Jane's Fame
Page 6
1809 was a difficult year for the family’s finances generally. The death of the Reverend Austen had left his widow and daughters with only Mrs Austen’s sinking stock in the South Seas and Cassandra’s annuity from the money left her by Tom Fowle. Edward covered the expense of settling his mother and sisters in a new home, a cottage belonging to his estate in Chawton, Hampshire (getting the cottage plumbed properly cost over £35 alone), and all the brothers were paying cash to maintain the household, an arrangement which was a struggle for the youngest, Charles, in particular. The transition from being a not-yet-married daughter to being a spinster sister and long-term burden must have been extremely distasteful to Jane, and the last thing she would have spent £10 of anyone’s money on in 1809 was the repurchase of a manuscript. She might have been cutting her losses in another sense too, for ‘Susan’ was getting old, and would have needed time and work to bring up to date. In fact, ‘Susan’ may have seemed to her a lot more out of date in 1809 than it did in 1816, when she did finally regain possession of the novel after the bankruptcy of Crosby & Co.
The stalemate over ‘Susan’ didn’t stop Austen’s continuation with writing during these years, reflected in the production-line efficiency of her output from the year she did first get published, 1811, to her death in 1817. Though in 1809 she didn’t get the opportunity to review her Gothic satire, she had the other 1790s novels, ‘First Impressions’ and ‘Elinor and Marianne’, still to hand, and must have been working on both of them in the years 1805–10. ‘Elinor and Marianne’ emerged as ‘Sense and Sensibility’, presumably to chime with ‘Pride and Prejudice’, the new name for ‘First Impressions’. In the first year at Chawton, she was still making adjustments to ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, the fragmentary novel begun in 1791; in the manuscript she has replaced an illegible detail (probably ‘parasol’) with ‘Regency walking dress’ and inserted a reference to Hannah More’s 1809 novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Many other changes, including the heroine’s name to Catharine from Kitty, may date from the same set of revisions. It seems rather extraordinary that Austen was keeping this story from her teens in play at all, but she displayed a strong reluctance to abandon any of her work entirely, however old or incomplete.
The manuscript of ‘The Watsons’ intriguingly reveals Austen’s method of revising by pinning slips of paper over sections of text to be amended where there isn’t room simply to cross through and write above the line; a nineteenth-century version of cut-and-paste. The sheets of paper are small, and her writing economically tiny, indicating that Austen was probably in the habit of making a draft or drafts like this and fair-copying at least once (to produce the evenly spaced and beautifully clear script of ‘Lady Susan’ and her letters, for example). Her use of dressmaking pins to attach corrections to ‘The Watsons’, and as staples in ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ (written on paper watermarked 1796 and 1799), is a nice connection between her writing life and her domestic life, displaying ‘a particular feminine frugality’, as Kathryn Sutherland has remarked.11 The two manuscripts show another habit of composition, which they share with ‘Sanditon’ too: Austen liked to write these early drafts on large sheets of paper cut and folded to make small booklets of around eight pages, which were easily portable and became a series of quires. She certainly had time to expend on the labour. Some critics think that ‘The Watsons’ was subsumed into Pride and Prejudice or Emma, but the similarities are tentative, and though Austen was unwilling to throw anything useful away, she doesn’t seem to have kept drafts for which she had no further use.
By 1810, ‘Sense and Sensibility’, rewritten at least twice, was completely revised and ready to be sent out as Austen’s latest bid for publication. This is unlikely to have excited her family much: they were possibly getting a bit tired of Jane’s lack of success. Henry was her agent again, and knew the man they sold to, Thomas Egerton, from Egerton’s printing of The Loiterer in 1789–90. The deal was to publish on commission, with Egerton paying all the costs and getting a 10 per cent commission on sales, and the author liable for all losses. It was quite a gamble for Austen, who, as Henry later recalled, ‘actually made a reserve from her moderate income to meet the expected loss’.12 Did she really expect a loss, or was this the spendthrift Henry’s inability to understand financial caution? He also claimed that his sister only published Sense and Sensibility against her own inclinations, but all the evidence in Austen’s own letters is quite to the contrary.
