Letters to Alice

by Fay Weldon

  So you must understand there were compensations to be found in virginity, in abstinence, in fidelity, and in spinsterhood, which are not found today, and read Jane Austen bearing this in mind.

  There were more positive compensations for living in this terrible time. The countryside must have been very, very pretty. The hedgerows and blasted oaks had not been rooted out by agro-industrialists, and wild flowers and butterflies flourished to brighten the gentle greyish greens of the landscape. These days the greens are brighter and the fields are smoother, thanks to insecticides, nitrates and herbicides. And everything you looked at would have been lovely: furniture (if you had any) made of seasoned oak, and by craftsmen working out of a tradition unequalled anywhere in the world —usefulness working in the service of grace. New and different buildings going up everywhere, as the population grew and the middle classes with it, but built in the Italian style of three or four hundred years back. (Go to Florence today, and a terrace you could swear was Georgian turns out to be Renaissance. There’s a true culture shock for any members of the cultivated English classes, to whose ranks I am so busily trying to promote you.)

  The Bath we know today grew up around Jane Austen’s ears, and the proportions which suited the ancient Greeks, and the later Italians, still seem admirable: it is not newness which shocks her successors, in those parts of old Bath newly demolished to make way for the concrete functionalism of new Bath, merely ugliness.

  But it’s all, I fear, swings and roundabouts. Perhaps landscape, buildings and objects had to be beautiful to compensate for the ugliness of the people. Malnutrition, ignorance and disease ensured a hopping, shuffling, peering, scrofulous population, running short of eyes and limbs. Crutches, peg-legs, glass-eyes and hooks were much in demand. If the children had pink cheeks it was because they had TB. Do not be deceived by the vision of Georgian England as a rural idyll. Artists of the time liked to depict it as such, naturally enough: (well, except for Cruikshank and Rowlandson who — I hope — went to the opposite extreme) and so did writers, and while you are reading Jane Austen you are perfectly entitled to suspend your disbelief, as she was when she wrote. Fiction, thank God, is not and need not be reality. The real world presses forcibly enough into the imaginative adventure that is our life, without fiction aiding and abetting.

  During Jane Austen’s lifetime — she was born in December 1775 and died in July 1817 — attitudes, they say,* changed significantly. They became, for a time, before the rigours of Victorian puritanism set in, more relaxed. The age of puberty declined; sexual activity in women was less surprising and less alarming; young women, increasingly, chose to marry for love and not at their parents’ choosing. There was an increase in the marriage rates, a lowering of the age of marriage, and a dramatic rise in the illegitimacy rate. Women became more fertile, for good or bad. The rate of infant mortality decreased. The statistics we know: the rest is the kind of sweeping generalization writers of non-fiction love to make, probably more or less true, and good enough for the likes of you to pass examinations on the strength of. ‘Attitudes’ may not have changed: simply, what happened, did.

  Why, you ask? Better nutrition, a new understanding of hygiene, the aftermath of the French Revolution, the loosening of the stranglehold of the Church, more novels and better novels read by more people in the opinion-forming ranks of society, better poetry — not wide-sweeping social changes, waves in the body politic but the sharp focusing power of individuals — who? Lord Byron? James just-call-me-Steam Stephenson? Blake? Shelley? Jane Austen? The Prince Regent?

  Any theory will do until the next one replaces it. Being a writer, I like the better-novels theory, which I hereby give you. If the outer world is a mere reflection of the inner one, if as you refine the person so the outer aspects of the world are refined, so will social change work from the inside out, from the individual out into the wider community. Enlighten people, and you enlighten society. How’s that?

  That is enough for now. I had a letter from your mother. She has not written to me for many years. I fear she may think I am an unsettling influence on you: I know your father feels that feminists (as non-feminists regard me) are dangerous to the structure of society in general and marriage in particular, and does not want the women in his family to have too much truck with me, and the arrival of the £500 will have set too many cats amongst too many pigeons, but I am being as responsible and informative and helpful as I can, so do reassure your mother, and if you care to bring the subject up, your father.

  With love,

  Aunt Fay

  *Mind you, they’ll say anything. Do remember.

  LETTER THREE

  A training in docility

  Cairns, December

  MY DEAR ALICE,

  We clearly cannot go on if I don’t give you the broad outline of Jane Austen’s life. I was brought up, as were many of my generation, with a vague knowledge of how and where she lived, and a general association between her and elegant Regency Bath, all dandies, coaches, balls, finery and elopements. The child’s view of history. But I must assume that your knowledge is even vaguer than was mine: you tell me you belong to a Women’s Studies Group so I daresay what you do know about Jane Austen is that she was not the first woman novelist of any note, but merely the first history cared to acknowledge. Well, that’s something.

