Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  9. Juvenilia, p. 241.

  10. Record, p. 89n.

  11. ‘Lines Written at Steventon’, Complete Poems, p. 73.

  12. See her letter to her newly married granddaughter, Anna Lefroy, in 1814, Record, p. 218.

  13. The works in question are The Loiterer by James and Henry Austen; Edward Cooper’s Sermons; George Cooke’s Sermons; Cassandra Cooke’s Battleridge: An Historical Romance; James Henry Leigh’s The New Rosciad; Cassandra, Lady Hawke’s Julia de Gramont and the works of Egerton Brydges.

  14. Memoir, p. 90.

  15. See her obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 74, pt ii, pp. 1178–9.

  16. Brydges (1834), p. 40.

  17. Sonnet XVI, Brydges (1785), n.p.

  18. Brydges (1834), p. ix.

  19. ibid.

  20. ibid., pp. 40–41.

  21. Memoir, p. 174.

  22. Complete Poems, p.4.

  23. ibid., p. 26.

  24. ibid., p. 20.

  25. Memoir, p. 16.

  26. Austen et al., no. 1, p. 4.

  27. ibid., p. 3.

  28. ibid., p. 4.

  29. ibid., no. 53, pp. 328–9.

  30. ibid., no. 9, p. 52

  31. Peter Sabor gives a very useful summary of the various arguments for and against the identification of Austen as ‘Sophia Sentiment’ in his edition of Austen’s Juvenilia, pp. 356–62.

  32. Austen et al., no. 60, p. 365.

  33. Tucker, p. 99.

  34. Austen et al., no. 1, p. 3.

  35. Some critics believe that these two plays could have been by James himself, but Peter Sabor’s noting of a manuscript change from ‘they’ to ‘it’ makes it much more likely that JA is referring to her own works. See Juvenilia, p.61 and notes.

  36. Juvenilia, p. 65.

  37. ibid., p. 71.

  38. ibid., p. 154.

  39. Mary Leigh’s ‘History of the Leigh Family’ and her husband’s note about her novel-writing are in the Leigh MSS at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, DR 671/77a.

  40. Gilson, p. 89.

  41. See, for example, Cassandra Cooke’s unpublished letter to Fanny Burney d’Arblay of 22 November 1796, MS British Library, Egerton 3698, f. 127.

  42. Burney, vol. 3, p. 137.

  43. ibid, p. 140.

  44. For this, and connections between Camilla and other Austen works, see my Fanny Burney: A Biography, pp. 268–70.

  45. Critical Review, n.d., quoted in Raven et al., p. 778.

  46. Farnell Parsons, ‘Jane Austen’s Passage to Derbyshire’, Report 2002, pp. 34–9.

  47. Brydges, preface to Mary de Clifford, p. iv.

  48. Brydges (1834), p. 6.

  49. Brydges, Mary de Clifford, p. 208.

  50. P&P, p .403.

  51. Letters, p. 22.

  52. Brydges (1834), p. 10.

  53. Letters, p. 22.

  54. MS Morgan, 2911.

  55. Record, p. 104.

  56. P&P, p .41; NA, pp. 107–8.

  57. Letters, p. 26.

  58. St Clair, p. 249.

  59. Letters, p. 199.

  60. Cassandra Austen to Mary Lloyd, 30 November 1796, Record, p. 99.

  61. L’Estrange, p. 305.

  62. Record, p. 50.

  63. 8–9 January 1799, Letters, p. 35.

  64. Letters, p. 44.

  65. Gilson, p. 24.

  66. NA, p. 30.

  67. CH, vol. 2, pp. 228–9.

  CHAPTER 2

  Praise and Pewter

  In his Memoir of Jane Austen, James Edward Austen-Leigh said of his aunt, ‘I do not think that she was herself much mortified by the want of early success. She wrote for her own amusement. Money, though acceptable, was not necessary for the moderate expenses of her quiet home. Above all, she was blessed with a cheerful contented disposition, and an humble mind; and so lowly did she esteem her own claims, that when she received 150l. from the sale of “Sense and Sensibility”, she considered it a prodigious recompense for that which had cost her nothing.’1

