Jane Austen

by Catherine Reef

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Epigraph

  GENTLE AUNT JANE?

  THE NOVELIST IS BORN

  LOVE AND LOSSES

  UPROOTED

  AN EXTRAORDINARY FATE

  LIGHT, BRIGHT, AND SPARKLING

  VICE AND VIRTUE

  “IF I LIVE TO BE AN OLD WOMAN...”

  LASTING WORDS

  OUR OWN JANE AUSTEN

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Jane Austen’s Works

  Picture Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Clarion Books

  215 Park Avenue South

  New York, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2011 by Catherine Reef

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  LCCN 2011008146

  ISBN 978-0-547-37021-7

  eISBN 978-0-547-57414-1

  v2.0313

  For Jennifer Greene

  I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreable.

  —Jane Austen, May 13, 1801

  one

  GENTLE AUNT JANE?

  Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?

  —PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

  CHARLOTTE HEYWOOD, twenty-two, has grown up healthy, useful, and obliging. Away from home for the first time, she waits in a sitting room at Sanditon House to be greeted by her hostess, the twice-widowed Lady Denham. It is early in the nineteenth century, and as Charlotte waits, she ponders. Why does a large, full-length portrait of Lady Denham’s second husband hang above the mantelpiece? In contrast, the great lady’s first husband, Mr. Hollis—the man who built Sanditon House—is portrayed in a miniature that would fit in Charlotte’s palm. And what is being said just then by Lady Denham’s nephew, Sir Edward, to the penniless Clara Brereton? Charlotte glimpsed the secret lovers outdoors, holding a private conversation, as she traveled up the broad, handsome approach to Sanditon House...

  Most of Jane Austen’s handwritten manuscripts have been lost, but her unfinished last novel is one that survives. Austen called this story The Brothers, but after her death, her family changed its title to Sanditon.

  Then Jane Austen’s characters fell under a spell. When Austen put down her pen on March 18, 1817, too ill to add another word to her story, she made time stand still for Charlotte and the others. For two centuries, not a clock has ticked in Lady Denham’s mansion or in the surrounding town; not a speck of dust has fallen there. Charlotte Heywood waits and wonders, her eyes focused on the tiny portrait of Mr. Hollis, never blinking. Lady Denham stands frozen in place, one foot raised, poised to enter the sitting room. Clara and her suitor sit motionless, side by side forevermore.

  How Austen would have finished her last novel, Sanditon, remains a mystery, one of several that confound the fans of this much-loved author. Millions of people throughout the world read and enjoy Austen’s books; she and her novels are the subjects of countless films and adaptations; but very little is known about the woman herself. What did she look like? Did she have “fine naturally curling hair, neither light nor dark,” as one of her many nieces recalled, or “long, long black hair down to her knees,” as another niece remembered? A cousin once dubbed Austen and her sister, Cassandra, “two of the prettiest girls in England,” but a niece wrote that Austen fell short “of being a decidedly handsome woman.” Jane Austen died before photography was invented. The only picture of her that survives is a watercolor by Cassandra Austen, but people who knew the author claimed it was a poor likeness.

  Cassandra Austen painted the only authenticated portrait of her sister, Jane. People who knew Jane Austen said that she bore little resemblance to this wary, unsmiling woman.

  No one knows Jane Austen’s views on religion or politics, or even what she did or thought for weeks or months at a time. Old diaries and letters can reveal much about famous people of the past, but Austen left no diaries. After she died, her relatives destroyed many of her letters for reasons that can only be guessed. Were they too personal? Might they have hurt peoples feelings, or revealed a side of Jane Austen that her family hoped to hide?

  Because her novels were published anonymously, when she died at age forty-one, readers were only just starting to learn that this country clergyman’s daughter—this retiring spinster—had authored Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and other popular novels that probe the human heart. Her family described Jane Austen to the world as they wanted her remembered. “Her sweetness of temper never failed. She was ever considerate,” wrote her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. “Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget,” wrote her brother Henry. Added one of her nieces, “I do not suppose she ever in her life said a sharp thing.”

  Not ever? It is hard to believe that such a sweet, forgiving creature would write lines such as these:

  I do not want People to be very agreable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

  For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

  Mrs. Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them.

  Jane Austen’s wit and cutting remarks on human nature make her novels fun to read.

  Austen lived and wrote as the 1700s came to a close and a new century began. Novels were still a fairly new form of literature, made popular in England by writers like Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. In 1719, Defoe wrote about a shipwrecked traveler surviving on an island in Robinson Crusoe. In 1749, Fielding entertained readers with the bawdy, comic adventures of a young man forced to make his way in the world in Tom Jones. In the early 1800s, Sir Walter Scott began drawing on history to write exciting novels like Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, books filled with romance, jousting, and the storming of castles.