  On 16 December (your cousin Tom’s birthday) Jane Austen was born at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire. Her father George was the clergyman there. She was the seventh of eight children, and born when her mother was thirty-six. This was not, for those days, a particularly large family. The Austens were energetic and intelligent people, and all their children survived. The second son, however, was born epileptic and brought up by a family in the village, as their own: mention of him is seldom made, although he lived to be nearly seventy, longer than many of his siblings. It was a family that valued intellect highly, and I do not think Mrs Austen was of the stuff that martyrs are made. Many books on Jane Austen (and there are many, you’ll find, for these days there is a Literary Industry much as there is an Agro Industry: the former being to reading as the latter is to farming) seem determined to present Jane Austen’s life as a gentle idyll, lived long ago in the days when life could still be idyllic, before Freud made us knowledgeable and Marx made us guilty; and her family as the perfect English family, the model of all that were to come, and to ignore its vigorous and gritty reality. They may have lived in the past but they were as real to themselves as we are to ourselves, and as complex.

  The Austen family is usually described as belonging to the gentry: a class of people below the nobility but a little above the new professional classes (doctors, attorneys, merchants and so forth), who lived off inherited wealth, and had servants. The gentry thought well of themselves, and liked to despise the nobility for their rackety ways, and were despised by them, in their turn, for being worthy and boring. But the statistics of the time make a separate division for clergy of the churches of England and Scotland, and number them as 18,000 (out of a population of 11,000,000), numbering ‘nobility and gentry’ as a mere 5,000, and certainly not including the clerical classes.

  The Austen family was well-read, lively and far from boring. They lived closely together, as was customary at the time, and with evident affection. (But I don’t know how you, Alice, would put up with living in your mother’s household all your life?) And that is what Jane Austen had to do, and assumed she would do, unless she married. Respectable women in those days did not live by themselves, unless widowed, and even then would be expected to move into the household of a relative, if practicable. The old were not doomed, as they so often are these days, to live alone.

  Steventon seems a remote place even today, when the roads are good and there are petrol engines to get you about. It is ten minutes or so drive from Basingstoke, through pretty, wooded countryside. There is nothing there, these days, except more woods, and more fields, and a single large, empty, crumbling Victorian house and the charming church
opposite it, where George Austen used to preach, and a vast and benign yew tree outside it. The rectory where the Austens lived was pulled down in the 1940s, for reasons not clear to anyone. There is nothing there now: certainly no discos, no public halls, no public telephone. I imagine there was very little then: the population of Steventon in 1840 was a mere 197 inhabitants, according to a gazetteer of that date, and there is no reason to think it would have changed much since the Austens were there. ‘The living is a rectory, valued at £11 4s 7d. The manorhouse has a very antiquated appearance, and bears evident marks of former grandeur,’ says the gazetteer. Nevertheless, paradoxically, I think two hundred years ago Steventon would have seemed less isolated than it does today. It is only fifty-eight miles from London. Whitchurch, the nearest market town, was six-and-a-quarter miles to the west, and such a distance that was then considered easily walked. The country gentry were not afraid of the discomfort of travel — they visited often, by trap, coach or carriage — to stay with friends and family, or simply touring and sightseeing.

  Nor were the Austens cut off from world events. Their newspapers were informative, intelligent and discursive. It is true that the world of politics and power, dissent and revolution, feature almost not at all, in Jane Austen’s novels, but this was surely from choice rather than from ignorance. The motherless son of Warren Hastings, the disreputable governor of India, was brought up in the Austen household for a time, although before Jane’s birth. A cousin married a French aristocrat who was beheaded in their Revolution. The young men of the family went off to war. She knew enough, more than enough.

  But you must understand that political awareness, let alone action, was not as easy to come by or act upon as it is today. There was no such thing as a Parliamentary Labour Party, no Conservative Headquarters, no Friends of the Earth, or Action for the Low Paid, or Age Concern — no pressure groups to join to stop this or start that. The Church preached acceptance: the working out of God’s will here on earth: the general feeling was that since everyone was going to Heaven or Hell, according to their just deserts, what happened down here was on the whole irrelevant. Charity helped the souls of the charitable: that was its point. The filling of the stomachs of the poor with Charity Soup (made from bones and cabbage) was a by-product of the activity. The poor, the gentry felt, had an unfair head-start in the race to Heaven, anyway. Jesus had said they’d get there first, no matter what. Science assumed a gentle progress in the unravelling of the secrets of the universe, and the eventual abolition of ignorance, and with it the end of social ills.

  It would have been startling had Jane Austen shown herself ‘socially aware’ in the modern sense; that she was not can scarcely surprise, or be a matter for condemnation. She was in fact socially aware in the Georgian sense — that is, in a world only recently emerged out of barbarity, however poetic, she analysed and refined still further the new refinement in human discourse: the new interest in the underlying morality, the real not the religious morality, of the way people talk to each other, behave to each other, love or don’t love each other, and so on. She condemned and she approved; and she took it upon herself to do so, out of no authority other than that invested in her by the worldly judgments of the Austen family, and the power of her own thought, her own moral courage and, simply, her opinion. That, for any writer, is surely more than enough to be going on with.

