Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  Austen’s rout of Burney continued after the older woman’s death in 1840, for when Thomas Babington Macaulay was reviewing Madame d’Arblay’s posthumous Diary and Letters in 1843, he was diverted (with some relief, one senses) from the difficult task of summing up her achievement to consider instead the merits of ‘a woman of whom England is justly proud’, Jane Austen. ‘Shakespeare has neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.’40 How crushing to the memory of Madame d’Arblay to have her encomium interrupted by this extraordinary praise of another writer; a female writer, and a novelist, compared with Shakespeare! But worst of all, one of those nieces of Mrs Cooke!

  * * *

  The first published reminiscence of Jane Austen, apart from Henry’s ‘Biographical Notice’, came from an unlikely source, Egerton Brydges, who was by 1832 living in Geneva, in exile from creditors. His mention of Austen in his Autobiography seems to acknowledge other people’s admiration of her more than his own, for he can’t conceal a note of surprise that the pleasant but unimpressive young girl ‘with cheeks a little too full’, whom his sister, Anne Lefroy, had befriended back in the 1780s and 90s, had turned out to be an acclaimed novelist. Austen had a great many true admirers among her contemporaries whose opinions were far more flattering than Brydges’s but were recorded in diaries and correspondence that remained unpublished for years, delaying the spread of her renown. Robert Southey, Maria Edgeworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bulwer Lytton, Sidney Smith and Henry Crabbe Robinson all privately expressed their high view of her work, and Disraeli – the man who once said that if he needed to read a good novel, he wrote one – claimed to have read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times.

  Sir Walter Scott’s own set of Austen’s novels became worn with re-reading, and in a famous journal entry of 1826 he reflected on what she had achieved, and how far beyond his own range it was:

  read again and for the third time at least Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvement and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!41

  When this was quoted in Lockhart’s biography of Scott, Sarah Harriet Burney, Fanny Burney’s half-sister, was delighted to find that Sir Walter ‘thought so highly of my prime favourite Miss Austen’. She had imagined herself to be alone in her fandom, having ‘quite raved’ about the books since 1813. Sir Walter boasted of having read Pride and Prejudice three times, but as Sarah Harriet noted, ‘I have read it as bumper toasts are given – three times three!’42

  Austen’s popularity with her Romantic contemporaries perhaps suggests they saw more of the ‘modern’ in her than other people, more of a break with the past than had been supposed. Austen’s attacks on the cult of sensibility, her matter-of-fact anti-Wertherism, her rational – but not unfeeling – demolition of the clichés surrounding True Love, were all as revolutionary in their way as anything in The Prelude or Don Juan. What love story had ever contained such sentiments as this, for instance, from Sense and Sensibility: ‘After all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one’s happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant – it is not fit – it is not possible that it should be so.’43

  Just how modern Austen was wasn’t remarked until much later; the adjective employed in the early nineteenth century was ‘pure’ or ‘natural’. Not everyone shared the same idea of ‘natural’, of course, and Wordsworth, unlike Coleridge and Southey, was not an admirer of Austen. Sara Coleridge remembered that her father’s friend ‘used to say that though he admitted her novels were an admirable copy of life, he could not be interested in productions of that kind; unless the truth of nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any attractions in his eyes’.44 But as a proviso, Sara Coleridge added that Wordsworth ‘never in his life appreciated any genius in which [humour] is a large element’.

  ‘Truth to nature’ was enough for the Poet Laureate Robert Southey, who told Egerton Brydges in a letter of April 1830, ‘You mention Miss Austen; her novels are more true to nature, and have (for my sympathies) passages of finer feeling than any others of this age. She was a person of whom I have heard so well, and think so highly, that I regret not having seen her, nor ever having had an opportunity of testifying to her the respect which I felt for her.’45 Southey realised how narrowly he had missed that opportunity, for his uncle, the Reverend Herbert Hill, was married to Jane’s great friend Catherine Bigg, and the novelist’s name was frequently mentioned at the Hills’ house in Streatham. Perhaps Southey heard the story of Mrs Hill’s brother and his proposal back in 1802; it’s odd to think that if Jane had married Harris Bigg-Wither, she and Southey would have been related.

  There was another story about Southey’s strong admiration for Austen that was passed on to Henry Austen by his friend Henry Sandford. The Poet Laureate had, apparently, picked up on an oblique quotation from one of Austen’s novels that Sandford had let slip and taken this as his cue to hold forth, all the way up a very long hill in Montreal, on his favourite novelist. The anecdote, dating from about 1823, survives because Henry Austen sent it on to Cassandra for what was clearly a collection of such snippets which his sister gathered slowly over the years. The cut-out paragraph is now in the collection of the British Library.

