* * *
When Arnold Bennett said of the Janeites in 1927, ‘they are nearly all fanatics. They will not listen. If anybody “went for” Jane, anything might happen to him. He would assuredly be called on to resign from his clubs,’11 his personification of the Janeite as a metropolitan clubman acknowledged the same truth as Virginia Woolf’s joke that ‘there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon [Jane Austen’s] genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their Aunts’.12 They may both have been alluding to the Janeite cabal that ran the Royal Society of Literature at the time, so solipsistically Janeite, in fact, that when one of their number, H. W. Garrod, did ‘go for’ Jane, in his 1928 lecture ‘Jane Austen: a depreciation’ (in response to another fellow’s gushing tribute), his criticisms of Austen were, apparently, conceived in the spirit of playful opposition, ‘written without thought of publication, for a pleasant occasion, and in lightness of heart’.13 And though his remarks were waspish (Garrod questioned the manliness of male Janeites, in thrall to ‘a mere slip of a girl’), the context was cosy.
‘Janeism’ had spread far beyond the control of twenty-five elderly gentlemen, however. There were books of quotations, Christmas compilations, articles in Country Life and The Lady, as well as in Notes & Queries and the TLS, continuations of Sanditon and The Watsons, sequels to Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma. No discussion of country houses, riding-habits, Bath, silhouettes or embroidery could pass, it seemed, without mentioning her name and she was cooed over and sentimentalised, travestied and elaborated upon quite regardless of what was being said about her in WC1. In his preface to the highly illustrated ‘Georgian edition’ of Austen’s novels in 1927, John Bailey remarked ‘the extraordinary spread’ of her cult, and how odd it was that readers’ sense of intimacy with the author seemed to increase with the passage of time, rather than the opposite. Katherine Mansfield put something like the same point more wittily: ‘the truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of their author’.14
Jane Austen was in vogue because her period was in vogue as well. The revival of Regency style in domestic architecture in the years following the Great War, especially in small-scale suburban homes, meant that a whole generation of English men and women were raised in houses that strove to resemble miniature Pemberleys. The classical portico, filtered through its English Regency renderings, had become, ironically, a symbol of modernity, and architectural streamlining (so necessary when space was short) marked a decisive move away from the fuss, clutter and untenable size of Victorian homes. Novels were shorter in the new century, biographies too, after Strachey, and Jane Austen’s life and works, which seemed restrained and tidy by comparison with the ‘breeding plots’ of the big Victorian family sagas, fitted in very nicely with the style of the times.
The Modernists had little to say in praise of Austen; she was more the preserve of the Bloomsbury Group. Leslie Stephen, who had praised Austen so faintly in the Dictionary of National Biography, changed his mind about the author as time went by, and – as Carrington and Lytton Strachey also intended – turned to her novels for comfort on his deathbed. His daughter Virginia Woolf proved a highly sympathetic and penetrating critic of Austen. The publication of Love and Freindship in 1922 had fascinated her, with its revelation of the fifteen-year-old Austen ‘laughing, in her corner, at the world’, and Woolf had no trouble squaring this interestingly subversive figure with the writer of the letters and the familiar novels:
Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart – these contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer.15
Far from being constricted in a space two inches wide, ‘whatever [Austen] writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe’.
But there was unease among the literati about how to distinguish their own forms of Austen appreciation both from those of her ‘adorers’ and from the hoi polloi. In an interview late in his life, E. M. Forster (a much more obvious ‘heir to Austen’ than Henry James) named Austen, along with Proust, as the author from whom he had learned most, especially about ‘the possibilities of domestic humour’.16 In the 1920s, however, he could only express his admiration satirically, claiming he shared ‘the fatuous expression and airs of personal immunity’ and ‘primal stupor’ of the die-hard Austen fan:
I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen …. She is my favourite author! I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.17
Criticism didn’t slumber, of course: Forster was reviewing Chapman’s 1923 Clarendon edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, and had adopted this self-parodic tone to provide cover for a critique of Chapman’s enterprise in which he seemed to give credit to Chapman’s scholarship (‘Even his textual criticism helps …’) while amply illustrating its pedantry. According to Forster, Chapman’s minute attention to certain background detail in the novels might have ‘woken the Jane Austenite up’ ever so slightly and exposed Austen’s texts to ‘contact with the life of facts’, but the books ‘continue to live their own wonderful internal life’ regardless of both fans and critics.
