Jane Austen

by Catherine Reef

  Life offered less adventure to the Austen girls. Around December 1792 Cassandra became engaged to Tom Fowle, one of the boys who had acted in plays at Steventon. It would be a long time until the couple could afford to marry, because Tom was a minister in a poor parish, and Cassandra had no money.

  Daydreaming about her own future, Jane made fanciful entries in her father’s church register. She recorded the unions of “Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London and Jane Austen of Steventon,” “Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool and Jane Austen of Steventon,” and “Jack Smith and Jane Smith late Austen, in the presence of Jack Smith, Jane Smith.” The easygoing Reverend Austen never crossed out these entries. They remain part of the record of parish weddings, christenings, and deaths.

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  LOVE AND LOSSES

  I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.

  —Letter to Cassandra Austen, January 9, 1796

  JANE AUSTEN frustrates anyone who tries to catch a glimpse of her. She seems to turn away or slip behind a hedgerow as soon as an observer draws near. A curious reader can only imagine what she looked like, based on the brief descriptions that have survived—even if these contradict one another.

  By October 1792, at age sixteen, Jane was “greatly improved as well in Manners as in Person,” from the way she appeared to Philadelphia Walter in 1788, according to Eliza de Feuillide.

  One of the Fowle brothers compared her to a doll, because she had a bright expression and “a good deal of color in her face.” Then he changed his mind and said she was really more like a child: “very lively & full of humor.” A neighbor remembered her as “a tall thin spare person with very high cheek bones,” whose face displayed “great colour—sparkling Eyes not large but joyous & intelligent.” Others recalled that she had a round face and “full round cheeks.” Some people called her eyes dark, but the family said they were hazel, like her father’s. Witnesses agreed, though, that she was tall: “tall & slight, but not drooping”; “rather tall and slender, her step light and firm.”

  This silhouette, discovered in an early edition of Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, bears the inscription “L’aimable Jane” (“The amiable Jane”). Art experts at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery think that the woman in profile is probably Jane Austen.

  That light, firm step made her a good dancer. “She was fond of dancing, and excelled in it,” Henry Austen said. Dancing was a popular social activity in eighteenth-century England. Men and women chose partners for the fashionable dances of Jane Austen’s youth, but couples danced in groups. They performed “figures,” or sets of movements, like those in American square dancing. They might step toward each other and back, join hands and circle, or cross from one position to another. Men and women formed two opposing lines for one of the liveliest and best-loved country dances, the Sir Roger de Coverley Couples doing this dance took turns stepping forward to perform their fanciest figures and then danced their way to the ends of the lines.

  Good manners required a couple to enjoy one or two dances together and then separate and pair up with others. And gentlemen took care that every lady wishing to dance was invited onto the floor. Someone, usually an older married woman, provided music on a piano.

  Country gentlefolk perform “lumps of pudding,” a popular dance.

  The Austens gathered socially with the families of clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and landowning gentlemen who had no need to work. The Bigg family, consisting of a widower with several children, lived in a nearby manor house called Manydown. Three of the Bigg daughters—Catherine, Elizabeth, and Alethea—were Jane and Cassandra’s friends.

  The Austen girls counted Martha and Mary Lloyd among their friends as well. Martha and Mary lived with their mother, a clergyman’s widow. Mary Lloyd and Jane Austen were nearly the same age, but Jane preferred Martha, who was ten years older and had a sense of humor. Mary Lloyd had survived the dreaded smallpox, which killed 400,000 Europeans every year in the 1700s. Most of the deaths occurred in cities like London, where people lived packed together and smallpox was a constant threat. In 1779, a typical year, smallpox killed twenty-five hundred Londoners. Every so often an epidemic erupted, and smallpox spilled into the countryside, infecting and killing people there.

