Jane Austen

by Catherine Reef

  Or perhaps Jane Austen flaunted her country ways and well-worn dresses. She had a low opinion of the Knights’ genteel friends. “They came, and they sat, and they went,” she commented. She befriended the family’s governess, Anne Sharp, in whom she found a woman like herself: smart, single, and lacking money. Anne Sharp was clever enough to write a play that the children performed for the servants, called Pride Punished or Innocence Rewarded.

  A governess held a lonely, awkward place in her employers’ home. She had belonged to their social class until financial need forced her to take a paid position. Yet her education and past connections placed her above the servants in status. She was often on duty from early in the morning until the children fell asleep at night, every day of the week. Before going to bed, she had to help with the family’s sewing, which left her no time to herself. For all this, she earned a small salary. A governess endured “years of chilly solitude through which the heart is kept shivering upon a diet that can never sufficiently warm it,” concluded one nineteenth-century writer.

  In 1802, as winter drew near, Jane and Cassandra visited their friends the Bigg sisters. Alethea, Catherine, and Elizabeth had a younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither. Harris was to inherit their father’s riches, which included the estate of relatives named Wither. He could afford to marry whomever he chose, and on December 2, 1802, he proposed to Jane Austen. The match offered real advantages to a woman who, at nearly twenty-seven, was beyond the prime years for marriage. As Harris’s wife, Jane never would have to worry about money. When he inherited his fathers estate, Manydown would be their home, and she could invite Cassandra to live there, too. She would have a big, healthy, young husband—Harris was twenty-one. And most likely she would have children. So when Harris Bigg-Wither asked if she would marry him, Jane Austen said yes.

  That night, laughter and rejoicing echoed through the stately halls of Manydown. But the next morning, Jane asked to see Harris alone. She had made a mistake and was calling off the engagement, she said. A marriage between Jane and Harris would have been a social contract and nothing more. They were old friends, but neither one loved the other. Although some women might marry first and wait for affection to grow, Jane’s heart prevented her from marrying without love. Harris understood, but Jane and Cassandra could not consider staying on at Manydown. They left immediately for Steventon and returned to Bath the next day.

  Fortunately for everyone concerned, no lasting harm was done. Harris Bigg-Wither bore the loss well. He married two years later and went on to father ten children and live the life of a respected country gentleman. The sisters Austen and Bigg remained friends, but Jane Austen received no more proposals of marriage.

  As she traveled to all these places—to Dawlish, Lyme, Godmersham, Manydown, and Steventon—Jane toted the manuscripts of her three finished novels along with the rest of her luggage. She valued them too much to let them out of her sight. But she wrote very little while she lived in Bath, for reasons that are unknown.

  She kept alive her hope of being a published author, though, and her brother Henry helped her. Working through a lawyer friend, he offered her novel Susan to the London publisher Richard Crosby and Son in 1803. Crosby bought the manuscript for ten pounds and promised to publish it soon, but ignored it from then on.

  While she waited to see Susan in print, Jane Austen began a new novel, titled The Watsons. This story centers on Emma Watson, the youngest of six grown children. Their father is a gentleman with no fortune, a widower and an invalid. Raised by an aunt who has recently married, Emma returns to live in her father’s house. In just a few pages, Austen introduces Emma’s quarrelsome family and transports her heroine to a ball. There, Emma catches the eye of the wealthy Lord Osborne and a local clergyman, Mr. Howard. She also meets the engaging Tom Mus-grave, whom at least one of her sisters hopes to catch.

  It appears that Austen planned to explore the pros and cons of marrying for money. “Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education & feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest,” Emma tells her sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth responds, “I think I could like any good humoured Man with a comfortable Income.” Austen made a promising start, but she never finished The Watsons. Modern readers can only guess why. Perhaps Emma Watson was too perfect a heroine, a young woman with no life lessons to learn.