The sense that several distinct groups of interested parties had emerged, each invested in a different view of ‘Jane Austen’, became even clearer in 1932 when Chapman published his two-volume Jane Austen’s Letters, a book that crowned twenty years of work. Forster was not the only commentator to be consternated; it turned out that Lord Brabourne’s partial and inaccurate 1884 Letters had, in fact, been pretty representative of the material as a whole, and that Chapman’s editing, far from rescuing Austen from accusations of dullness and triviality, enforced those impressions. Forster was disappointed to find that Austen’s most personal writing ‘had not the magic that outlasts ink’ and that no number of footnotes about coach timetables and bank accounts could revive its essential meaning:
Cassandra understood, her niece Fanny Knight understood, the Austen Leighs and Lord Brabourne had some conception – but we students of to-day, unrelated to her by blood, what part have we in this family talk, and whose triviality do we expose but our own?18
A number of other critics found the unliterariness of Austen’s letters positively irritating: Garrod described them as ‘a desert of trivialities punctuated by occasional clever malice’, while Harold Nicolson thought them ‘trivial and dull’, the work of a mind ‘like a very small, sharp pair of scissors…. She emerges diminished’. As Mary Lascelles noted, there was an air of triumph among these anti-Austenites at the discovery that ‘the writer of the celebrated novels was no better than anyone else and rather less likeable than most’.19 Chapman’s printing for the first time of passages that the family had hitherto suppressed, such as Austen’s remarks about the Misses Debary’s bad breath and the gratuitously unpleasant joke about Mrs Hall’s stillbirth being the result of ‘happening to look at her husband’, exposed a lack of taste and feeling that no one had previously supposed possible of dear Aunt Jane. No matter that the novels contain exactly consonant passages of ill humour (such as the brutal critique of Mrs Musgrove’s ‘large fat sighings’ over her good-for-nothing dead son in Persuasion, and Emma’s heartless wit against Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic); this was the woman in propria persona. Though Austen’s popular image skipped ahead along a primrose path, blithely detached from texts or textuality, among the reading class, Chapman was responsible for the sharpest readjustment in Jane Austen’s reputation in living memory.
* * *
The first decades of the new century saw significant movements of the Austen papers, manuscripts and memorabilia out
of family hands and into those of collectors and collections, many of them American. Chapman had thought £385 a ‘monstrous price’ for twelve pages of ‘The Watsons’ in 1925: one can guess what he thought eight years later, when Walter M. Hill of Chicago bought the manuscript of ‘Lady Susan’ (which had passed from Lord Brabourne to Lord Rosebery in 1892) for $8,812 at a Sotheby’s sale, or when the same buyer paid £1,000 for a single Austen letter.
A particularly valuable stash of treasures, containing letters, the memoranda about the novels’ dates of composition, Cassandra’s sketch of Jane and the amber crosses bought for the sisters by their brother, had descended via Charles Austen to three of his granddaughters, who sold most of the items off in the 1920s, using Chapman as their intermediary. The manuscript items went mostly to the British Museum and Mr Pierpont Morgan, but the crosses, and Jane’s letter about them, were bought by a young Yale graduate student, Charles Beecher Hogan. In a correspondence with Chapman, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Henry Hake, who at the time was trying to find a decent likeness of Jane Austen to purchase for the Gallery, was told that Hogan’s purchases were ‘nothing to your purpose’.20 Yet Hake was curious enough to enquire about the young collector from a correspondent in Connecticut, who reported that Hogan was an assistant in the reference department of the Yale library; ‘He is in, I should say, his middle twenties & I shd. think was on the impecunious side.’ Two months later, Hake’s friend sent a newspaper cutting announcing Hogan’s forthcoming marriage to Miss Carolyn Crosby of Minneapolis, ‘one of America’s wealthiest heiresses’, with the wry note added, ‘“Impecunious” no longer!’ Jane and Cassandra’s amber crosses became a wedding present to Hogan’s wealthy bride.
