In the meantime, one of the doctors treating Henry revealed that, as physician to the Prince Regent, he knew that His Royal Highness was ‘a great admirer’ of Miss Austen’s novels and kept a set in each of his residences. Few people could have been less flattered by this information: Jane thoroughly disapproved of the Regent and had sided strongly with his wife during their scandalous public wrangling at the time of the divorce proceedings. But when the doctor informed the Prince that the author was presently in London, Jane received an invitation to visit his library at Carlton House and be received by the librarian, the Reverend James Stanier Clarke. This questionable treat took place on 13 November 1815. Jane was given a tour of the ornate and garishly coloured palace, stuffed with gilt and ormolu and velvet hangings, and in the Gothic library Mr Clarke repeated the Prince’s praises and passed on his permission – which she had never sought, of course – to dedicate her next book to him.
Such an offer was tantamount to a command, and caused Austen some anxiety about protocol, though Murray was pleased with the honour and found the correct, fulsome form of words for the dedication. In the meantime, Mr Clarke had begun to pester the author with suggestions for future subjects, something about a clergyman perhaps, who passes his time between the town and the country, who is fond of literature and is ‘no man’s Enemy but his own’ – someone, indeed, rather like himself. Austen’s attempts to rebuff him and Clarke’s increasing insistence on the value of his advice make one of the most amusing exchanges in Austen’s surviving correspondence, but also give us a glimpse of what she had to put up with as a woman of extraordinary talent and originality being patronised by nincompoops. When she answered politely that such a character as Clarke suggested would be beyond her range and would require ‘A Classical Education, or at any rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English Literature’,61 he countered helpfully with a much fuller outline of the proposed novel, complete with just such little touches of sophistication as she had confessed lacking:
Make all your friends send Sketches to help you – and Memoires pour servir – as the French term it. Do let us have an English Clergyman after your fancy – much novelty may be introduced – shew dear Madam what good would be done if Tythes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother – as I did – because the High Priest of the Parish in which she died – did not pay her remains the respect he ought to do. I have never recovered the Shock. Carry your Clergyman to Sea as the Friend of some distinguished Naval Character about a Court – you can then bring forward like Le Sage many interesting Scenes of Character & Interest.62
Clarke insisted that his rooms in Golden Square, ‘my Cell … where I often hide myself’, were ever at her disposal, with a small library and maidservant in constant attendance. Perhaps the Reverend Clarke, who has gone down in literary history as one of the great fools, was a little in love with the creator of Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price, and who can blame him?
The satirical ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’ that Austen wrote as a private response to Clarke’s advice is a very funny pastiche of his suggestions (and incidentally bears some resemblance to the storylines of Madame d’Arblay’s 1814 flop, The Wanderer) that takes malicious revenge on Clarke and those like him who had pointed out ways in which Austen could improve her writing. Two friends are in the joke with her, Mary Cooke and Fanny Knight; the other names that appear neatly in the margin, next to their attributed suggestions, are themselves victims of the satire: Murray’s reader, William Gifford, a clergyman called Mr Sherer who had not liked Emma, Martha Lloyd’s aunt Craven, and, of course, James Stanier Clarke. The beautiful and virtuous heroine of Austen’s ‘Plan’ is ‘often reduced to support herself and her Father by her Talents, and work for her Bread; – continually cheated and defrauded of her hire, worn down to a Skeleton, and now and then starved to death’:
– At last, hunted out of civilized Society, denied the poor Shelter of the humblest Cottage, they are compelled to retreat into Kamschatka where the poor Father, quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the Ground, and after 4 or 5 hours of tender advice and parental Admonition to his miserable Child, expires in a fine burst of Literary Enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives against Holder’s of Tythes.63
The ‘Plan’ is thought to have been circulated among Austen’s friends and family, but, like her recording of ‘Opinions’ about Mansfield Park and Emma, the joke could be even more private than that, a symptom of profound (not necessarily unhappy) isolation. Why seek an audience, after all, for an attack on how one is received? The phenomenon had rapidly gone beyond satire: in the ‘Opinions of Emma’ that Austen was gathering at about the same time as writing ‘Plan of a Novel’, most of the contributors felt free to point out Austen’s shortcomings in no uncertain terms: Mrs Guiton thought the novel ‘too natural to be interesting’, while Mrs Digweed, perhaps stung by the emergence of such vast literary talent among the ranks of the Chawton Reading Society, said that ‘if she had not known the Author, [she] could hardly have got through it’.64
What the Prince Regent made of Emma, if he ever ‘got through it’, is not recorded, but the dedication of the book to him, and Murray’s elegant imprint, ensured a certain amount of notice in the literary press. Most of it was extremely conventional. The British Critic described the book as ‘inoffensive and well principled’; the Gentleman’s Magazine thought it had ‘no tendency to deteriorate the heart’. For the first time, the author had some connection with the book’s reception in fashionable society, and was required to send a copy to the Countess Morley, a lady with literary interests whose husband Henry Austen was trying to secure as a patron for himself. Jane’s careful drafting of a note to her, which still exists in two versions – one in pencil, gone over in ink, the other in ink (but presumably a copy, as there is no seal, postmark or address) – betrays a painful degree of consciousness. It’s a lot of practice for a thank-you note, and the differences between the two drafts are few and trivial. Was Jane Austen intimidated by writing to a member of the aristocracy, annoyed at having to toady to Henry’s patrons, or did she often (always?) take this much trouble composing?
