Jane Austen

by Fiona Stafford

  James’s poetry remained unpublished, circulating only among the Austen family. In 1789, however, with the help of his younger brother Henry, he launched himself on the public at last with The Loiterer. The title was an obvious gesture towards the highly successful literary journals of the day, Dr Johnson’s The Idler or Henry Mackenzie’s more recent publication, The Lounger. Oxford-based and Oxford-oriented, The Loiterer appeared every Saturday for over a year, offering – what the editor promised in the first issue – ‘moral lectures, critical remarks, and elegant humour’.

  For Jane Austen, now thirteen, the paper also provided a chance to see some of her own words in print. In the ninth issue, published on 28 March 1789, James included a letter from an anonymous female correspondent, complaining about the male bias of The Loiterer and demanding new contributions ‘from among the young of both sexes’.7 Although the authorship of the letter, which was published under the name ‘Sophia Sentiment’, has never been established absolutely, it seems more than likely that the editor’s young sister had a hand in it – indeed, she may well have written the entire piece. The playful tone and the parody of sentimental tastes is certainly in accord with Jane Austen’s earliest surviving writings, while the entertaining suggestion for a moving tale has much in common with her ‘Plan of a Novel’, composed in response to correspondence with the Prince Regent’s librarian many years later, following the publication of Emma. In the letter, Sophia Sentiment requests ‘some nice affecting stories, relating the misfortunes of two lovers, who died suddenly, just as they were going to church’. The comic conciseness of the sentence, with its abrupt juxtaposition of the clichéd and the unexpected, is as typical of the young Jane Austen as the plot summary that follows:

  Let the lover be killed in a duel, or lost at sea, or you may make him shoot himself, just as you please; and as for his mistress, she will of course go mad; or if you will, you may kill the lady, and let the lover run mad; only remember, whatever you do, that your hero and heroine must possess a good deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.

  Jane may not have written the whole letter, but parts of it seem unmistakably hers.

  The letter from Sophia Sentiment is important not only as the first published work of Jane Austen, but also because of its subject matter. Though obviously related to contemporary debates over female education and appropriate reading for girls, Sophia Sentiment (whose name means ‘wise opinion’, as well as being a parody of the silly fictional heroines of the day) is also a sign of changing attitudes at Steventon. The insertion of a female perspective into the male conversation of The Loiterer reveals much about developments within the Austen family in the 1780s as the younger children began to make their own voices heard. As Jane entered her teens, she was only too conscious of herself as a girl, with feelings and expectations that were very different from most of her siblings. She benefited enormously from the knowledge, advice and encouragement of James and Henry, but obviously recognised that she had her own views, especially when it came to literature. What’s more, she was eager to express them.

  Jane Austen’s early writings were carefully preserved by her family after her death, and so, although they were not published until the twentieth century, the three little volumes now provide a rich resource for any reader interested in her work. The pieces she composed between 1787 and 1792 show the early growth of her astonishing literary talent and the way in which it was fostered by her own sense of an immediate audience. Almost every story, poem or playlet is a present to one of her family. ‘The Three Sisters’ is for ‘Edward Austen Esquire’, ‘The Visit’ is dedicated to ‘the Revd James Austen’, ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’ to ‘Miss Austen’, and ‘Sir William Mountague’ to ‘Charles John Austen Esquire’. Some of the creations are offered for a specific purpose, such as ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, which was given to her close friend Martha Lloyd as ‘a small testimony of the gratitude I feel for your late generosity to me in finishing my muslin Cloak’, or the two little tales ‘Jack and Alice’ and ‘The Adventures of Mr Harley’, which were for Frank, now far away and serving as ‘a Midshipman on board his Majesty’s ship the Perseverance’.8 Writing was a way of expressing love and friendship, even if both were apparently being mocked in the stories themselves. ‘A Letter from a Young Lady, whose feelings being too Strong for her Judgement led her into the commission of Errors which her Heart disapproved’ includes Anna Parker’s confession that she murdered her father very early in her life and has since murdered her mother, before concluding with the resolution, ‘I am now going to murder my Sister’, but this does not mean that Jane’s parents and Cassandra did not enjoy the little spoof just as much as they were meant to. The miniature comedies depend on the improbability of their narratives and the way in which the familiar is suddenly transformed into something surreal. They also demand an audience who understands the joke.