In the rapidly rising market for Austen manuscripts and memorabilia, Hake hoped that some hitherto unknown portrait of Jane Austen might now come to light, but his search was long and unrewarding. He had seen a reproduction of the Andrews portrait, but didn’t seem to know that it was derived from a different picture; similarly, he believed the Rice Portrait to be exactly what the caption in Brabourne’s edition of the Letters claimed, ‘Jane Austen by Zoffany’. Hake approached the Hubbacks and Rices with a view to buying the picture for the nation, but the family, though willing to consider a copy being made, didn’t want to part with it at that date.
When Hake asked Chapman’s advice about images of Austen, the scholar blew cold on the Rice Portrait, ‘I never feel happy about this picture, and I know that R.A.A-L [James Edward’s grandson, Richard Austen-Leigh] is very sceptical.’21 Hake transferred his attention to the possibility of other images existing in the family, and enlisted the help of Frank Austen’s grandson, eighty-eight-year-old John Hubback, to make enquiries on his behalf. A week later Hubback confirmed that the family had no knowledge of any ‘original portrait of Jane Austen in her maturity, that can be accounted a trustworthy likeness…. All those round-eyed prints or sketches, such as that in “Lady Susan” or in the Memoir by J. E. Austen Leigh are admittedly very touched up.’22 He was convinced that the Andrews picture was ‘a made-up affair from some other drawing’, but, remarkably enough, claimed not to know the sketch it was derived from, though Cassandra’s drawing had been reproduced in his own book, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers, in 1906. None of Cassy Esten Austen’s descendants, who had owned the sketch until their sale of manuscripts and relics in 1920, seemed to remember the picture either, or make the connection between it and the Andrews/Lizars doll. In 1932, the Andrews picture was still in the family, owned by Lois Austen Leigh, of ‘Sanditon’ in Aldeburgh.23
Even Chapman seemed ignorant on this score. He told Hake that there was ‘a horrid little sketch (head) by Cassandra reproduced somewhere. This cannot be of any importance.’ Chapman was about to publish, as a frontispiece to his edition of Austen’s Letters in 1932, the ‘bonnet’ picture by Cassandra, now acknowledged as the only unequivocally authentic picture of Jane Austen. Chapman told Hake that this too was ‘nothing to your purpose’ – a favourite phrase – ‘because it gives only the back of the sitter’s head’.24 So Hake made no further enquiries about the image, and it remains in the possession of Austen descendants to this day.
Twelve years after Hake’s initial enquiries, the gallery purchased, on Chapman’s encouragement, a silhouette that had been found in a second edition of Mansfield Park, with the handwritten inscription ‘L’aimable Jane’. It was thin grounds for an identification with Jane Austen, and the item is seldom exhibited (it has been catalogued by the National Portrait Gallery as ‘uncertain’ and ‘possibly by Mrs Collins, c.1801’), but, in 1948, Chapman held out the hope that it might ‘start speculation and lead to discoveries’ if he used it in one of his Clarendon volumes. ‘All the other candidates have been reproduced, some ad nauseam,’ he wrote to Hake, ‘and I think the shade deserves a run for its money.’25 The idea that there could be candidates and competition involved in establishing an authentic image of Jane Austen was surprising, as Chapman’s remarks about Austen icons often were. In his book Jane Austen: Facts and Problems, he described the ‘bonnet’ watercolour as ‘the graceful outline of a seated lady’, when most observers would remark its utter lack of gracefulness, dumpy body and clumsily misaligned limbs. ‘It has nothing inconsistent with what is known of Jane Austen’s figure,’ Chapman concluded, presumably not meaning to sound ungallant.26
In 1945, Elizabeth Jenkins tracked down ‘the Cassandra scribble’, as Hake referred to it in a memo, in the inventory of Frederick Lovering of St Austell, whose estate was up for sale. Hake, though obviously not very impressed by the quality of the item, understood its importance and was quick to secure the purchase. It has been on display at the National Portrait Gallery ever since. Though it can’t be absolutely authenticated, it has become the ur-image of Austen, and all the more precious for being so rare, fragile and faint.