  Cassandra was the person who exercised ultimate control over Jane’s posterity and who, a few years before her own death in 1845, destroyed a large quantity of her papers, leaving the life-record famously scanty and unrevealing. Her motives have often been brought into question, and are usually thought to have been either mean-spirited or self-protective, but the evidence points a different way. Far from thwarting the passing on of information about her sister, Cassandra Austen kept the archive intact for twenty-five years and added to it assiduously during those years, preserving every scrap of praise for her sister that she encountered.

  Cassandra’s involvement in Jane’s writing career is very clear from the letters that have survived (and which may have been selected by her, consciously or unconsciously, to illustrate just that point). In one of 6–7 November 1813, having mentioned the latest news on the second edition of Sense and Sensibility and gossip about its authorship, Jane says, ‘I cannot tire you I am sure on this subject, or I would apologise.’46 The sense is that Cassandra could often be as eager (if not more so) for news like this as Jane herself.

  Jane’s frequently deferential tone towards her older sister and mysterious tribute in 1796 to Cassandra’s superior talents as ‘the finest comic writer of the present age’47 are difficult to square with the humourless nature of Cassandra’s few remaining letters (as opposed, say, to letters by Mrs Austen, who was a notably lively writer and proud of her ‘sprack wit’). If anyone deserved comparison with a poker, it would seem to be the young woman who bore up with such rigid self-control under the loss of her fiancé in 1797; as Eliza de Feuillide reported, ‘Jane says that her Sister behaves with a degree of resolution & Propriety which no common mind could evince in so trying a situation.’48 Cassandra’s fortitude is surely a model for that of Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, whose lone outburst against her more expressive younger sister is to protest that her composure of mind is the result of ‘constant and painful exertion’, not lack of feeling.49 Cassandra’s own capacity for both was dramatically demonstrated in the letter she wrote to Fanny Knight from Winchester, between Jane’s death and burial, very likely in the presence of the corpse: ‘I have lost such a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can ha
ve been surpassed, – She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.’50 But this outpouring of feeling is instantly checked by the following consideration: ‘I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the hand which has struck this blow.’ The absolute Christian correctness of this seems too violent for sympathy.

  Cassandra, who had spent much of her youth mourning for Tom Fowle, spent her later years keeping the memory of her sister sacred. ‘Aunt Cassandra’s loss in her sister was great indeed and most truly a loss never to be repaired,’ Fanny Catherine Lefroy wrote later, repeating the impressions of her mother, Anna. ‘They were everything to each other. They seemed to lead a life to themselves, within the general family life, which was shared only by each other. I will not say their true but their full feelings and opinions were known only to themselves. They alone fully understood what each had suffered and felt and thought.’51 Little chinks of these strong feelings can still be glimpsed. In Cassandra’s own copy of Persuasion, next to the passage in which Anne Elliot reflects, ‘She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning,’ she wrote feelingly, ‘Dear dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.’52

  The scraps of praise for Jane that were kept by Cassandra and left to their brother Charles include her writing-out of the quote from Lockhart’s Life of Scott (published in 1830), Henry’s letter relating Southey’s praise, an extract from one of Charles Austen’s letters, copied out by his daughter, and a piece cut from a letter recording Miss Sherriff’s dinner-party conversation with Sheridan back in 1813. The fragment, addressed to Cassandra, in an unknown hand, ends ‘I know you like to hear any thing of this kind’, indicating that friends and family were on the lookout for such items.53 They didn’t necessarily reach Chawton very quickly. After the sale of the copyrights to Bentley in 1832, the family had no more control over Jane’s works, no income from them and no connection with the publishing world. It was almost two years after its publication that Henry sent on a poetic tribute in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXXV. Next to an illustration of a woman reading was this verse titled ‘The Lady and the Novel’, by the Earl of Carlisle:

  Beats thy quick pulse o’er Inchbald’s thrilling leaf,

  Brunton’s high moral, Opie’s deep-wrought grief?

  Has the mild chaperon claimed thy yielding heart,

  Carroll’s dark page, Trevelyan’s gentle art?

  Or is it thou, all perfect Austen? Here

  Let one poor wreath adorn thy early bier,

  That scarce allowed thy modest youth to claim

  Its living portion of thy certain fame!54

  When her mother died at the age of eighty-seven in 1827, Cassandra adopted the title ‘Mrs Austen’, as was conventional for mature unmarried women as well as married ones. Not that there was much family left at Chawton among whom distinctions of rank could be made. Chawton House had long been let by Edward, and the year after old Mrs Austen’s death Martha left to marry Frank (who was knighted in the early 1840s). Cassandra made long visits to them, and to her other brothers. The favoured nieces and nephews were all grown up by this time, some with children of their own.