  Or did grief halt Jane Austen’s progress? On December 16, 1804, her twenty-ninth birthday, her brother James encountered Anne Lefroy, the family friend who had encouraged Jane’s writing but interfered in her love life. Mrs. Lefroy was out for a day of shopping in nearby Overton, accompanied by a servant. Like many gentlewomen, she enjoyed riding on horseback, but on this day she complained to James about her horse, calling it stupid and lazy. Then as she rode home, the horse bolted. The servant chased after his mistress but failed to catch the panicked steed. Mrs. Lefroy hung on, and when she thought it was safe, she tried to dismount. This was a mistake. She fell hard and died of her injuries a few hours later.

  In future years, the coming of her birthday would remind Jane Austen of Anne Lefroy. On the day she turned thirty-three, December 16, 1808, Austen wrote a poem in tribute to her old neighbor. Mrs. Lefroy might have meddled, but Austen claimed to admire this “Angelic Woman.” In her verses, she conjured up Mrs. Lefroy “as she used to be”:

  Her looks of eager Love, her accents sweet.

  That voice & Countenance almost divine...

  She speaks; ’tis Eloquence—that grace of Tongue

  So rare, so lovely!—Never misapplied...

  She speaks & reasons but on Virtue’s side.

  The first snows had barely fallen on Anne Lefroy’s grave when the Reverend Austen fell ill. According to Jane, he suffered from “oppression in the head with fever, violent tremulousness, & the greatest degree of Feebleness.” His family sent for a doctor, who applied a remedy called cupping. The doctor placed heated glass cups on the patient’s skin to draw blood toward the surface. But (no surprise) this treatment did nothing. The old man grew worse, and on January 21, 1805, he died. Jane sent a letter to her brother Frank, who was stationed aboard a ship off the English coast, informing him of the news. “Being quite insensible of his own state,” she wrote, their father “was spared all the pain of separation, & he went off almost in his Sleep.” She added these comforting words: “the Serenity of the Corpse is most delightful!”

  The man in this illustration from a European medical text has had glass cups applied to his temples. A similar treatment failed to help Austen’s father in his final illness.

  five

  AN EXTRAORDINARY FATE

  Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.

  —MANSFIELD PARK

  SEVEN YEARS I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind,” observed Jane Austen in 1805. In 1798, she had been writing novels and dreaming of seeing them published. She could expect that when she left Steventon, it would be to live in her husband’s home. Seven years later, she had put aside her writing like some childish thing. And her chances of marriage had faded with each passing year.

  The Reverend Austen’s death created a financial catastrophe for the surviving single women. The church had stopped paying his annuity when he died, leaving the women to depend on sons and brothers for support. James and Henry each gave them fifty pounds a year, but James, established in the parsonage at Steventon, might have given more. They expected another hundred from Edward, who could have easily shouldered all their expenses. Frank offered a hundred more, but his mother took only half, because he was engaged to be married and needed the money himself. If the women hoped for help from the wealthy Leigh-Perrots, Mrs. Austen’s brother and his wife, they were disappointed again.

  Jane and her mother and sister moved several times, always to cheaper lodgings, but even the rent for a small, shoddy flat in Bath was more than they could afford. Then kind Frank invited them to live in Southampton with him and
his bride, Mary, after they married in 1806. His navy career took Frank away from home for long stretches, and he hated to leave Mary alone. The three Austen women agreed to the plan, because they really had no choice. Martha Lloyd, whose mother had recently died, was to join the household as well. Jane had never liked Bath, and after she left in July 1806, she never went back.

  In Southampton the Austens lived in Castle Square. Their landlord, the Marquis of Landsdowne, dwelled with his wife in the neighboring gothic-style castle. The marquis’s marriage had caused a local scandal, because his wife had been his mistress first. The Austens’ house was old and needed repairs, but it had its charms. Its garden ran all the way to the old wall surrounding the town, and Jane looked forward to planting raspberries, gooseberries, currants, and roses. Living in Southampton brought the women closer to Steventon, so they saw more of James, his Mary, and their children, including the new baby, Caroline. They also saw Edward and his family, who had begun spending time at Chawton House, a nearby estate that Edward had inherited. Jane went on shopping trips with Edward’s oldest daughter, Fanny Knight, and enjoyed family outings.