  Even given the conventions of Victorian biography and the fact that the writer was the subject’s nephew, this is a remarkably inaccurate view of Jane Austen’s attitude to her profession. Austen was mortified by the humiliating rejections and delays she faced in the first half of her career, did want to make money and had no intention of ‘writing for her own amusement’ alone. While she never needed or desired to adopt the difficult life of a full-time female ‘hack’, like Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Inchbald or Ann Radcliffe, neither was she ever the bland dabbler of James Edward’s imagining (or of Henry Austen’s earlier portrait, on which it is based). She may not have craved the society of other writers, but did want readers – lots of readers – and money, which, like fame, was very ‘acceptable’ to her indeed. ‘Tho’ I like praise as well as anybody,’ she wrote in 1814, with bracing directness, ‘I like what Edward calls Pewter too.’

  Perseverance was the quality Jane Austen recommended to her niece Anna, a fledgling writer, in 18152 and which she possessed herself almost to the point of bloody-mindedness. She needed a powerful work ethic to see her through years of writing, revising and adapting a growing collection of unpublished and – as far as she knew – possibly unpublishable works. Hardly any of Austen’s original manuscripts have survived; only the fragmentary ‘Sanditon’ and ‘The Watsons’, the finished but unpublished ‘Lady Susan’, a short and unpolished dramatisation of scenes from Richardson’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ and two cancelled chapters of Persuasion, so it is difficult to reconstruct Austen’s working methods, and Austen’s work. The six major novels only exist for us as finished items, as if they really had been produced effortlessly by that ‘cheerful contented’ person whose writing ‘cost her nothing’. But a memorandum compiled by Cassandra gives some idea of the timescale involved in their composition, and the doggedness of this genteel lady writer:

  First Impressions begun in Oct 1796

  Finished in Augt 1797 – Published afterwards, with alterations & contractions under the Title of Pride & Prejudice.

  Sense & Sensibility begun Nov. 1797

  I am sure that something of the same story & characters had been written earlier & called Elinor & Marianne.

  Mansfield Park, begun somewhere about Feby 1811 – Finished soon after June 1813

  Emma begun Jany 21st 1814, finished March 29th 1815

  Persuasion begun Augt 8th 1815

  Finished Augt 6th 1816

  North-hanger Abby was written about the years 98 & 99 C.E.A.3

  The most persistent theory about Austen’s creative life, put forward by James Edward Austen-Leigh and repeated endlessly ever since, is that she had two ‘phases’ of composition, in the 1790s and after 1809, which were divided by eight years of dearth; that the family’s move to Bath in 1801 silenced her and that her muse returned only when she settled back in Hampshire. Austen left no diaries or pocketbooks, very few letters from the period before 1800 and no letters at all from May 1801 to September 1804, so these are, indeed, difficult years to reconstruct. But while it is impossible to quantify the extent of Austen’s writing activity and business with publishers during this time, there is no reason to suppose she didn’t have any. We know that she had three full-length novels finished or in progress in 1801, that her father solicited publication for one of them in 1797 and that she was successful in selling ‘Susan’ in 1803, so she may have sent manuscripts to other publishers too, and had other rejections. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how the author of ‘First Impressions’ and ‘Elinor and Marianne’ could have borne to leave them festering in a drawer year after year.

  The Austens’ move to Bath gave them excellent access to booksellers, literary societies, circulating libraries and the general gossip about books and authors which the family – and especially Jane and her father – loved. In Bath, they would have felt far better connected with the world of books and print than in rural Hampshire; there were plenty of bookshops and on
e of the country’s largest circulating libraries on Milsom Street. Since there is nothing to suggest that George Austen withdrew his approval of his daughter’s writing after the snub from Cadell, it seems entirely possible that he renewed his efforts on her behalf. It was through a bookseller in Bath, according to her nephew, that Jane Austen had her first contact with the London publisher Benjamin Crosby, known for his list of Gothic romances and trade in remainders. Crosby had been joint publisher with a Bath bookseller called Cruttwell in 1800 of an account of the trial for shoplifting of Jane Austen’s aunt, Jane Leigh Perrot. Perhaps there was pressure on Jane to maintain the connection; Mrs Austen had been particularly keen to show solidarity with her wealthy, childless sister-in-law over many smaller matters.4 In the spring of 1803, Jane Austen sold Crosby the manuscript of her Gothic satire, ‘Susan’, for ten pounds outright.5 The business, conducted anonymously through Henry and his lawyer friend William Seymour, seemed to please the publisher as much as the author: he promised ‘an early publication’ and advertised ‘Susan; a Novel, in 2 vols’ as one of the New and Useful Books that he had ‘in the press’.6

