear’s five times repeated “Never” as he holds his youngest daughter dead in his arms; and Fanny is in effect Sir Thomas Bertram’s Cordelia, the misprized third daughter who alone remains staunch.

  15. JA accused Hannah More of “pedantry and affectation” in her Coelebs in Search of a Wife, published in 1809 to considerable success. One of its themes is the contrast between corrupt town ladies and innocent country girls. Coelebs chooses as his bride one who is constantly examining her own conscience for possible failings, and devotes herself to gardening and good work with the poor in the village.

  16. Support for the view that ladies were generally in favour of abolition is found in Fanny Austen’s diary, or pocket-book, for 1809, which contains an anti-slavery story in the printed matter at the front (see Appendix II). The publishers who printed and sold the pocket-books must have had good reason to assume this would be popular. Brian Southam’s arguments are made in “The Silence of the Bertrams,” TLS, 17 Feb. 1995, pp. 13–14. Southam argues convincingly that JA places the book in the years 1810–13, i.e., after the dates which made the shipping of slaves illegal. From May 1807 no ship could legally sail from any port in the British Empire with slaves, and from Mar. 1808 no slaves could be landed. This did not mean the trade stopped—it continued illegally—and it remained a divisive issue; slavery itself was not abolished in the Empire until 1834.

  17. JA to Fanny Knight, 23 Mar. 1817.

  18. CEA to Philadelphia Whitaker, 18 Aug. 1811, AP, p. 248.

  19. Fanny’s diaries for 15 July 1809 and 9 Sept. 1811.

  20. JA wrote to CEA after Eliza’s death, 16 Sept. 1813, saying she and their niece Fanny were sharing accommodation at Henrietta Street and were “very well off indeed, & as we have poor Eliza’s bed our space is ample in every way.”

  21. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 26.

  22. William and R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters, a Family Record, pp. 106–7.

  23. “Austen, Maund, Austen & Co. 10 Henrietta St” appears in the printed list of banks in Eliza Chute’s diary for 1813; the second Austen can only be Francis.

  24. Fanny Austen, then at Chawton House with her father, wrote in her diary that her Aunt Jane arrived on 30 Apr. “with Mrs. Perigord.”

  25. The epitaph can no longer be seen, but the text is given by Deirdre Le Faye, “Hancock Family Grave,” Jane Austen Society Report (1981), p. 183. It was copied in 1881 when St. John-at-Hampstead recorded all the tombstone inscriptions.

  22

  DEDICATION

  1. Chapman conjectures that she was Frances Burdett, who died in 1846, and was the aunt of Baroness Burdett-Coutts. She told JA that she liked Mansfield Park less than Pride and Prejudice, noted in the “Opinions,” Minor Works, p. 432.

  2. Madame de Staël had a hard time with English literary ladies. Fanny Burney also broke off friendship with her because of de Staël’s irregular private life. But Miss Berry went to her dinners during her stay in London in the winter of 1813–14, meeting there among others John Murray the publisher, Mrs. Siddons, Kemble and the Duke of Gloucester; and she went to the theatre with Byron.

  3. The OED suggests that “coze” is an amalgam of “cozy” and the French causer.

  It gives no earlier usage than Austen’s in Mansfield Park, which suggests it is her coinage. 4. This Don Juan was nothing to do with Mozart, although it was done with music; it was a “pantomime,” based on the Restoration playwright Thomas Shadwell’s comedy of 1675, The Libertine.

  5. James’s wife Mary Austen kept one from 1810, Fanny Austen from 1804. Since the fragment of a JA diary exists for 1807, it is possible JA destroyed such earlier ones herself, leaving only the later ones for CEA to refer to, since only Emma and Persuasion are given exact dates in her memorandum.

  JA could also have used them in relation to the internal chronology of some of her novels, since they laid out the weeks and holidays clearly. Sir Frank MacKinnon (1871–1946), a high court judge with an interest in the eighteenth century, first suggested that JA used almanacs in fixing dates. Chapman agreed with him, and between them they assembled only partially convincing evidence that she did so for the final version of Pride and Prejudice and for Mansfield Park.