  The castle built by the Austens’ landlord and neighbor the Marquis of Landsdowne, dominated the local landscape. Both the castle and the Austens’ Southampton home have been torn down.

  Benefits can also be drawbacks, however, and her relatives got on Jane’s nerves. She grew to dread visits from James. “His Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied from his Wife’s,” she grumbled, “& his time here is spent I think in walking about the House & banging the Doors, or ringing the bell for a glass of water.” Other family members made demands, too. Frank went to sea in early 1807, leaving the household of women to look after his pregnant wife. A daughter, Mary Jane, was born in April. (Frank’s wife, Mary, would die in 1823 while giving birth to her eleventh child, a boy named Cholmeley, who lived only briefly.)

  Jane had fun living with Martha Lloyd, though. They saw plays together and went to a ball where a dark-eyed gentleman surprised Jane by asking her to dance. Jane joked with her friend, pretending to believe that Martha was carrying on a forbidden love affair with a married clergyman.

  She also escaped by making visits. She spent time with the Fowles—the Austens’ old friends—and with the Biggs at Manydown. She never tired of seeing Henry and Eliza in London and going with them to concerts and dinner parties. Yet, as a poor woman, she traveled only when a male relative was going her way. Once she went to Godmersham, planning to stay two weeks, but her ride home fell through, and no one else was headed for Southampton. The hundred-mile trip required more than two days of travel, so her family decided that she should stay at Godmersham two more months, until Henry stopped there on his way to Hampshire.

  Two months! This meant that Jane would miss a visit from the Bigg sisters—their last visit before Catherine Bigg was to be married. She appealed to Edward, but he refused to go out of his way so that she could see her women friends. So Jane lied and said she had a private reason for needing to be home, and Edward had no choice. He took his sister to Southampton, but he made it clear that he was an important man, and she was wasting his time. “Till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things,” Jane lamented.

  Yet Edward’s sisters helped him selflessly In September 1808, Cassandra went to Godmersham to aid Elizabeth with the birth of her eleventh child. Elizabeth delivered a healthy boy, Brook John, and seemed to be recovering. Then, without warning, she died, and her doctor had no idea why. Henry rushed to Godmersham, but Jane had to stay in Southampton and could only write letters to the family in Kent. She praised Elizabeth’s “solid principles, her true devotion, her excellence in every relation of Life.” She sympathized with “dearest Edward, whose loss & whose suffering seem to make those of every other person nothing.” And she could not resist asking Cassandra, “I suppose you see the Corpse,—how does it appear?”

  As the motherless family struggled to adjust, two of Edward’s sons spent a few days in Southampton with their aunt Jane. She treated the boys with patient kindness and eased them through this sorrowful time. She took them to see a battleship being built and for a rowboat ride. She organized arts and crafts projects and games of cards and spillikins (pick-up sticks). “Her charm to children was great sweetness of manner—she seemed to love you, and you loved her naturally in return,” remembered James’s daughter Caroline. “She would tell us the most delightful stories chiefly of Fairyland, and her Fairies had all characters of their own.” Jane also joined in the children’s games. “She would furnish us with what we wanted from her wardrobe, and she would often be the entertaining visitor in our make-believe house,” Caroline said. Prim Cassandra preferred serious pastimes. She once lectured the children on astronomy, giving Fanny Knight a headache.

  A favorite aunt of the children in her family, Jane Austen wrote this letter to her niece Cassy, Charles’s oldest girl, reversing the spelling of all the words.

  Even with Jane and Cassandra willing to care for their nephews and nieces, Frank and Mary were ready for a home of their own. They looked for one on the Isle of Wight, leaving Jane, Cassandra, their mother, and Martha Lloyd to worry again about where to live—but not for long. Edward offered them the choice of two houses that he owned. One was near Godmersham, in Kent, and the other was in Hampshire, close to his other estate, Chawton House. Mrs. Austen liked the place in Kent, but the others voted for Chawton Cottage. Edward remodeled it for the women, and they moved there in July 1809.