  For twenty-seven-year-old Jane Austen and her family, this must have been an intensely exciting time. Crosby’s acceptance of the manuscript crowned a decade of effort on the part of the author and rewarded her family for their support. It came at a very significant moment in Austen’s life. A few months earlier, on a visit to her Hampshire friends Catherine and Althea Bigg, Jane had received a proposal of marriage from her friends’ younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, heir to a splendid and substantial family home, Manydown House, near Basingstoke. It is usually assumed that Harris’s offer came out of the blue, but without any letters from this year or the previous one, it is impossible to tell how intimately acquainted the couple were. The fact that Jane accepted his proposal – even though she withdrew her acceptance within hours and fled from Manydown – indicates that she had anticipated his move, and considered in advance the possibility of marrying him. The visit itself may have been structured around a courtship that had been going on for months: it’s hard to imagine that Bigg-Wither would have dared risk speaking to her otherwise. Whatever the circumstances, Jane’s reversed decision was a turning-point in her life. In December 1802, Austen teetered on the edge of becoming the mistress of a beautiful estate near to her native Steventon and, almost inevitably, becoming the mother of lots of little Bigg-Withers; in the spring of 1803, she was a free woman, and about to be a published writer. The acceptance of ‘Susan’ must have helped her to justify to her family her refusal of Bigg-Wither. The £10 she received from Crosby would not, of course, have gone far towards her upkeep (apart from her disabled brother George, Jane was the only one of her siblings who was wholly dependent and incomeless), but helped to show that her preoccupation with writing wasn’t entirely solipsistic.

  Austen was buoyed up enough by the prospect of having her first novel in print to set to work on an entirely new one, ‘The Watsons’, the story of a young woman, Emma Watson, who reenters her own family after twelve years of living with richer and more refined relations. If her later experience is anything to go by, Austen would have been focusing intensely on the forthcoming publication of ‘Susan’, for when in 1811 she was in a similar position, waiting for the appearance of Sense and Sensibility, she said to Cassandra that she was ‘never too busy’ to think of it; ‘I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.’7 Months passed, however, and ‘Susan’ never appeared, nor was there any communication from Crosby in explanation. Austen must have got tired of having to account for it to those of her intimates who enquired when the novel would be out; like any form of abandonment, it could only have caused her deep mortification and embarrassment.

  When the Reverend George Austen died suddenly at home in Bath in January 1805, aged seventy-three, Jane lost both a beloved, like-minded parent and the best supporter of her literary endeavours. George Austen had been anticipating his younger daughter’s debut as a novelist for several years, but never lived to see one of her books in print. His death left the Austen women heavily dependent on the charity of the remaining Austen men, and Jane’s new situation, as an unmarried, unprotected and now virtually penniless twenty-nine-year-old, was borne in on her forcefully as she and her sister and widowed mother moved to and from a series of rented houses in Bath and Southampton during the next four years, ending up sharing the home of her sister-in-law Mary and brother Frank (who, as a Captain in the Navy, was often on active service in the war with France at this time).

  While it was clearly a time of retrenchment and change, Austen is unlikely to have given up her habit of writing in these years: it’s as unlikely as her not having written any letters in the same period. We just don’t have the documentation any more. The novel begun in Bath, ‘The Watsons’, had started promisingly, but was put aside after about 17,000 words. However, the watermark of another manuscript, the completed epistolary novel ‘Lady Susan’, shows that it was written – or rewritten, or copied – in 1805. Scholars are divided on dating its origins; though there is no rule saying that authors all have to ‘progress’ from one mode to another, in form and tone ‘Lady Susan’ seems to belong to the juvenilia rather than the mature novels, and the surviving 1805 manuscript is very clean (unlike ‘The Watsons’, which is full of evidence of working). The inference is that ‘Lady Susan’ is older than its paper. Perhaps Austen meant to submit it for publication at this date, or change it more: it would, after all, have been odd to have two novels in circulation with such similar titles as this and ‘Susan’.

