If Eliza’s experiences in the 1790s were bound up with the great historic events of the period, other members of Jane Austen’s family were experiencing things that might not register publicly but were just as momentous personally. The marriages of Edward and James were followed a year later by the births of their children Fanny and Anna, giving Jane and Cassandra new identities in the family – as aunts. James, his wife and daughter moved into the rectory at Deane, within a mile of Steventon, where James had become the curate and worked under his father’s guidance. Little Anna would never remember her mother, however, for James’s wife Anne died suddenly in May 1795. Within two years, he had married again, choosing for his bride Mary Lloyd, who was not to prove the easiest stepmother for his daughter, though she swiftly provided a son and heir to carry James’s name and genes into the next generation. As James planned his second wedding, Eliza also readied herself to exchange widowhood for marriage to her long-standing admirer Henry Austen, now old enough to seem a suitable partner and full of just the kind of optimistic energy to help renew her hopes and happiness.
Cassandra, too, seemed destined to escape her role as sister, daughter and aunt, for she had become engaged to Thomas Fowle, former student at the rectory, now ordained as a clergyman and hoping to establish himself in a satisfactory living. If Jane’s delight in her sister’s happiness was tinged with some private dismay at the thought of their permanent separation, she was still quick to sympathise with Cassandra when it emerged that, instead of an early wedding, Tom Fowle would be disappearing overseas for many months. When asked to accompany his uncle, Lord Craven, across the Atlantic as the chaplain on board his ship, Tom agreed to go. With Frank and Charles already in the navy, the Austens knew all about the hazards and discomfort of long voyages, and were only too aware of the likelihood of a hostile confrontation with an enemy fleet. In the event, Tom suffered not from the French, but from a fever, dying in St Domingo in 1798 before he and Cassandra had the chance to marry.
Upheavals such as these at home and abroad must have had their effects on all concerned. And what was Jane Austen doing during the tumultuous 1790s? She seems to have spent most of her time dancing. ‘I fancy I could just as well dance for a week together as for half an hour,’ she wrote on Christmas Eve, 1798, capturing the mood of the night before and of much of the preceding decade.17 It is not until January 1796 that modern readers get a proper glimpse of the young Jane Austen, speaking in her own voice to the person closest to her. Her earliest surviving letter to Cassandra was written at Steventon over a January weekend, when Jane was twenty and her sister was celebrating her twenty-third birthday with her fiancé at the Fowles’ family home in Kintbury, not far from the market town of Newbury. Her birthday greeting is just as light-hearted as the compositions she had given Cassandra in the past, hoping that her sister would ‘live twenty-three years longer’,18 before moving swiftly on to the real treat – an account of the previous night’s ball. After detailing the various members of the party, she admits, teasingly, ‘I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.’ The details are withheld with just the same control that she would later exert on the narration of her novels, and just the same encouragement to let the mind race on: ‘Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.’ Whatever the pleasures of Kintbury, some part of Cassandra must have been eager to know more about her sister’s evening with her ‘Irish friend’, Tom Lefroy.
Jane’s Tom lived in Ireland, but had spent Christmas visiting his relatives at Ashe, a village close to Steventon and Deane. Jane was especially fond of Mrs Lefroy, and so found herself attending the same balls as Mrs Lefroy’s nephew and evidently enjoying his company very much, despite meeting him on only three occasions. Though apparently sanguine about his imminent departure (which would leave ‘nothing to console us till the arrival of the Coopers on Tuesday’), she describes him as ‘a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man’ and, towards the end of the letter, admits that he had ‘but one fault . . . that his morning coat is a great deal too light’.19 The detail is really an excuse for Jane to compare Tom Lefroy to Henry Fielding’s impulsive, hugely attractive, but decidedly dangerous, fictional hero (‘He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones’) and to convey to Cassandra some of the excitement of their profligate and shocking conversations.
Five days later, she wrote again to mark the day ‘on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy’, adding: ‘My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’20 Her language recalls the sentimental heroines of her early parodies, and shows that her command of exaggerated emotional expression could be usefully applied in the management of her own feelings. If Cassandra doubted her tone for a moment, she would have been reassured by the very next sentence announcing that William Chute had called the day before, which includes a typical comic touch: ‘I wonder what he means by being so civil.’ It is hardly the letter of a broken-hearted damsel, but it does convey very powerfully the sense of a young woman enjoying life, discovering her own sexual feelings and recognising that she herself is poised for adventures in the adult world.