  A ship wrecks off the coast of Madagascar in Daniel Defoe’s book The Adventures of Robert Drury (1807). Readers in Jane Austen’s time savored tales of danger in faraway places.

  These authors packed their novels with action. They transported their characters to exotic locales and had them escape mortal danger with barely moments to spare. They painted on big canvases, but Austen sketched on a “little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory,” she said, working “with so fine a Brush.” She wrote about the kind of people she knew well, ladies and gentlemen of the English countryside, and she confined her plots to family life, friendship, courtship, and marriage. She offered readers “little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little masterstrokes of imagination,” said the American-born novelist Henry James.

  Jane Austen began writing stories as a child growing up in her father’s parsonage. She honed and polished her work, and in 1811, when she was thirty-five years old, her first published novel appeared. Sense and Sensibility offers a cynical view of a society in which money matters more than character, and in which the people who get along best know how to hide their feelings. Like all of Austen’s novels, Sense and Sensibility concerns itself with women of marriageable age and their quest to settle happily with suitable husbands.

  More novels followed, among them the sprightl
y Pride and Prejudice, in which smart, outspoken Elizabeth Bennet teaches handsome, wealthy Fitzwilliam Darcy to overcome his haughtiness as she learns to love him; Emma, which chronicles a year in a country village during which Emma Woodhouse gains the maturity needed to marry the right man; and Persuasion, in which Austen’s oldest heroine gets a second chance at love.

  Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen portrayed Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice. These two characters are destined to fall in love despite their initial dislike of each other.

  Austen wrote in plain language and concentrated on character. Her novels reveal a deep understanding of psychology, of how people thought, behaved, and expressed themselves. Although she wrote about women and men of her own time and place, her characters still ring true, because she captured the essence of human nature.

  A twenty-first-century reader who begins a Jane Austen novel enters a distant world where money and lineage made some people better than others. Marriage often boiled down to economics: for many people, choosing the right husband or wife had more to do with gaining an income than with love. Women faced limited options. Marriage gave them social and financial security, with or without romantic love, but it carried the burden of constant childbearing and rearing. A single woman with no income had little freedom, because she depended on her family for shelter and support. Those who were qualified could teach or care for the children of others, but teaching was hard work that paid little, and governesses held a low social rank. “Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor,” Austen wrote.

  Jane Austen belonged to this world and to a big, sprawling family. She had almost no schooling and never ventured out of a small section of England. She inhabited a narrow niche, but she found in it a wealth of inspiration for her fiction. To her, gathering characters and watching them mingle became “the delight of my life,” she said. “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.”

  The softly draping garments seen In ancient Greek and Roman art Inspired the graceful, flowing women’s fashions of Jane Austen’s time. Many women chose muslin, a finely woven cotton, for their dresses, and they preferred white and pale shades to dark, somber colors. Dresses had high waists and low necklines, and sleeves often extended past the elbow. This illustration is from a fashion magazine published in 1800.

  two

  THE NOVELIST IS BORN

  My conduct must tell you how I have been brought up. I am no judge of it myself.

  —THE WATSONS

  “LAST NIGHT the time came, and without a great deal of warning, everything was soon happily over,” wrote the Reverend George Austen on December 17, 1775. The night before, his wife had safely given birth to the couples seventh child, Jane. Her father called her “a present plaything for her sister Cassy, and a future companion.” He baptized her in the Church of St. Nicholas at Steventon, where he preached every Sunday.

  The baby thrived, like all the sturdy Austen children, starting with James, the oldest. He was considered the writer in the family. Handsome Edward was easy to like, and gangling two Henry learned early how to use his natural charm. Cassy—Cassandra—would be Jane’s closest friend and companion, making their father’s prediction come true. And little Frank had a mind of his own.

  George, the second boy, was healthy, too, but he had epilepsy and was deaf and slow to learn. He lived nearby, with paid caretakers who treated him kindly. No one knows how common it was for the disabled to live apart from their families. Generally, history remembers developmentally disabled people from Jane Austen’s time only if they were poor. This is because their neighbors paid for their care, and their names became part of the parish record. Families like the Austens, who had a large enough income, supported their disabled members, whether these people lived at home or with others.