  At every turn, the restrained language of polite eighteenth-century literature is disrupted by unexpected action and often violence. In ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, for example, the eponymous heroine falls in love with a particularly pretty bonnet her mother has been making for the ‘Countess of ——’. Taking the bonnet, Cassandra sets off to make her fortune, curtseying to the first young viscount she meets, before going on towards the bakery. At this point, the comedy explodes:

  Chapter the Fourth

  She then proceeded to a Pastry-Cooks where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry-Cook and walked away.9

  At twenty-three words, it is not a long chapter, but its effect on the mini-novel is overwhelming. What begins as a parody of contemporary sentimental fiction suddenly introduces a moment of slapstick violence, conveyed with extraordinary verbal economy. The young writer observes the acceptable modes of contemporary writing and behaviour with great astuteness, but is also constantly alert to the possibilities of the unlikely and the unacceptable.

  Throughout the early writings, Jane Austen’s delight in creating little worlds in which anything can happen is abundantly evident. In ‘Henry and Eliza’, the fairy-tale detail of the baby discovered in the haycock sets the scene for an extravagant romantic adventure, but its traditional elements are balanced by the distinctive comic outlook that marks so much of Austen’s work. When Eliza finds herself imprisoned in Newgate by her persecutor, ‘the Dutchess’, her response is more reminiscent of Emma Woodhouse than of Cinderella: ‘No sooner had Eliza entered her Dungeon than the first thought which occurred to her, was how to get out of it again.’10 After spending a few weeks working through the bars on her cell window, her escape is hindered by anxiety about her children’s safety on the descent down the prison wall. She is, however, a resourceful heroine, and, after some (fairly rapid) deliberation, she arrives at a solution: ‘At last she determined to fling down all her Cloathes, of which she had a large Quantity, and then having given them strict Charge not to hurt themselves, threw her Children after them.’ Eliza is both a fairy-tale character and a believable young woman in an unbelievable situation.

  Despite the wildness of Austen’s imaginary incidents, these buoyant stories are generally grounded by numerous details of recognisable human characteristics, turns of phrase or familiar places. Mr Clifford, for example, is introduced through a catalogue of his many carriages (‘of which I do not recollect half. I can only remember that he had a Coach, a Chariot, a Chaise, a Landeau, a Landeaulet, a Phaeton, a Gig, a Whisky, an italian Chair, a Buggy, a Curricle and a wheelbarrow’), but he then spends five months laid up in the ‘celebrated City’ of Overton, the town nearest to the Austens’ home at Steventon, where he is cured by the ‘no less celebrated Physician’.11 In other stories, the perspectives of different characters are brilliantly caught, such as that of the postillion in ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, whose ‘stupidity was amazing’ because he declares, ‘without the least shame or Compunction, that having never been informed, he was totally ignorant of what part of the Town, he was to drive to’.12 The scale and sc
ope of the early pieces may be modest compared with the novels of Austen’s maturity; their ambition, however, is anything but. Though the narratives are brief, or sometimes straining to run away, they are lit by brilliant flashes of observation and by numerous dazzling sentences in which not a word is wasted.

  Austen’s juvenilia reveals a young writer in the process of self-discovery and a young reader eager to master anything that may come her way. She experimented with a remarkable variety of genres, producing playful imitations of contemporary novels, scenes from Restoration comedy, comic operettas and conduct manuals, and even composing a short history of England. In every piece, she is in dialogue with established writers, learning from their example, but also daring to take exception to their practices and views and to put forward her own, highly individual, position. The comments she scribbled in Goldsmith’s History of England reveal a vivid imaginative engagement with his account of the English past, as she laments the fate of Christopher Layer, hanged, drawn and quartered for his support of Ormond – ‘Poor Man! Alas Poor Man’ – or as she responds to the detail of Cromwell’s massacre of Drogheda – ‘Detestable Monster!’13 Imaginative reading was the prelude to imaginative writing and, when Jane Austen turned her hand to British history, her own account was just as full of sympathetic involvement with figures such as Elizabeth Woodville, ‘who, poor Woman!, was afterwards confined in a Convent by that Monster of Iniquity and Avarice Henry the 7th’.14