  This “cottage” was a solid, two-story brick structure with six bedrooms and two parlors. One of the parlors held a piano. Mrs. Austen, who was seventy, took charge of the garden. She was often outside in her green apron, digging up potatoes or caring for the flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees. The house sat close to the busy, noisy Winchester Road, so from time to time she left her work to watch the passing traffic.

  “The awful stillness of night” would be “frequently broken by the sound of passing carriages, which seemed sometimes even to shake the bed,” said Caroline Austen, who liked to stay with her grandmother and aunts. Caroline observed that her aunt Jane wore a white cloth cap indoors. “Such was the custom with the ladies who were not quite young,” she noted. “My two Aunts were not accounted very good dressers, and were thought to have taken to the garb of middle age unnecessarily soon.” Caroline’s brother, James Edward, remembered that Aunt Jane’s neighbors “often served for her amusement.” She “was as far as possible from being censorious or satirical,” he explained. “The laugh which she occasionally raised was by imagining for her neighbors, as she was equally ready to imagine for her friends or herself, impossible contingencies ... or in writing a fictitious history of what they were supposed to have said or done.”

  Jane rose early in Chawton. She practiced the piano before the others were awake, and then she prepared everyone’s breakfast. In Chawton, she felt settled for the first time since leaving Steventon, and at last she found the hours and the space to write in earnest. She worked at a small desk in the parlor that held the piano. She kept her writing secret from the servants and neighbors and hurriedly hid her manuscript pages when someone entered the room.

  Remembering her novel Susan, she wrote to Richard Crosby, the publisher who had paid ten pounds for it in 1803 and never printed it. Using a name that she invented, “Mrs. Ashton Dennis,” she claimed to be the author of this work. Six years had passed, so she assumed that Crosby had lost the manuscript, and she offered to supply a new one. Crosby replied that he still had the book, but he was in no hurry to publish it. Mrs. Dennis could have it back if she repaid his ten pounds.

  Ten pounds! This was more than a poor spinster could afford. So she dusted off Sense and Sensibility, the novel featuring the sisters Elinor and Marianne, and sent it to a different publisher, Thomas Egerton. Unwilling to take a financial risk on an unknown female writer, Egerton offered to publish this novel if the author paid the costs. Again Austen
faced the same old obstacle: money. But this time Henry and Eliza came to her rescue and paid for the book to be printed.

  Printing a book took a long time in Jane Austen’s day, when type was set by hand, letter by letter. In March 1811, Jane stayed with Henry and Eliza in London while she looked over the proofs—the first, unbound printed pages of her book. Then she waited eagerly for the finished book to appear. “I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child,” she said. At last, in October, Sense and Sensibility was published anonymously, in three volumes.

  Printing was a slow, tedious task in the 1800s, Three workers operate an English printing press by hand.

  The novel focuses on sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who are forced out of their home after their father’s death. Elinor possesses “strength of understanding and coolness of judgment”; she displays good sense by keeping her emotions in check. Marianne, meanwhile, indulges in sensibility, or feeling. She is “eager in every thing,” Austen wrote; “her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.” The person forcing the women out is their weak-willed half brother, John. The son of their father’s first wife, he has inherited the family estate. Although he promised his father to take care of Elinor, Marianne, and their mother and younger sister, he lets his greedy wife, Fanny, talk him out of doing what is right.

  Mrs. Dashwood’s wealthy cousin, Sir John Middleton, offers the women a home at Barton Cottage, where they will be his neighbors. Sir John hates to be alone and surrounds himself with company. He is constantly dropping by to invite the women to dinner parties. He introduces them to his friend Colonel Brandon, but Marianne dismisses the colonel as “an absolute old bachelor, for he was on the wrong side of five and thirty.” Surely a man of his great age was too old to be in love! “He talked of flannel waistcoats,” Marianne says, and she connects these practical garments “with aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble.” She prefers the younger Mr. Willoughby, who rescued her when she turned her ankle while walking in the countryside.