  Austen clearly still had manuscripts going around the family, for their private enjoyment. Cassandra, who made a particular pet of their eldest niece, Fanny Knight, after the death of Fanny’s mother in 1808, must have shown the teenager one of Jane’s manuscript novels as a mark of favour and intimacy when she was visiting their brother Edward’s house at Godmersham in Kent. Responding to this news in a letter of January 1809, Jane makes some interesting remarks to Cassandra about this very small expansion of her readership. She feels her prose is already affected by the consciousness of an audience, and fears further ‘hurt’:

  I am gratified by [Fanny] having pleasure in what I write – but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning Criticism, may not hurt my stile, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset, it would be charming.8

  Austen was perhaps feeling nostalgic for the helter-skelter brilliance of her youth, and the reassuring degree of control she used to have over her well-disposed home audience. There is a lot of freedom in being unpublished, and she had been unpublished a long time. Her letter also shows a deep self-consciousness about being entertaining, and making it look effortless. The metaphor of the rain in the storecloset is brilliant, not only enacting her self-critique of ‘looking about for an illustration in every corner of the room’, but suggesting what trouble such luck might be. Even more striking is the sense of watchfulness over her own development, a concern with the danger of falling off, or stiffening. This evidence of writerly anxiety and self-monitoring, from an unpublished author, is surely very unusual. It shows how seriously Austen took her own vocation, published or not.

  In the first years of the new century, she was, of course, expecting that Crosby’s edition of ‘Susan’, however long delayed, would eventually appear. But having sold the copyright outright and anonymously, she had no rights over her own book, no dealings with the publisher and had to resign herself to waiting. In 1809 an anonymous novel called Susan was advertised in the press, which Austen and her family must have thought at first was her book, negligently brought out at last, without notification, by Crosby; further investigation would have shown that, as with ‘First Impressions’, she had been pre-empted again, and her title used by someo
ne else. On 5 April 1809 she was moved to write to Crosby, under an assumed name, to complain about the non-appearance of her own ‘Susan’. Six years of frustration and bottled-up disappointment come to the surface in this, her most angry letter, written in the person of ‘Mrs Ashton Dennis’ (perhaps in an attempt to sound older and more significant than a mere Miss). The incognito helped her to be especially forthright, telling Crosby that she could only account for his negligence ‘by supposing the MS by some carelessness to have been lost; & if that was the case, am willing to supply You with another Copy if you are disposed to avail yourselves of it, & will engage for no farther delay when it comes into your hands’.9 The offer of another copy was possibly just to call his bluff, as Austen does not seem to have been in the habit of keeping copies of manuscripts (though she did copy this letter: it is our only record of it). But she was clearly furious at the treatment she had received, and Crosby’s likely decision not to publish ‘Susan’ at all. She insisted on no more delays, not even to her letter, which should be answered ‘as soon as possible, as my stay in this place will not exceed a few days. Should no notice be taken of this Address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work, by applying elsewhere’. The assumed name allowed her to sign off dramatically, ‘I am Gentlemen &c &c MAD. –’

  Mrs Dennis’s ultimatum, coming so vehemently out of the blue, seemed to irritate rather than shame the publisher. In his curt, prompt reply, Crosby’s son Richard denied that there had ever been any agreed timetable for publication, and pointed out that the firm owned, but was in no way bound to publish, the manuscript. He even slipped in a threat – ‘Should you or anyone else [publish it] we shall take proceedings to stop the sale’ – before admitting that he was nevertheless prepared to sell the goods back to her ‘for the same as we paid for it’.10

  It was a very unsatisfactory conclusion: Crosby sitting on the rights, and obviously unwilling to publish; Austen forced to find £10 if she wanted to retrieve the work and submit it elsewhere. The £10 was a large sum for her, but not an impossible one. Judging from her later careful marshalling of her earnings from writing, she might have saved some or all of the money she got for the book in 1803, or have put some by over the years from her modest allowance of £10 a year. Henry spent as much as this every time he and his wife threw a party – and to Edward, who had inherited the Knight fortune and name by this date, and whose income from Hampshire estates alone averaged £5,000 a year, it would have been a very small sum indeed. But Jane never would have dreamed of borrowing from her brothers, even to ransom back her book; her professional and personal pride would not have allowed it. One only has to look at how carefully she budgeted for possible losses later to see how much store she set by remaining independent in these matters.