Throughout her twenties, Jane Austen’s letters are filled with news of balls and ball-gowns. Though she wrote to Cassandra only when they were apart, and even some of that correspondence was destroyed, the surviving letters give a vivid sense of Jane Austen’s life and opinions as a young woman. The ‘true art of letter-writing’, she observed on 3 January 1801, is ‘to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth’.21 Reading her letters to Cassandra thus gives us the privileged sense of eavesdropping on their conversations. Their close relationship meant that Jane could express her feelings freely, in terms that she knew would be understood and received with kindness. Following a Christmas ball in 1798, she was riding on a cloud of warm memories after dancing all twenty dances of the night: ‘My black Cap was openly admired by Mrs Lefroy, & secretly I imagine by every body else in the room.’ Merely a fortnight later, things turned out rather less happily: ‘I do not think I was very much in request – People were rather apt not to ask me till they could not help it.’22 Personal disappointments nevertheless afforded comic opportunities, and so the very good-looking officer, who had apparently been so keen to meet her, is despatched in her letter with easy wit: ‘[A]s he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, We never could bring it about.’ The voice is irrepressibly lively, even amid the most challenging of social minefields. If she was disappointed by Tom Lefroy’s failure to visit her when he stayed with his aunt in November 1798, some three years after their flirtation, the letter that refers to the matter betrays little visible sign of distress, carrying on with typically witty observations on Mary (who would be ‘glad to get rid of’ her rheumatism, and her child) and Mrs Portman (‘not much admired in Dorsetshire; the good-natured world, as usual, extolled her beauty so highly, that all the neighbourhood have had the pleasure of being disappointed’).23 It is not that Jane Austen lacked deep feeling, but her favourite mode for letters, as for every other kind of writing, was comic.
Although it is possible to detect in her private correspondence some of the emotional upheavals experienced during the 1790s, the surviving letters also bubble with excitement over new experiences, revelations about human nature, flirtatious conversations and hopes of even better encounters to come. They suggest a young woman who is keen to share her experiences and observations, but who is always writing primarily to entertain an affectionate reader. When she arrived in London in August 1796, for example, she reached at once for pen and paper, adopting a familiar parodic tone to convey her obvious relish of the great city: ‘Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted.’24 Three years later, when she travelled to Bath, the same air of excitement runs through the account sent to Cassandra, but this time there are more witty comments on those she had encountered, like Dr Hall
, who was ‘in such deep mourning that either his Mother, his Wife, or Himself must be dead’.25 The apparent suppression of sympathy in observations of this kind is really an expression of feeling for someone who mattered more to her than Dr Hall, and who would recognise the tone of the sentence instantly. Jane Austen’s references to death and disease were very often pithily phrased, as if to emphasise the comic absurdity of the human condition when its most vulnerable aspects were being exposed.
She wanted to make Cassandra laugh – just as Cassandra’s letters pleased her. We no longer have the letters sent by Cassandra, but numerous references in Jane’s correspondence suggest that they were a source of great enjoyment: ‘The letter which I have this moment received from you has diverted me beyond moderation,’ she wrote on 1 September 1796, ‘I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school.’ Cassandra’s fine letters set high standards, and Jane responds by calling her ‘the finest comic writer of the present age’ – a compliment reminiscent of the extravagant dedications in her early writings, but also indicative of Jane’s own values and aims.26
Occasionally, the letters do reveal her anxieties, as in the one despatched on 18 September 1796 from Edward’s home at Rowling in Kent. It begins with a confession that the morning has been spent ‘in Doubt and Deliberation’ and ends with a rare, but telling, apology: ‘How ill I have written. I begin to hate myself.’ Throughout the letter, her uncertainty about how she was going to get home to Steventon undermines her determined comedy, giving her joke about falling into the hands of ‘some fat Woman who would make me drunk with Small Beer’ an uncomfortable edge. Letters such as this afford a sharp insight into Jane Austen’s utter dependency on her relations and her own fundamental lack of freedom. Generally, her writing offered a world in which she was in command, but here the pressure of a situation that rendered her powerless to make decisions was disrupting the smooth control of her prose.
Although Jane Austen spent so much of her young adulthood planning her wardrobe and enjoying parties, writing remained crucial to her sense of self and general well-being. Her first surviving novel demonstrates the care that she devoted to her creative work during the 1790s and the continuing force of her experimental spirit. Lady Susan is a remarkable transitional text, retaining all the irreverence of her earliest work, but also revealing many of the strengths of her maturity. It is designed to startle readers – and a glance through the responses it has elicited over the years shows that it has been very successful in this respect. Though epistolary in form, the fictional letters in Lady Susan are most unlike those written by Jane to Cassandra: they are used to construct distinct characters who are often shown to be motivated by a self-seeking desire to influence their correspondents. When inviting herself to her brother-in-law’s house at the start of the novel, for example, Lady Susan is a model of politeness and propriety, but to her admirer, Reginald, she presents the tones of passionate indignation. Only Mrs Johnson is allowed to read about her friend’s calculated manipulation of everyone she encounters, but even those letters seem chiefly designed to show off Lady Susan’s secret triumphs to a less successful woman of the world.