The relief and joy to the author of selling the book can be gauged by the fact that, as after the acceptance of ‘Susan’, she began immediately on an entirely new novel. This one, known later as Mansfield Park, was carried on and finished within two years and four months, the first of Austen’s books not to be composed in fits and starts over a much longer period. She must also have been working on the revision of ‘First Impressions’ into Pride and Prejudice, since it was lined up ready to be offered to the publisher after the publication of Sense and Sensibility, and from what she said in 1813 of having ‘lopt & cropt’ it extensively,13 the work of revision took time.
Jane spent several weeks in London in April 1811, at Henry and Eliza’s house in Sloane Street, a busy visit full of social events, coinciding – deliberately, one imagines – with the arrival of the first proof pages from Egerton. The proofs needed little adjustment, though Austen attempted to bring the book right up to date by adding a reference to the twopenny post – introduced in 1809 – and Marmion, the bestselling poem published anonymously by newcomer Walter Scott in 1808. Austen had initially expected her novel to be published in May, but hope of that was fading; even June sounded unlikely. ‘Henry does not neglect it,’ Jane told Cassandra, who was staying at Godmersham and had been discussing the forthcoming event with Edward’s adoptive mother, Mrs Knight. ‘He has hurried the Printer, & says he will see him again today.’14 But there was a long delay before the book finally appeared in October, leaving Jane plenty of time to fear a repeat of the Crosby debacle. Meanwhile, other writers were making impressive debuts and she was getting left behind. This was worse than bad novelists stealing her titles. Hearing the anonymous 1810 novel Self-Control (by Mary Brunton) talked up among her friends, Austen tried to get hold of a copy, but was feeling anxious about it, as she told Cassandra: ‘I … am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever – & of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.’15
The circle of people who knew about Jane’s authorship was small up to this point, and among the many nieces and nephews, only the eldest, Fanny Knight, was in on the secret. She had more than one letter that autumn from her aunt Cassandra ‘to beg we would not mention that Aunt Jane Austen wrote “Sense & Sensibility”’.16 In truth, there wasn’t much need to worry about secrecy; the author must sometimes have hankered for less of it, and probably didn’t even know the momentous date on which the novel, in three volumes, ‘By A Lady’, was eventually published. She had the congratulations, or otherwise, of her closest family and friends, and James composed a poem for her on the occasion, but news of the book’s reception in the wider world filtered through to Chawton Cottage only slowly. Thomas Egerton had advertised the ‘Interesting Novel’ at the end of the year but it took three more months for the first of only two notices of the book to appear, a long article in Critical Review, in which the author praised Sense and Sensibility as ‘one amongst the few’17 good examples of the genre. Austen must have been pleased with this (if she saw it) and the enthusiastic review in British Critic three months later: ‘We think so favourably of this performance that it is with some reluctance we decline inserting it among our principal articles.’