  Martha, who had been so close to both Austen sisters, had been Cassandra’s intended executrix, but when she died first, in 1843, a new will and instructions had to be drawn up. Cassandra turned to her youngest brother Charles to take on the task, with his daughter Cassy Esten Austen to help ‘examine and apportion’ Cassandra’s jewellery and mementoes, bequeathed to nine of her nieces, to Henry, to James Edward’s wife Emma and to Fulwar Craven Fowle’s daughter Elizabeth Caroline. The occasion made her reconsider what was and was not appropriate to pass on, as she wrote to Charles in May of that year:

  As I have leisure, I am looking over & destroying some of my Papers – others I have marked ‘to be burned’, whilst some will still remain. These are chiefly a few letters & a few Manuscripts of our dear Jane, which I have set apart for those parties to whom I think they will be mostly valuable.55

  In other words, Cassandra’s main purpose in retaining some manuscripts at this date was to make appropriate keepsakes within the family. Charles was to have ‘Volume the First’ (Cassandra pasted a note in the back, ‘For my Brother Charles. I think I recollect that a few of the trifles in this Vol. were written expressly for his amusement’56), ‘Volume the Second’ was for Frank and ‘Volume the Third’ for James Edward Austen-Leigh. Caroline Austen was to receive ‘The Watsons’, Anna Lefroy ‘Sanditon’ (neither of these fragmentary works had a title at this date) and the rejected chapter of ‘Persuasion’, but the greater part of the remaining manuscripts went to Fanny Knight, now Lady Knatchbull. She was to get almost ninety letters, and ‘Lady Susan’, the only complete unpublished story.

  Caroline Austen corroborated the fact that Aunt Cassandra had ‘looked over … and burnt the greater part’ of her letters from Jane ‘2 or 3 years before her own death’ and that, of the ones given as legacies, ‘several had portions cut out’.57 Catherine-Anne Hubback gave some idea of the material that was destroyed, remembering how Aunt Cassandra used to relish re-reading letters of Jane’s ‘triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom’58 – not the traditional image of the good-natured spinster sisters! But the fact that Cassandra waited so late in her life before effecting a final purge seems very significant. Cassandra acted in an unusual way in not destroying all the letters, regardless of their contents, as proven by their niece Anna’s assumption, twenty years later, that she had done so. ‘The occasional correspondence between the Sisters when apart from each other would as a matter of course be destroyed by the Survivor,’ Anna wrote to her half-brother James Edward when he was compiling material for his biography. ‘I can fancy what the indignation of Aunt Cassa. would have been at the mere idea of its being read and commented upon by any of us, nephews and nieces, little or great.’59 This is undoubtedly true. The sisters considered letters as private, unless they signalled otherwise; when Mrs Austen ‘had the perusal’ of one of Cassandra’s to a Miss Irvine in 1804, Jane alerted her of the fact, adding that it was something which ‘in your place I should not like’.60 Yet this is one of the letters saved from the bonfire, bequeathed to Charles Austen, and now available in print in dozens of languages the world over, perused by hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people. Cassandra’s feelings of propriety about the content being private must have been overridden by other, even stronger, feelings.

  Of the few letters from Cassandra herself that have survived, one to Anna Lefroy of 1 February 1844 shows her still gratefully collecting scraps of praise for her sister’s works in her seventy-second year. Anna had sent a cutting from a review of four novels, which digressed on to Jane Austen, calling her ‘the greatest of all female novelists … great in her absence of affectation, in her wonderful knowledge of the secrets of the heart, in her power of investing common-place with interest’. Cassandra’s response shows her pleasure at this, but also a residual surprise that the wider world might agree with her own opinion:

  The first subject which calls for my gratitude is the Extract from the Foreign & Colonial Review respecting your Aunt’s works which you were so good as to send. The Article was quite new to me & could not fail of being highly gratifying to my feelings. It was evidently written by a person of taste & discrimination. Is it not remarkable that those Books should have risen so much in celebrity after so many years? I think it may be considered as a proof that they possess intrinsic merit.61

  The idea that the intrinsic merit of Jane’s novels was debatable comes as almost as much of a surprise as Cassandra’s perception of them as having had their day long ago. Her int
erest in the books’ wider fame has a detachment and objectivity about it which underlines her own much more powerful and unfluctuating sense of proprietorship. She had been Jane’s confidante, the first reader of all the works (both the ones that are known to us and perhaps some unknown), the person whose tastes and opinions most heavily influenced Jane’s writing, and whose approval was pivotal. But there must have been a terrible loneliness to such a position, when everyone who had understood it properly was dead. ‘Prayers composed by my ever dear sister Jane,’ Cassandra wrote on a copy of some precious remnants, but to whom was such an explanatory note addressed?

  Cassandra’s later life on her own in Chawton was remembered by John White, a villager who died in 1921, aged 100. He recalled that she lived ‘at the corner house by the Pond’ and that the front door opened straight into a room, either the dining-room or drawing-room. She ‘took a great interest in young girls’ of the village and taught them reading, the catechism and sewing, and had a nice dog called Link who used to go up to Chawton House for the milk with Cassandra’s manservant, William Littleworth, and bring it home in a pail held in his mouth.62