  Everything Jane Austen read came alive, but, at the same time, her natural empathy with those she encountered through her reading was kept in check by a keen sense of the ridiculous and of the potential absurdity of emotional display. When Charlotte reflects on the unfortunate predicament of her double engagement in ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, for example, her suicidal plunge is treated with lightly: ‘She floated to Crankhumdunberry where she was picked up and buried.’ Austen even composes a comic epitaph in the manner of contemporary commemorative tablets:

  Here lies our freind who having promis-ed

  That unto two she would be marri-ed

  Threw her sweet Body and her lovely face

  Into the Stream that runs thro’ Portland Place.

  Austen’s love of literary form and her delight in the comic potential of language would always prevent her sympathetic nature from emanating as sentimentality on the page. The girl who chose to give her pastoral heroine, Chloe, a song in which she yearns for Strephon to carve the partridge, ‘if it should be a tough one. / Tough one, tough one, tough one . . .’, would never allow her pen to dwell in the regions of simple romance.15 When Jane Austen presented Jane Cooper with an elaborately alliterative dedication, she signed herself ‘your Comical Cousin’. In her early writings, she was not only developing her literary skills, but also learning to define herself.

  As a young writer, Jane Austen wanted to find out what she could do. As one of the youngest in a large family, she also wanted to show everyone else what she had found out. Making people laugh was a way of making them listen. For, although her miniature novels were often written for her closest companion and most sympathetic reader, Cassandra, much of her early writing seems to have been designed to impress as well as to entertain. One of the most substantial pieces, which must have demanded considerable authorial effort, is ‘Love and Freindship’, dedicated to her cousin Eliza. As if to bridge the age difference between the young author and her patroness, who was now turning thirty, the little epistolary tale begins as the heroine reaches fifty-five, and is assumed by her younger correspondent to be safe at last ‘from the determined Perseverance of disagreeable Lovers and the cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers’. Fifty-five-year-old Laura is less convinced that the time for adventures is over, but nevertheless agrees to unfold the story of her life so far, in a series of letters that effectively parody every cliché of the contemporary literature of sensibility.

  Some of the earliest pieces were for Jane’s parents. In ‘The Mystery’, she humbly solicits the patronage of her father, in a dedication that is parodic but still expresses a child’s desire for parental approval. As the youngest daughter, Jane probably had to work quite hard to attract attention from her busy parents, and so her talent for creating amusing stories was a very happy discovery. Though younger than her brothers, and educated according to the expectations of an age in which women of her class were meant to marry and have babies rather than pursue an academic education or a profession, Jane Austen’s natural ability and determination enabled her to surpass her literary siblings from a very early age. To the great credit of her parents, they encouraged rather than curbed her genius, and so the dedications of her early compositions convey a genuine debt of gratitude, as well as mockery of contemporary literary fashions.

  Despite Jane Austen’s early discovery of the possibilities of the page, her writings also reveal an awareness of potential limitation. The earliest surviving pieces offer playful miniaturisation of contemporary literary styles, with ‘Amelia Webster’, for example, providing a diminutive example of the epistolary fiction popular at the time. Here, Austen managed to introduce three different couples and conclude with their marriages in the space of the seven very short letters that fly between the various characters and the unknown observers, Tom and Jack. ‘Edgar and Emma’, a slightly more substantial narrative in the third person, depicts the return of Sir Godfrey and Lady Marlow to their family seat after an absence of two years and its profound effect on their daughter, Emma, who has been nursing a passion for Edgar Willmot. Emma’s discovery that, of all the numerous Willmot children (the list runs to more than twenty), Edgar is the one away at college produces a powerful reaction: ‘[S]he remained however tolerably composed till the Willmot’s were gone when having no check to the overflowings of her greif, she gave free vent to them, & retiring to her own room, continued in tears the remainder of her Life.’ Although the comic excesses of the tale are beautifully handled, it offers an alternative ending to the happy unions that so quickly bring closure to ‘Amelia Webster’. Even at the age of twelve, Jane Austen was aware that there seemed only two possible endings for a young woman’s story – either marriage or melancholy isolation. Her tales show an early, and remarkably assured, sense of the way narrative works, as well as an awareness of the limited choices allowed by society to women, whatever their natural ability.