  Children’s voices filled the parsonage at Steventon, where the Austens lived, and young feet thundered up and down the stairs. As if seven children were not enough, the Reverend Austen ran a boarding school for boys. From August until Christmas, and again from February through June, pupils slept in the garret and mastered Latin and classical Greek in the parlor below. When not teaching, Jane’s father wrote weekly sermons, ministered to the people of Steventon and nearby Deane, and oversaw Cheesedown Farm, in the northern part of the parish. Selling the farm’s bounty, like teaching, brought in needed money.

  Jane Austen’s childhood home, the Steventon parsonage, was torn down in 1828.

  His wife, Cassandra Leigh Austen, worked hard, too. She cared for her children, cooked meals, and washed clothing and bed linens for her family and the pupils. She tended the kitchen garden, milked the cows, fed the chickens, collected their eggs, and sewed the family’s clothes. She had a quick mind and composed poems for her children and her husband’s pupils to enjoy, and she played the piano. Mrs. Austen may have been a humble clergyman’s wife, but she was distantly related to nobility. She was proud of her aristocratic nose, with its bump high on the bridge and pointed tip.

  The Reverend George Austen was “a profound scholar” and a man “possessed of a most exquisite taste in every species of literature,” wrote one of his sons. He read aloud to his children, and once they could read to themselves, he let them choose freely from the hundreds of books shelved in his study. He owned a microscope that let him see the pearly eyes of insects, the “animalcules” living in a drop of water, and other minute wonders of God’s creation.

  The Reverend George Austen had an active mind and encouraged his sons and daughters to read.

  English people of the 1700s believed that nature revealed the power and wisdom of the Almighty. They also believed that God had placed kings and queens above dukes, earls, and viscounts. Titled nobles in turn were superior to the gentry—the refined, educated class to which the Austens belonged. The social order was so complex that different levels existed even among the gentry. Being knighted, having a prominent surname, or owning land that had been in the family for generations placed someone in the highest tier. At lower levels were bishops, smaller landowners, military officers, physicians, and clergymen like Jane’s father, who were educated but had relatively little money. The upper classes and the landowning gentry looked down on people who took money in exchange for goods and services, no matter how much wealth they accrued.

  The nobility and gentry took pride in their manners, which had been drilled into them almost from birth. An elaborate code of etiquette governed every social interaction, however trivial. It dictated how ladies and gentlemen entered a dining room for dinner, who spoke first when people were introduced, and where a lady might walk and with whom. Displaying proper manners to everyone, regardless of station, showed “good breeding,” or a solid upbringing. Yet these arbitrary rules had another purpose as well. They “seem to have no object but exclusiveness,” commented a nineteenth-century writer. In other words, they separated “good society,” to whom they were second nature, from the newly rich, who had mastered them imperfectly.

  The rules of inheritance further complicated the system. In Jane Austen’s time, the oldest son generally inherited everything from his parents. If a family had no sons, then the estate went to the male relative next in line, possibly a nephew. This custom protected estates from being divided up, but it forced younger sons to seek their own fortune, perhaps to become clergymen or military officers. It also excluded daughters, forcing many to rely on the men in their families for support.

  Men who had made fortunes in industry strived to acquire land and titles, hoping to distance themselves from common merchants and tradespeople. Luckily for them, it was not impossible to gain admission to a higher social circle. There were plenty of families among the upper classes who were short of cash and eager to acquire it.

  Marrying a woman from a wealthy manufacturing family could make life easier for a gentleman with financial worries. The connection would also raise the status of the woman’s family, allowing everyone to gain. Of
course, some people ignored the rules and married for love, for better or worse.

  If the poor were part of English society, then this was God’s will, too. Every community had its population of people in want: laborers who had grown too old or sick to work, widows, and orphans. The law required each parish to look after its needy. Citizens were charged a tax, called the “poor rate,” which bought food and firewood for the poor and paid their rent, medical bills, and burial costs. The parish found work for the able-bodied and bound poor youths as apprentices so they could learn a trade. Christians had a solemn duty to help the poor. Jane Austen knew the impoverished people living in the humble cottages of Steventon, and like all the ladies in her social circle, she gave them clothing, blankets, and other things they needed.

  Two children from a family of gentry give a coin to a beggar in this painting from 1793. Like all children of their class beyond the age of three or four, the brother and sister are dressed like adults. The beggar boy, who depends on charity, lacks a hat and shoes.

  Steventon, with its rolling hills and winding lanes, was in the county of Hampshire, in southern England. Other places offered more beautiful views, but Steventon was known for its charming hedgerows. These borders of trees and undergrowth defined meadows, gardens, and property lines. They sheltered nesting birds, spring wildflowers, and benches for strolling ladies who stopped to rest. Steventon was in the country, but nightly carriages brought mail and passengers to and from London.