  As children were born into the Austen household they were put out to nurse in the village. That is, other women than their mother would breast-feed them. It was customary at the time. It may or may not have been traumatic for the developing infant — you will have to consult with your pro-and-pre-and-neo-and-anti-Freudian friends. (I imagine most will be anti. It is not these days fashionable to see the self as neurotic, merely society. Twenty years ago the opposite was true. ‘People are getting nastier, society nicer’: Discuss.) Wet-nursing was a useful way for a peasant woman, especially one who had just lost a nursing infant, or had a still-birth, to earn extra money: it enabled the women of the gentry to preserve their strength and their status as spiritual beings. I was going to add and their figures, but I do not honestly believe this entered into their heads: into that of the ladies of the nobility, no doubt, and dwellers in the demi-monde, but not, I scarcely imagine, into the head of Mrs George Austen, mother of eight, wife of the Vicar of Steventon and Deane, and her like. She would have had worthier and profounder and more sensible ambitions.

  So far as parenting* in England was concerned, until as recently as just after the last war, it was considered enough for the mother (if only by proxy) to look after the child’s physical needs and the father to see that it got an education — that the child had emotional needs was not part of the general awareness. The mother’s duty was to the father, not the child, if a conflict of interest arose. In the days of the Empire, women followed their husbands around the globe, and shipped their children back to England to live in unspeakable boarding schools, where they were as like as not sexually abused, beaten, and starved, without apparent alarm to anyone. You do not know, little Alice, how recent or how lucky you are.

  In the last war, when I was a child, evacuees were shipped out of London schools to avoid Hitler’s bombs; working-class mothers would arrive at the school gate to find their children gone, with no forwarding address. Middle-class women, who organized the evacuation procedure, and who took the separation of child from mother for granted, and their husbands, who felt that for a boy to be made a man of he had to be parted from the mother as soon as possible, simply could not understand the fuss these women made. But then a psychiatrist named Bowlby, in the mid-fifties, wrote about the trauma of mother-child separation so forcibly that he terrified a whole generation of middle-class women into clutching their children’s hands every minute of their dependency, and even into discarding prams, because the use of these vehicles entailed separation. John Bowlby is now castigated as being part of the plot-against-women, and may in a sense be so, but at least the child is known to have feelings. We have to be told these things, you know. It is surprising how ignorant we are, if we rely on instinct. ‘Instinct’ usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.

  When Jane Austen was ready to be weaned — at perhaps a year old — she would be removed from her wet-nurse, the woman she must regard as mother, and put back into her family. No doubt they were kind to her. But a contemporary social worker would shake her head in disapproval and regard it as a Major Life Event of the kind that contributes to an early death in the actuarial studies of insurance companies. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, was two-and-a-half years her senior, and tradition has it, had a temper, but no doubt there were servants enough to keep the older child from attempting to smother this sudden new rival. Well, one hopes so.

  Your sister Polly is two years your junior, Alice. I seem to remember terrible incidents, when jealousy got the better of your normally sunny nature. You tried to drown baby Polly: she had to have her nose X-rayed, and how your mother worried in case radiation would get her bone marrow! We have no reason to suppose that children then were different from children now, or that they suffered less from the panic of being displaced. We just take better care (if we belong to the new, caring, maternal classes, that is) to save them from it.

  When Jane was seven, in 1783, she was sent off with Cassandra to be educated by a Mrs Cawley, the widow of a one-time principal of an Oxford College, and for this reason qualified to teach girls. One wonders why it was necessary: the brothers were educated at home by George Austen, who was a professional tutor, and if it seemed essential that the girls should have a woman’s touch, Mrs Austen was the niece of the President of Trinity, which I would have thought was more than equal to being the widow of the Master of Brasenose — but I joke…It was no laughing matter. Cassandra and Jane, the story has it, were miserable. And Mrs Cawley was horrible. She took the girls to Southampton — (why, why?) — where they both became dangerously ill with a putrid fever. Mrs C
awley did not inform the Austens, but a cousin of the girls, a Jane Cooper, also a pupil, fortunately did. The Rev. and Mrs Austen, and Mrs Cooper, came to retrieve their children. Jane nearly died: poor Mrs Cooper, contracting the infection herself, actually did so.

  That episode wouldn’t look good on the social worker’s file either. In fact, to be so traumatized at such an early age might well get you off a criminal charge in later life…But, not abashed, not having the advantage of hindsight, not even, one imagines, believing that their lives and conduct would be put to such unfair scrutiny by succeeding generations — that kind of thing they left to God — the Austen parents sent Jane and Cassandra off to another school in the following year, 1784.

  Now, I know the Rectory must have been crowded: although James was nineteen and at Oxford, and Edward, at seventeen, now lived with the rather grand Knight family (who had taken a fancy to him in his early childhood), Henry, aged eleven, and Francis, aged eight, and Charles, only five, were still at home. (Francis and Charles were to be sent off, when they reached twelve, into the navy, a savage, dangerous and fearful place for children.) And I know that Mrs Austen was behaving as mothers of her class and generation did, and I know that bonding is difficult if you don’t breast-feed, and so on, and I know that criticizing the way other mothers bring up their children is always easy and usually despicable (most of us do what we can, as mothers, in the light of our own natures), and that to have Cassandra and Jane about might have been the last straw — especially if Cassandra was peevish and Jane disdainful, and father’s pet — but even so, even so — well really, Mrs Austen!