  By 1792, the comic energy of her tales was as vigorous as ever, but her writing also reveals a growing interest in human situations and prospects. In ‘Catharine’, for example, the sentimental heroine’s refuge in her favourite bower provides both the centrepiece for parodying contemporary literary convention and a space for more serious reflection on the fate of those who had helped create the shady arbour – the Wynne sisters. Catharine’s close friends had lost their parents and therefore their home and financial security. As a result, one was now ‘splendidly, yet unhappily married’, while the other, ‘scarcely more comfortable’, had been employed as a companion to the daughters of a dowager.16 The story begins by reducing two young women to lives of misery, which leaves the bereft Catharine to an uncertain future at the mercy of her aunt and neighbours. The author’s acute perception of the precariousness of human life, and especially of young women’s fortunes, gives the unfinished tale an edge that is quite different from the extravagant freedom of some of the earlier pieces. At sixteen, Austen was alert not only to the ways in which fictional narrative works, but also to the less manageable stories of real men and women.

  As Edward and James married and set up homes of their own, the pressure to find a suitable partner was beginning to bear upon the younger members of the household. While Jane Austen was imagining the future of Catharine in her bower, her cousin Jane Cooper was being swept away in a whirlwind romance and marriage to a handsome captain in the navy. When Revolutionary France declared war the following February, Henry enlisted at once in the Oxfordshire Militia. Charles was already at the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth and would soon follow Frank into active serv
ice at sea. For Jane Austen at seventeen, the prospect of eventually being left alone in a large house with ageing parents was beginning to seem threatening to a degree that could not be entirely dispelled.

  THE TRUE ART OF LETTER-WRITING

  1793–7

  When Catherine Morland tells Mr Tilney that ‘one day in the country is exactly like another’, she is reflecting the experience of a young woman whose life until the age of seventeen has been spent in ‘a small retired village’ and who now finds herself amid the bustle and variety of Bath. In 1797, at the age of twenty-one, Jane Austen visited the fashionable spa town for the first time. The fear and excitement of being jostled in the crowded assembly rooms and thronging streets went straight into the novel she began to write upon her return to Steventon. Unlike Catherine, however, Jane Austen had already realised that Bath’s attractions, considerable as they were, could not necessarily eclipse the appeal of rural life. Tiny villages and elegant towns both had their merits, however different in kind. What Northanger Abbey demonstrates is that, by the end of the 1790s, Jane Austen was in a position to recreate either setting within the pages of a novel, and to develop fictional voices capable of presenting opposing points of view with complete conviction. The difference between her work at the beginning and end of the decade is remarkable, and even though nothing she completed during this period was published within her lifetime, it represents a crucial stage of Jane Austen’s development, both as a writer and as a woman.

  Although Catherine Morland might not have noticed much going on before her arrival in Bath, life at Steventon was full of drama. If the outbreak of war transformed Henry Austen into a tall, scarlet-coated lieutenant, it also placed him in potentially mortal danger, itself deepened by his own determination to obtain a commission in the regular army rather than the militia. Even his posting in the militia saw him rapidly sent off to Southampton to defend the realm against the very real threat of a French invasion. Hampshire, a county on England’s south coast, whose harbours accommodated the principal naval ports of Portsmouth and Southampton, was on the front line of any imminent attack: if the Revolutionary forces were victorious, the area around Steventon would be one of first to fall into enemy hands. Nor were the fears generated only by newspaper reports of distant political developments. In the summer of 1794, Jane’s cousin Eliza returned to the rectory, traumatised by her experiences in France and full of overwhelming memories of what she had witnessed. She had reached Calais, heavily pregnant, given birth to a baby, who had died almost at once, and then escaped across the Channel. On top of the distress and physical upheaval, she had to contend with the thoughts of her husband’s trial, the hostile evidence given by their own servants, and his death on the guillotine. Eliza had grown up in India and travelled across half the world, but nothing had prepared her for the shock of a familiar European country convulsed in revolution.