  6. Arne’s opera of 1762, with a text from Pietro Metastasio, was popular and continued to be performed well into the nineteenth century; it was written with two parts for castrati, but presumably adapted. Mrs. Jordan played Nell on 7 March, Miss Hoyden in A Trip to Scarborough on 10 March, when Byron saw her. JA does not name her, but Genest gives the dates of all her performances of this, her last London season. She fell ill in April, and was then summoned to Essex to care for one of her married daughters during a difficult confinement (a reason JA would have sympathized with). After this she returned to Covent Garden and continued to act until the end of the season in June. Henry Austen’s house at 10 Henrietta Street was two doors away from her first London lodgings at No. 8.

  7. The phrase is from Fanny’s diary for 8 Apr. 1814; so is the account of the Alton illuminations and supper for the poor, which she walked into Alton to watch, being at Chawton with her father in May.

  8. Fanny’s diary for 20 June, when she was staying at Henrietta Street, reads: “Uncle HA went to Whites Fête at Burlington House.”

  9. The case was not settled until after JA’s death, and Edward was obliged to pay £15,000 to get the Hintons to agree to a settlement. Information from Caroline Austen, Reminiscences (1986), pp. 38–9, and Deirdre Le Faye, A Family Record, pp. 194–5.

  10. Caroline Austen, Reminiscences, p. 40.

  11. Text given by Geoffrey Grigson in the TLS for 19 Aug. 1955, p. 484. Although Scott published Waverley anonymously, the Austens were among the many in the secret, doubtless through John Murray.

  12. See Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen, pp. 11–12, for JA’s initial reluctance about the dedication. Within a year 1,250 copies of Emma were sold, but sales fell sharply after this. As Jane Aiken Hodge points out on p. 125 of The Double Life of Jane Austen, Murray remaindered both Emma and the second edition of Mansfield Park he published in 1816 five years later, in 1821. Neither was reprinted until Richard Bentley’s edition in 1833.

  13. JA to JS Clarke, 11 Dec. 1815.

  14. JA to CEA, 26 Nov. 1
815.

  15. From Scott’s diary for 14 Mar. 1826, first published by J. G. Lockhart in his Life (1837–8).

  23

  THE SORCERESS

  1. Francis Austen’s account at Hoare’s Bank gives his half-pay and investment income. Clive Caplan has found from Directories and bank notes that Francis was a partner from 1806 to 1809.

  Eliza Chute’s diary for 1816 has a printed list of London banks at the front which gives “Austen, Maunde, Austen & Co.” I think it reasonable to assume the second Austen is Frank.

  2. See Mrs. Austen’s account of this in a letter to Jane Leigh-Perrot, 4 Jan. 1820: “from the unfortunate spring of 1816 poor Henry has had hardly anything for himself.—Frank also was so much a loser that he was unable to make me any remittance.” AP, p. 264, corrected text from Deirdre Le Faye’s private transcript. James continued to give £50 a year, and there was no rent to pay, and free firewood supplied by Edward. In 1820, after the death of James and the settling of Edward’s case, he was allowing his mother £200 a year.

  I have not been able to trace any will made for Eliza; if she died intestate, her estate would have gone to her husband.

  3. JA reports this to CEA in her letter of 8 Sept. 1816.

  4. Caroline Austen, Reminiscences, p. 48.

  5. Deirdre Le Faye gives Henry’s stipend and the date of his appointment, A Family Record, p. 212.

  6. She does not mention being unwell, but Henry’s biographical note reads: “the symptoms of a decay, deep and incurable, began to shew themselves in the commencement of 1816.”

  7. The novelist Mary Brunton described the regime during her visit to Cheltenham in 1815.

  8. Caroline Austen, My Aunt Jane Austen, p. 8.

  9. Reginald Farrer, “Jane Austen,” Quarterly Review, July 1917, quoted at length by Brian Southam in Vol. II of Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage; this quote from p. 270.