Another small watercolour has been put forward in subsequent years as a portrait of Austen: a rather glamorously dressed full-length figure, allegedly painted by the hapless James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian. Like the silhouette, its claims to authenticity are weak, but the fact that it gets mentioned at all in discussions of Austen iconography shows how desperate people are for a suitably attractive image of our best-loved novelist. A 2007 article in the New York Times, titled ‘Pretty words, Jane; would that you were too’, expresses this wishfulness in rather extreme terms: ‘the dreary spinster of the Cassandra sketch isn’t anyone we recognize’.
This begs the question of how we would ‘recognize’ Jane Austen, with only Cassandra’s drawings and various conflicting written testimonies to go on. In the two generations following hers, the family couldn’t even agree on the colour of Jane’s hair, and described it variously as ‘fair’, but also ‘light brunette’, ‘black’ and ‘neither light nor dark’. The lock of hair that is now on display at the Jane Austen House Museum isn’t much help on this score, having faded over time to a pale, sandy tone. Even between 1949 and 1971, it was thought to have faded so much that the Jane Austen Society committee decided to have some maintenance work done. They sent in an expert from the giant chemical group Unilever to examine the lock, and his conclusion was that within the last three months of Austen’s life, her hair had not been brushed or combed much, a dismal reminder of the exigencies of the sickbed.27 Subsequently, the hair colouring firm Elida was employed to restore ‘the original colour’ of the hair – whatever they imagined that was – but the sample today is again extremely pale, so perhaps it’s time for another posthumous hair job.
There was more agreement among the nephews and nieces about intangible attributes of their aunt’s appearance such as ‘liveliness’, and the brightness of her eyes. James Edward Austen-Leigh had struggled to evoke her ‘very attractive’ person, light, firm step and ‘whole appearance expressive of health and animation’. But this was not much more forthcoming than Henry Austen’s description in his original Biographical Notice, where he avoided the vulgarity of refe
rring directly to his beloved sister’s looks by saying ‘of personal attractions she possessed a considerable share. Her stature was that of true elegance. It could not have been increased without exceeding the middle height. Her carriage and deportment were quiet yet graceful. Her features were separately good.’ Even Henry, who knew his sister so well, couldn’t settle to one consistent description and altered the wording in 1833 to ‘her stature rather exceeded the middle height’, dropping the phrase about ‘true elegance’. Since ‘stature’ was really the only physical attribute he was discussing in the first place, the change was very odd. Had Jane grown? One of the few things that can be surmised from Austen’s own evidence is that she must have been taller than average. She refers to her height several times in the Letters, ordering flat-heeled shoes and instructing Cassandra to buy two lengths of muslin, ‘one longer than the other – it is for a tall woman. Seven yards for my mother, seven yards and a half for me.’28
The curl, if not the colour, of her hair, is also documented in the Letters. As early as 1798, when she was only twenty-two, Austen rejoiced in being able to adopt the convenience of wearing a muslin cap in the evenings and ‘saving a world of torment as to hair-dressing’: ‘my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering’.29 Clearly, she was not a vain young woman, nor even particularly ‘well-turned-out’. The most imaginary aspect of the many imaginary portraits of Austen that have appeared over the decades (thoroughly documented by Deirdre le Faye in the Jane Austen Society Report for 2007) must be conspicuous elegance of dress.
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