  There was nothing to be done for people who caught smallpox except pray that they survived. Painful blisters burst out on their skin, often covering every bit of the face. Their skin felt as if it were on fire and sometimes came off in sheets. This evil disease tortured the body’s surface without mercy, but it did its worst damage inside, attacking the throat, lungs, intestines, liver, and other organs. Smallpox had left Mary’s face badly scarred, but she was lucky to have escaped the blindness and other disabilities that were common among survivors. No one in Jane Austen’s lifetime knew that a virus caused smallpox, but those who blamed it on “animated atoms” were on the right track.

  The Lloyds and the Fowles were cousins, and Martha and Mary’s sister had married one of the Fowle brothers. The Georgians approved of marriage between first cousins, because it kept money and property within a family.

  The Austens’ social circle also included the Lefroys. The Reverend George Lefroy, his wife, Anne, and their three young children occupied the rectory in Ashe, the village beyond Deane. Anne Lefroy wrote poetry, and she encouraged younger writers, including Jane Austen. She was a great reader who could recite Shakespeare’s verses from memory.

  At Christmas in 1795, the Lefroys had a visit from their nephew. Tom Lefroy was nearly twenty and had grown up in Ireland. Blond, handsome, and smart, he was soon headed for London, to study law. He met Jane Austen when the Biggs hosted a holiday ball at Manydown and hung lanterns in their greenhouse to illuminate the night. Immediately, Tom and Jane felt drawn to each other, and they seemed not to care who knew it.

  Society expected correct, dignified behavior from a woman who had reached the age for marriage. A young, single woman was to be chaperoned in public at all times, and she was to speak to a gentleman only if he had been properly introduced. She could write to him only if they were engaged, and she knew never to be alone with him. Jane and Tom skirted the rules of decorum, attracting the attention of their elders.

  Cassandra Austen missed the shameful display, because she was staying with the Fowles in Berkshire, but Jane told her all about it in a letter. Twenty-year-old Jane asked her sister to imagine “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” Jane and her “Irish friend” had met three times, but already Tom Lefroy was being teased about her. They would see each other again before he left Hampshire, at a ball hosted by his aunt and uncle in the rectory at Ashe.

  This letter to Cassandra, dated January 9, 1796, is the earliest piece of Jane Austen’s correspondence that escaped destruction. It reveals a carefree young woman joyously in love who believes herself loved in return. She passes along news of friends and family but keeps returning to the subject most on her mind: Tom Lefroy. His jacket is too light in color, she writes, but this is because he admires Tom Jones, the hero of Henry Fielding’s novel, who wore white when he was wounded.

  Jane was just as buoyant five days later, when she wrote to Cassandra again. This time, she confided that she expected to receive an offer of marriage during the ball at Ashe. “I shall refuse him, however,” she joked, “unless he promises to give away his white coat.”

  The proposal never came, though. Tom’s family had big plans for him, and they did not include marrying a penniless girl. The son of an army officer, Tom needed a wife who would bring wealth to the match. Her money would allow him to live in an affluent style and make friends who could help him get ahead. The Lefroys noticed the budding romance and nipped it early by hurrying Tom off to London. Jane never saw or heard from him again.

  How she bore up—whether she cried, went without sleep, and let the world see her sorrow—cannot be known. The next letter that Cassandra spared from the flames was w
ritten seven months later, in August, when Jane’s feelings were under control.

  Jane dared not ask anyone about Tom Lefroy, but she listened closely when her father did. During a visit to the Steventon parsonage in November 1798, Anne Lefroy told the Reverend Austen that Tom had finished his studies in London and was returning to Ireland. Within a year he married an Irish heiress, with whom he would have a big family. He went on to serve in Parliament, and in 1852 he was named lord chief justice of Ireland, which was then under English rule. He might possibly have enjoyed the same success with Jane as his wife, but it would have been much harder to achieve. In old age Tom Lefroy admitted that he was once in love with Jane Austen, but he said it had been a “boyish love.”

  Thomas Langlois Lefroy, who carried on a brief youthful romance with Jane Austen, served as chief justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench in Ireland, retiring at age ninety.