Unknown to her, the novel was generating plenty of interest among the reading public, especially in the fashionable world. Countess Bessborough recommended it warmly to Lord Granville Gower, as ‘a clever Novel. They were full of it at Althorp’, and the Prince Regent’s only legitimate child, the teenaged Princess Charlotte, wrote to a girlfriend that she had ‘just finis
hed’ reading it and was in the grip of a strong identification with the more romantic of the Dashwood sisters; ‘it certainly is interesting, & you feel quite one of the company. I think Maryanne & me are very like in disposition, that certainly I am not so good, the same imprudence, &c, however remain very like. I must say it interested me very much.’18 There was gossip about who the author of this charming book might be: Egerton had transposed ‘By A Lady’ in one advertisement as ‘By Lady A’ – typo or sales stratagem is hard to say – and some, like the Regent’s brother, the Duke of York, imagined that the author was Lady Augusta Paget (a rather outré suggestion, as Lady Augusta was a divorcée). This sort of literary guessing-game was a popular pastime in an age where anonymity was standard practice for most authors, especially women authors. Other candidates for authorship of Sense and Sensibility over the next months included Elizabeth Hamilton and Mrs Dorset, now almost completely forgotten except in this context. As Austen’s friend Mrs Pole said of Austen’s novels a year or two later, ‘Everybody was desirous to attribute them to some of their own friends, or to some person of whom they thought highly.’19
For Austen, anonymous and uninformed in her Hampshire village, the sense of being a published author remained rather abstract. There was one amusing incident, during a visit to the circulating library in Alton with James’s daughter Anna, when the teenager came across a copy of Sense and Sensibility, ‘which she threw aside with careless contempt, little imagining who had written it, exclaiming to the great amusement of her Aunts who stood by “Oh that must be rubbish I am sure from the title”’.20 Austen was best able to measure her success through the book’s sales. By July 1813 the first edition of around 750 copies (cheaply produced for the circulating-library trade at a price of 15 shillings a set) had sold out, earning Austen a profit of £140. Having published on commission, she, of course, still possessed the copyright, ‘if that shd ever be of any value’, as she remarked to her brother Frank.21 The £140 was a very respectable sum, though nothing compared to the record-breaking deal Fanny Burney was about to sign with Longmans for The Wanderer, an advance of £3,000 that made even Byron’s eyes water (and on which the publisher lost a fortune: the second impression was pulped in 1817). To Austen, £140 was, of course, a huge increase in her personal wealth, but more importantly, it was a solid justification of her faith in herself. At last, she had reason to hope that the manuscripts she had piled up at home could be put before the public, and that she could go ahead with new novels with some certainty of them reaching an audience.
In his verse ‘To Miss Jane Austen the reputed Author of Sense and Sensibility’, James Austen had praised his sister’s personification of those qualities, and given her his best wishes, perhaps a little wistfully, ‘Oh then, gentle Lady! continue to write,/And the Sense of your Readers t’muse & delight.’22 James’s life had contracted very much since the days when he was the impresario of the Steventon theatricals and energetic editor of The Loiterer. He had taken over the curacy of Steventon (and the rectory that went with it) on his father’s retirement in 1801, and had been rector since his father’s death, but there was no return of the old gaiety in the former family home, and though James continued to write poems, there is no evidence that he sought publication for them. James’s middle age was characterised by increasing melancholy and stasis. His poems became more introspective, his cadences interestingly halting, as in this description of himself:
By the long habits of retired life
Unfitted to give pleasure, or be pleased
In large & noisy parties; and at times
But scarcely able to maintain my share
Of conversation …23
The poem’s subject was James’s reticence, bordering on inability, to accept a different post in the Church, but neither his deliberations nor his language were exactly what one would expect of a man of God: ‘Here … I am known, & borne with; but who there/Would care for me?’ Of all the brothers, he seemed the one who had most early promise and who achieved least. Edward was master of Godmersham, Henry was a successful banker, cutting a stylish figure with Eliza in London, Captain Francis Austen was earning a high reputation for rectitude and leadership in the Navy and Charles Austen was also leading an active and successful life at sea. Perhaps James had been immobilised by waiting for the substantial inheritance he was promised by the Leigh Perrots, whose great wealth got even greater in 1806 after part of the Leigh family’s Stoneleigh estate came to them. Mrs Austen’s deep agitation about the Leigh Perrot money was almost entirely on behalf of her eldest son, endlessly promised and never receiving a fortune almost equal to that of his younger brother Edward. No wonder James was brooding and embittered, and spent most of one visit in 1807 ‘walking about the House & banging the Doors’, as Jane was distressed to notice.24