Austen was understandably annoyed that Murray’s dispersal of copies of Emma ‘among my near Connections – beginning with the P.R. and ending with Countess Morley’65 meant there wasn’t one available for her younger brother Charles. Among the other ‘near Connections’ of the author to whom the publisher had sent pre-publication copies were the celebrated novelist Maria Edgeworth (who was puzzled that the book had ‘no story’) and Augusta Leigh, Lord Byron’s half-sister. Augusta took it with her, in December 1815, when she moved into her brother and sister-in-law’s home to assist at the birth of their first child, Allegra. Augusta was not perhaps the expectant mother’s first choice of companion, as Lady Byron already had her suspicions about the relationship between her mercurial husband and his half-sister (which was to cause such scandal later), but we can be fairly sure that the book went down well, at least. Lady Byron, already thoroughly miserable in her marriage, was the former Annabella Milbanke who had been such an enthusiastic reader of Pride and Prejudice in 1813. As Christine Penney has remarked in a bibliographic note about this copy (which sold in 1995 for £16,000), ‘one must hope that Emma gave both women some relief from their domestic hell’.66
Three months after the publication of Emma, an unsigned article by Walter Scott, about 4,000 words long, appeared in the Quarterly, acknowledging publicly for the first time that ‘the author of Pride & Prejudice etc etc’ was a force to be reckoned with. Scott’s thoughtful, deeply appreciative overview of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma was all the more interesting given his very different mode of novel-writing from Austen’s, the ‘big Bow-wow strain’, as he was to characterise it later. He recognised her kind of novel as something new in the past fifteen or twenty years, replacing the improbable excitements of sensat
ional literature with ‘the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’.67 Readers, he said, were made to feel they really knew the characters, and could spot their counterparts in everyday society. The risk of this ‘naturalness’, Scott realised, was that everyone felt free to criticise ‘that which is presented as the portrait of a friend, or a neighbour’.
Austen was not overcome by praise from the bestseller. Though grateful for the distinction of such a long notice, she expressed displeasure to Murray at Scott’s complete neglect or ignorance of Mansfield Park: ‘I cannot but be sorry that so clever a Man as the Reviewer of Emma, should consider it as unworthy of being noticed.’68 Mansfield Park was still, for her, something of a special case, a contemporary book touching on serious themes, not likely to get its due. It didn’t receive a single review during the author’s lifetime, and ranked low in the ‘Opinions’, except among a minority of high-minded people who tended to disapprove of the frivolity of the other books. In the emerging pecking-order of the novels, Pride and Prejudice was constantly referred back to as the very best of Jane’s efforts so far; Mr Collins was often praised (except by clergymen), and characters in Emma such as Miss Bates and the Eltons proved popular, though not Emma herself, interestingly. Austen had said when she was writing the book that Emma was a heroine ‘nobody but myself will much like’, anticipating the responses of the home audience almost exactly.
Austen’s letter to Murray also contains an acid little aside about how the only comment on Emma that had reached her from the Prince Regent was on the book’s appearance. She was becoming sensitive to such slights – to any sort of criticism. Murray’s friend and reader William Gifford, for example, hardly deserved being held up to ridicule in ‘Plan of a Novel’ for his suggestion she should write about a clergyman’s daughter: he was an intelligent and keen supporter of hers. But an air of anxious disillusionment hangs around her letters of this time, as if Austen was losing faith – not in her own work, but in the ability of others to appreciate it in the ‘right’ way. Perhaps her experience of being unpublished so long, and being her own principal reader, had left her hard to please when it came to outside judgment of her ‘darling children’. In her reply of 1 April 1816 to some of James Stanier Clarke’s renewed suggestions for her future plots, she seems to be addressing herself more than him: ‘I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced I should totally fail in any other.’69
Jane’s letter of thanks to Countess Morley contains a similarly lonely, self-reflective sentiment:
Accept my Thanks for the honour of your note & for your kind Disposition in favour of Emma. In my present State of Doubt as to her reception in the World, it is particularly gratifying to me to receive so early an assurance of your Ladyship’s approbation. It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which Emma’s Predecessors have experienced, & to beleive that I have not yet – as almost every Writer of Fancy does sooner or later – overwritten myself.70
The idea of having ‘overwritten herself’ was not the only thing preying on Austen’s mind early in 1816. Henry Austen’s banking business, which prospered during the war years, suffered a corresponding slump in 1815 when farmers began to default on their debts. The country branches Henry had set up in Alton, Petersfield and Hythe came under severe strain, and over the winter of 1815–16, the Alton bank crashed. Henry’s partnerships dissolved in a flurry of asset-stripping and last-ditch mortgaging, and in March the London branch failed and Henry was officially declared bankrupt. The catastrophe brought financial losses all through the family (Jane herself lost £13.7s, though this was nothing compared to Edward’s £20,000 loss, or the Leigh Perrots’ £10,000). It also brought social and professional shame, which Jane felt much more acutely than her brother, who was soon negotiating for a career in the Church. She had to make alternative money arrangements with Murray, and let him into the ‘late sad event in Henrietta St’.71 Henrietta Street itself, Henry’s spacious house in Hans Place and the access it had afforded to London, to plays, parties, literary gossip, books and publishers, had all to be given up, of course.