  Anne Lefroy introduced Jane to another man in 1797. The Reverend Samuel Blackall, a graduate of Emmanuel College in Cambridge, expected to be appointed to a good parish soon. He liked company and conversation, and he was at an age to marry. Who could be a more suitable mate than the smart daughter of a fellow clergyman? No one knows how the meeting went, but in 1798 Blackall wrote to Anne Lefroy that he looked forward to seeing the Austens again. He had “the hope of creating to myself a nearer interest.” But, he added, “at present I cannot indulge any expectation of it.” His words imply that Jane had been blind to his charms. If Anne had hoped to make a new match for Jane, to atone for the one her family had prevented, the plan failed.

  Jane’s comments back this up. After seeing Blackall’s letter, she wrote with relief to Cassandra, who was staying with Edward at Godmersham, that the marriage-minded minister would not be visiting the Lefroys. “And it is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual, unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me.” Anne Lefroy had little to say about the matter. Jane wrote: “Perhaps she thinks she has said too much already.”

  When Austen learned much later that Blackall had finally married, she recalled him mockingly as “a piece of Perfection, noisy Perfection himself.” His wife, she said, would need “to be of a silent turn & rather ignorant, but naturally intelligent and wishing to learn.”

  Other people might divert love’s course in real life, but novelists can devise happy endings. Jane Austen’s heroines would marry their chosen suitors, despite differences in income and class. By the time she met Tom Lefroy, Austen had begun a novel in letters called Elinor and Marianne. It focused on two sisters, one who relies on caution and good sense, and another who follows her heart. In October 1796, she began another novel, First Impressions, which featured a family of modest means with a flock of daughters nearing the age for marriage.

  First Impressions delighted Jane’s family and friends. Martha Lloyd read it so many times that Jane playfully accused her of scheming to memorize it and publish it herself. The Reverend Austen thought it was good enough to be printed. He sent his daughter’s manuscript to a distinguished London publisher, Thomas Cadell, without revealing the author’s name. Cadell thought less of the novel than the author’s proud father did, however. He scrawled across the top “Declined by Return of Post” and sent it back to Steventon.

  The novels Jane Austen wrote in her twenties were longer than the Juvenilia. As an adolescent she had imagined characters who behaved badly and had placed them in ridiculous circumstances. Even Lady Susan, a novel-length work written when she was eighteen, featured a heroine whose heart was so cold that she forgot she had a daughter. This was all quite amusing, but as Austen grew into adulthood, she sought greater challenges as a writer. She began creating characters with the ambitions, talents, fears, and quirks of real human beings. She placed them in realistic situations that revealed their flaws and tested their strengths. She was learning to apply her wit sparingly, but with greater effect. A dedicated writer, she wrote steadily, even in times of grief.

  Sorrow visited Austen and her family on a regular basis. Too often in the late eighteenth century, sickness and accidents snatched away people who only a short time before had been young and full of health. One day in 1795, Anne Austen, James’s wife, felt ill after eating dinner. Within hours, she was dead, the cause of her death a mystery. Little Anna went to live with her grandparents and aunts at the parsonage in Steventon.

  When Jane Cooper fell in love with Captain Thomas Williams of the Royal Navy, her happiness seemed certain. The couple soon married, with Jane and Cassandra Austen serving as witnesses. In 1796, when her husband was knighted for commanding a ship that helped capture two French vessels, Jane Cooper Williams became Lady Williams. Two years later, she was driving a two-wheeled carriage, enjoying the scenery on the Isle of Wight, off England’s southern coast, when she collided with a runaway workhorse. She was thrown to the ground and killed.

  Misfortune targeted Cassandra Austen, too. At the close of 1795, her Tom—Tom Fowle—joined the army. He was to be chaplain in a regiment that was sailing to the West Indies to fight the French. Military service would take him away from England for more than a year, but Lord Craven, the nobleman in charge of the regiment, had promised to place him in a thriving parish after the war. Fowle’s reward would be a decent income and the chance to marry much sooner.