Egerton Brydges had been far more successful in literary life, first with his two novels and in the new century as a connoisseur and collector of antiquarian books. At his son’s grand home, Lee Priory, he ran his own small press devoted to the republication of Tudor works and eventually became an MP who helped change copyright law for authors. The Austens’ cousin and Loiterer collaborator Edward Cooper had also become a man of letters. Cooper was a rather stringently principled young cleric, very much of the coming manner in the Church, who insisted on residing in his Staffordshire benefice rather than subcontracting his parish duties to a curate, as many ministers did. Jane had found her cousin very attractive and congenial in his youth, and admired his stance on clerical residence (the defining characteristic of Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park) and they corresponded regularly enough for Jane to mention his ‘chearful & amusing letters’ in 1801, though she guessed that religious zeal was already getting the better of him, and that he would feel ‘obliged to purge himself from the guilt of writing Nonsense by filling his shoes with whole pease for a week afterwards’.25
Cooper did get more and more evangelical, and his sermons, the first volume of which was published in 1805, notably hardline:
God sees through every disguise. He distinguishes the true character of men with infallible certainty. He now notices the specious pretender to religion. He will ere long bring to light his hypocrisy, and will at last load him with merited infamy and punishment.26
The Hampshire Austens found all this too full of ‘Regeneration & Conversion’ for their taste,27 but Cooper’s books sold extremely well. The 1809 collection went into four editions within a year, and he published many more, with numerous selections and reprints appearing all through the 1820s and 30s. James Edward Austen-Leigh remembered them ‘much preached in many pulpits in my youth’.28 Jane Austen may have had good reason to envy her cousin’s success as an author: his first publisher, gallingly, was that very Thomas Cadell who had passed over the opportunity to read ‘First Impressions’ in 1797, and even after Jane was published, Edward Cooper sold consistently better than she ever did.
Though the publication of Sense and Sensibility didn’t measure up to the success of Edward Cooper’s sermons, Jane scarcely needed her brother James’s encouragement to keep on writing, and Thomas Egerton was interested in publishing more. She had ‘Mansfield Park’ under way and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ ready for the press. ‘The 2nd vol. is shorter than I cd wish,’ she told Cassandra when all the revisions were done, ‘– but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of Narrative in that part. I have lopt & cropt so successfully however that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S.&S. altogether’.29 The experience of publishing on commission had been successful, but put the onus on the author, or her agent, to oversee a great deal of business which perhaps busy Henry wasn’t able to attend to as promptly as he might have wished in 1811, when Eliza became ill. Austen clearly wanted to hand the matter over this time, so agreed to sell Egerton the copyright of her next book for the bargain price of £110. She wrote to Martha Lloyd, ‘I would rather have had £150, but we could not both be pleased, & I am not at all su
rprised that he should not chuse to hazard so much – Its being sold will I hope be a great saving of Trouble to Henry, & therefore must be welcome to me.’30 It’s strange that she valued Pride and Prejudice at so much less than Sense and Sensibility, but perhaps – it’s an odd thought – she was simply glad to get it off her hands after so many years. She certainly derived nothing but pleasure from the contemplation of her earnings so far, writing to her brother Frank, ‘I have now therefore written myself into £250. – which only makes me long for more.’31
‘I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,’ Jane wrote triumphantly to her sister on 29 January 1813 when the first set of Pride and Prejudice arrived at Chawton; ‘on Wednesday I received one Copy, sent down by Falknor … The Advertisement is in our paper to day for the first time; – 18s.’ Austen’s surprise at what the publisher was charging (and making in profits for himself) is reflected in her next remark, ‘He shall ask £1-1-for my two next, & £1-8-for my stupidest of all.’32 Her observations were shrewd, as Egerton had not only upped the price of her book, but shaved production costs by cramming more lines on a page and using cheaper paper, since he was paying this time, as well as getting the profits. The print run of the first edition isn’t known, but is likely to have been around 700 copies. It sold fast enough for a second edition to appear later the same year, which was still available in 1815; a third edition came out in 1817. A conservative estimate of these sales (based on the print runs of other Austen novels) would be 1,500 copies – and of the gross profit to Egerton about £575: £465 more than he paid for the rights.33