  10. Anne Elliot is the second daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and foolish baronet, a widower with no son; the Somerset estate will go to a cousin, William Elliot. Eight years before the story opens, Anne had been engaged to a young naval officer, Wentworth; her mother’s friend Lady Russell had advised her to break off the engagement on the grounds that he had no fortune, and she had unhappily done so. Eight years later, her younger sister Mary has married a neighbouring land-owner, Charles Musgrove; Anne is slighted by all the family, her looks are fading, and she deeply regrets breaking her engagement.

  Sir Walter is obliged to curtail his expenses and decides to let his house to Admiral Croft and move to Bath for a season. Anne goes to stay with Mary and becomes part of the large Musgrove family party. Mrs. Croft turns out to be Captain Wentworth’s sister, and he is introduced to the Musgroves; he has made a fortune in prize money, and is now a most desirable husband. He and Anne meet, with shrinking unhappiness on her side and an apparent indifference on his; his attentions are all for the two pretty Musgrove sisters, and there is a general assumption he will marry one of them.

  A party is made up to visit Lyme Regis, where Wentworth’s friend Captain Harville is staying; he is mourning for his sister, who has died young, and consoling her fiancé, Captain Benwick. In Lyme, Louisa Musgrove falls from the Cobb and seems to be seriously injured; Wentworth blames himself—they had been fooling about on the steps—and realizes everyone expects him to marry her should she recover. Anne joins her father and sister in Bath; they are both somewhat in the power of a flattering widow, Mrs. Clay, daughter of the family lawyer, who accompanies them. Young Mr. Elliot turns up; he has noticed Anne at Lyme and been struck by her appearance. Lady Russell encourages his attentions to Anne, but Anne remains doubtful about him. News comes that Louisa is better, and that she and Benwick are now engaged. Wentworth appears in Bath; he becomes jealous of Mr. Elliot’s attentions to Anne. She learns from an old friend that he is a person of bad character; and soon he and Mrs. Clay both prove themselves such. When Wentworth proposes to Anne again, she joyfully agrees to marry him at last.

  11. See R. W. Chapman, “Jane Austen’s Text,” TLS, 13 Feb. 1937, p. 116.

  12. JA to Fanny Knight, 13 Mar. 1817. It is a relief to know that Harriet survived the medical treatment and the illness, and lived another fifty years.

  13. Dickens was five in 1817. The Dickens family home in Portsmouth must, incidentally, have been rather like the Price household in Mansfield Park ; they left for London in 1816. As it happens, monologues were in the air; Dickens was later greatly influenced by the actor Charles Mathews (1776–1835), who devised and performed “monopolylogues” on stage, impersonating a series of characters with great brilliance. He began these in 1808, but they did not become famous until around 1817. And although JA saw Mathews perform in London in 1811 and 1814, the first time at least was in a Molière adaptation, and it is unlikely that she ever heard him do his solo performances. Her credit is all her own.

  14. Caroline sets this visit in Mar. rather than Apr., but it does not seem to fit with other events and is more likely, I think, to have taken place after CEA’s return from her uncle’s funeral in Berkshire.

  15. She gave it to a Liverpool physician, and it was still in the possession of his granddaughter in 1926, when she had it published in The Times. Now in the Pierpont Morgan Library. All this from R. W. Chapman’s notes to his edition of Jane Austen’s letters, supplemented by Deirdre Le Faye’s notes in her edition.

  24

  COLLEGE STREET

  1. James Austen to James-Edward Austen, 12 June 1817, cited in George Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage, pp. 111–12. The words “an extraordinary circumstance in her complaint” suggest that Lyford did diagnose a specific illness. Cancer would be expected to produce pain, and would be likely to go unnamed.