According to Cassandra’s memorandum, Jane had begun writing her next novel (called ‘The Elliots’ at this stage, later Persuasion) in August 1815, that is, while Emma was in production. She finished it – or finished with it for the time being – a year later. When her niece Fanny enquired about her work, she said, ‘I have a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short, about the length of Catherine.’72 It is notable that Austen was anticipating such an interval between the book being ‘ready for publication’ and being published. In her 1920 biography, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh claimed (on family authority) it was Austen’s practice to let works ‘rest’ like this, to dissipate ‘the charm of recent composition’ and give herself time to make final changes in the light of second or third thoughts. This seems entirely consistent with a lifetime of keeping control over her manuscripts (albeit unwillingly), to the extent that Austen may have only really felt comfortable about her unpublished, still-improvable books.
Two manuscript chapters of ‘Persuasion’, the only such drafts of any part of any Austen novel to have survived, have given scholars fascinating insight into Austen’s working methods. The wholescale changes that she made to the story and style show that, even at this late stage in her career, ‘conception and execution were neither instinctive nor unerring’, as Brian Southam has remarked.73 In the cancelled draft, the resolution of the love story is made to turn on a very artificially engineered meeting between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth at the Crofts’ lodgings; it has none of the drama or emotional weight of the later version, in which Anne’s heartfelt conversation with Harville about the differences between men’s and women’s constancy is overheard by Wentworth at the White Hart and prompts his renewed declaration to her by letter. The thoroughness of the revision shows the effort that Austen was prepared to put in to improve her work; ‘a triumph of rethinking’, in Southam’s words again, ‘won through trial and error’. Austen clearly had little respect for those who, like Egerton Brydges, dashed off work and sent it straight to the printer; she drily suggested that an 1809 novel called Ida of Athens ‘must be very clever, because it was written as the Authoress says, in three months’.74
The same year that she was writing ‘The Elliots’ (Persuasion), Austen was making extensive changes to the manuscript of ‘Susan’, which had just come back from its long sojourn in Benjamin Crosby’s slush pile. She was strongly motivated to update and resell the book, money being more of an issue than ever in 1816 (when the tenancy of Chawton Cottage also came into doubt, owing to litigation against her brother Edward), but she found the work difficult, and after a year felt it still wasn’t ready. She reported to her niece Fanny Knight that ‘Catherine’, as the story was now called, was ‘put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out’.75
As part of its revision, Austen had written a short preface to explain the novel’s datedness. It is the only autobiographical writing of its kind by her, and shows just how much Crosby’s dog-in-the-manger behaviour still rankled:
This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller, it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish seems extraordinary. But with this, neither the author nor the public have any other concern than as some observation is necessary upon those parts of the work which thirteen years have made comparatively obsolete. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have pa
ssed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books and opinions have undergone considerable change.
Even with this rider, Austen hesitated to send the book out into the world. By the middle of 1816, she was suffering from pains in the back and chronic fatigue. On a summer visit to the Fowles at Kintbury, her hosts noticed how ill she looked and were struck by her ‘peculiar manner – as if she did not expect to see them again’.76 By the time Jane made up the booklets in which she began her next novel, ‘The Brothers’ (later given the title ‘Sanditon’), she had been ill for some months, though hopeful of a recovery. She wrote about 24,000 words before putting the story aside in March 1817. It went ‘on the Shelve’ along with ‘The Watsons’, ‘Lady Susan’, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ and the two short novels which she had, technically speaking, finished, but which were somehow not yet deemed ready to be submitted for publication, ‘Susan/Catherine’ and ‘The Elliots’. In June, Austen was moved to lodgings in Winchester to be nearer the professional skills of the surgeon Dr Lyford. It is not certain what was wrong with her; Bright’s disease, Addison’s disease or cancer are the more recent suggestions. Her symptoms were of severe debilitation, discoloured skin, pains.
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