  Cassandra expected Tom Fowle to return in spring 1797, but “alas instead of his arrival news were received of his death.” Fowle had died of yellow fever in February, and the news had taken three months to reach England. “Jane says that her sister behaves with a degree of resolution & propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation.” The person describing Cassandra’s strength is not Jane, who was at her sister’s side, but Eliza, whose information was secondhand. Any letters that Jane might have written about this unhappy time were later torn up and tossed into a fire.

  Cassandra Austen gave up all thoughts of marriage at age twenty-four, upon learning that her fiancé had died.

  Lord Craven swore that he never would have let the young minister sail to such a disease-ridden place if he had known about the engagement. His words failed to comfort Cassandra, though. Twenty-four and beautiful, she decided never to marry. She put on the cloth cap and high collar of a middle-aged woman and hurried into spinsterhood.

  No one weathered more storms, however, than Eliza de Feuillide. Early in 1791, her mother, Jane’s aunt Philadelphia Hancock, discovered a lump in her breast. It was the first sign of the cancer that would kill her. Eliza hoped for “the unspeakable happiness of seeing my beloved parent restored to Health,” but Hancock looked forward to pain, illness, and certain death. The only remedies to be had were quack cures, and one of these gave temporary relief. By the end of the year, she needed laudanum, a drug made from opium, to dull her pain, and she died in February 1792.

  Philadelphia Hancock enjoyed a more adventurous life than most Englishwomen of her time, living in both India and France.

  “Poor Eliza must be left at last friendless and alone,” predicted her sourpuss cousin, Philadelphia Walter. “The gay and dissipated life she has long had so plentiful a share of has not ensur’d her friends among the worthy: on the contrary many who otherwise have regarded her have blamed her conduct & will now resign her acquaintance.”

  Eliza confounded those small minds that gloated over her bad fortune. Her friends stayed loyal, and her husband came from France to be with her in her grief and, at long last, meet his son. He had to hurry home, because France threatened to seize his property if he stayed away too long, but he hoped to return to England soon. Eliza fought off melancholy and did her duty, as she saw it.

  She doted on her son, but she worried about him, too. Little Hastings was sickly, and he suffered frequent, violent seizures that damaged his brain. When most children his age learned to talk, Hastings made noises but said no words. While they took their first steps, he had to be carried. He would learn to walk and
talk only with great effort. There would be no paid caretakers for Hastings, though. Eliza kept the “dear little Boy” close to her and gave him the very best care that she could. She took him to seaside spas, hoping that ocean bathing and salty air would build his strength.

  Meanwhile, the count faced danger as a nobleman in France. The French Revolution had given way to the bloody Reign of Terror. After abolishing the monarchy, France’s new leaders saw enemies everywhere: in neighboring nations and states, within the Roman Catholic Church, and especially among the nobility. They beheaded thousands of real or imagined traitors, including the queen, Marie Antoinette, who was executed on October 14, 1793. Neighboring peasants attacked Eliza’s husband and laid waste to his estate, but he survived. By February 1794 he was in Paris, where he tried through bribery to free an aged noblewoman from jail. He was promptly arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to death. The count lost his head on the guillotine on February 22, 1794.

  A proper waiting period elapsed before Henry Austen asked Eliza to marry him in 1795, but she turned him down. A year later, the widowed James Austen also proposed marriage to her, and she refused him, too. She hated to give up “dear Liberty, & yet dearer flirtation,” she said. But liberty could be lonely, so when Henry renewed his proposal, Eliza said yes. Henry earned a steady income as an army captain, and Eliza knew “the excellence of his Heart, Temper, and Understanding.” Henry cared for Eliza, but more important to her was “his Affection for my little Boy.” It hardly mattered to Eliza—or anyone else—that she was ten years older than her husband-to-be. When she and Henry married in 1797, the Reverend Austen sent forty pounds to Henry’s regiment to pay for a celebration.