  2. Charles’s diaries are in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (AUS/ 109).

  3. This is Margaret Anne Doody’s persuasive conjecture in her 1993 edition of Catharine and Other Writings.

  4. The comic verses “Venta,” dated 15 July 1817, were said by Henry in his biographical note to have been written by Jane on “the day preceding her death.” I agree with Chapman that it seems unlikely she would have produced the six stanzas even three days before her death. He suggests they might be James’s lines, although it seems equally unlikely he would be writing comic verse while his sister lay dying. Chapman points out that neither the Memoir of 1870 nor the Life of 1813 makes any mention of them. He did, however, print them among the Minor Works , pp. 451–2.

  5. So he told Mrs. Austen, who passed it on to Anna in a letter cited by Deirdre Le Faye in A Family Record, p. 230.

  6. CEA to Fanny Knight, 20 July 1817.

  7. CEA’s letter of 20 July speaks of her appearance as she lies in the coffin. When Cassandra died in 1845, her nephew James-Edward Austen told his sister Anna that her coffin in the dining room prevented the assembled family from eating there, obliging them to take their meals in the drawing room. Of the two front rooms at College Street (now made into one, but then separate), both low ceilinged, one is about 10 ft by 15 ft, with a sashed bow window; the other is slightly larger, with windows front and back.

  8. Eliza Chute’s diary for 24 July records “fine pleasant” weather.

  9. “Candour” did not mean what it means today, as R. W. Chapman explained in his note “Miss Austen’s English” in Vol. I of his 1923 edition of the novels. It was defined by Dr. Johnson as “free from malice; not desirous to find faults” and used by JA herself in Pride and Prejudice to mean “to take the good of every body’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad.” That Jane Austen lived by the highest Christian values of self-abnegation and charity needs no spelling out; equally, the three prayers she wrote for herself, carefully composed as they are, are also entirely conventional, and indicate that her faith was calm rather than questing. As Henry wrote at the end of his biographical note, “her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church.”

  25

  POSTSCRI
PT

  1. Although the title-page bears the date 1818, they were ready for sale at the end of Dec. 1817. It was a four-volume edition costing twenty-four shillings.

  2. Both cited by Deirdre Le Faye, A Family Record, pp. 234–5.

  3. He had printed 1,750 copies.

  4. Caroline Austen, Reminiscences, p. 57.

  5. Eliza Chute to Emma Smith, letter of 1828, quoted by Maggie Lane, Jane Austen’s Family through Five Generations, p. 210.

  6. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 117.

  7. Lewes writing in 1859, cited by Brian Southam in his introduction to Vol. II of Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, p. 21.

  8. Cited by Southam in Vol. II of Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage , p. 18.

  9. Henry Austen to Richard Bentley, 24 July 1832, British Library Add. MSS 46611, ff. 305.

  10. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, pp. 11–12.

  11. Mary Dorothea Knatchbull married at nineteen Edward Knight the younger—they were not related by blood, but connected through the marriage of Fanny (his sister) to Sir Edward Knatchbull (her father), which was one of the reasons for his opposition to the marriage. The couple settled at Chawton Manor and were very happy but for the rift with her father. He finally agreed to see her again after ten years, and the next year she died in childbirth. Edward Knight then married Adela Portal and fathered a second large family.

  12. Information from Joan Corder’s unpublished thesis of 1953, “Jane Austen’s Kindred” at the College of Arms, London. Of the four children of Charles’s grandson Charles John, the eldest (another Charles John), born in 1881, started work as a bricklayer and moved on to driving the bread van because he liked horses; he died in 1905, leaving a son Geoffrey, who became a salesman for Morris Motors and had no children. Francis, the grocer’s assistant, was born in 1887 and died unmarried in 1916. Edith, born in 1884, made a good career for herself teaching in schools, mostly in the West Country, and aware of her connection with Jane Austen; she died in 1949. The youngest boy, Herbert, born in 1889, was apprenticed to the printing trade, served in both world wars, married in 1915 and was proprietor of the Eastgate Press in Bridgwater in 1952. He told Joan Corder that he had in his possession “the Davenport which belonged to Jane Austen and a family tree going back to 1500 and some (crested) silver.” It was his son who emigrated to Argentina, and his daughter Margaret, born in 1918, who married Melvin Greengrass of New York in 1945.