The discrepancy between Lady Susan’s fond references to her daughter, Frederica, in the opening letter to Mr Vernon and the subsequent assessment sent to Mrs Johnson – ‘She is a stupid girl, & has nothing to recommend her’27 – could hardly be more marked. Jane Austen is revelling in the possibilities of language, revealing that words are as prone to deceive as to denote the truth. Lady Susan is a brilliant writer who knows the power of a good narrative: ‘I trust I shall be able to make my story as good as her’s. If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence.’ Though she has struck many readers as a monster of amorality, she is also, in part, a fantasy figure for a young woman whose own life offered so few real choices and whose chance for personal autonomy depended on her imagination and skills as a writer. Lady Susan’s ‘desire for dominion’ and love of ‘universal admiration’ may be despised by her sister-in-law, Mrs Vernon, but they reflect something of the author behind the fiction, who seems to have used her novel to start exploring some of the complexities of the human psyche and of the relations between different people. In this case, a woman who, despite her fading beauty, could command the desire of every man she encountered, and whose primary means to control her world were linguistic, had an attraction that extended beyond the eyes of her fictional suitors. At the same time, the abhorrence of Lady Susan that is manifest in so many of the letters suggests an acute awareness of the potentially unappealing nature of eloquence and of the dislike so easily generated by an intelligent woman, who could be deemed cunning, unmaternal or coquettish. Lady Susan is at once attractive and repulsive, and the choice of the letter form allows conflicting responses to exist side by side.
The satirical comedy of Lady Susan seems less exaggerated than that of Austen’s earlier writing because the characters are more developed and the situations more realistic, but the novel is still full of similar jokes. Lady Susan’s dismay at being forced to visit ‘that insupportable Spot, a country village’, is clearly meant to amuse the Austen family, as is her observation that ‘I have never yet found that the advice of a Sister could prevent a young Man’s being in love if he chose it.’ It is also easy to hear Jane Austen’s enjoyment of verbal economy in Lady Susan’s advice to Mrs Johnson on the management of husbands: ‘[S]ince he will be stubborn, he must be tricked.’ Integral to the humour, however, is a more serious concern with human behaviour and social codes. The novel gave Jane Austen an opportunity to air some of her exasperation with contemporary notions about the education of girls, as Lady Susan despatches her daughter to a fashionable boarding school despite believing that being ‘Mistress of French, Italian, German, Music, Singing, Drawing &c will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add one Lover to her list’. Frederica’s desperate escape from the school and the subsequent revelation of her fondness for independent reading is more than a joke at her mother’s expense. It suggests Jane Austen’s own dissatisfaction with the way in which so many girls seemed born only to be groomed for the marriage market, dissuaded from taking independent action by domineering adults who rendered them virtual prisoners in their own families. Frederica’s story is, in some ways, a comical revisiting of the great epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson, but it also hints that the parodic surface of Jane Austen’s early fiction was beginning to reveal new psychological depths and a readiness to explore the predicaments of real people.
The sympathy for Frederica that increasingly undermines Lady Susan’s domination of her novel is a good indication of Jane Austen’s literary development. Despite her attraction to the comic potential of the older woman in fiction, Austen herself was only just entering her twenties, and her imagination was more easily engaged by the possibilities and difficulties facing those of her own age. From Lady Susan, she turned her attentions to new, younger characters in the creation of two novels that would eventually be revised and published as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately, the manuscripts of the works she composed in the 1790s have not been preserved, so we can only speculate on the shape of ‘Elinor and Marianne’ and ‘First Impressions’. It seems likely that both were at least partially epistolary in form, like Lady Susan, and that some of the letters eventually included in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had their origins in these earlier compositions. The focus of Jane Austen’s later plots – on young women who suffer setbacks as a result of unreliable men, overbearing relations and social prejudices in their search for suitable partners – also has obvious foundations in the kind of life led by their author during the 1790s. More than this, however, can hardly be ascertained with any confidence.
What is clear, nevertheless, is that Jane’s writing continued to command the respect of her family. An anecdote recounted many years later by her niece Anna describes an early family reading of the story that would become Pride and Prejudice; though it was deemed unsu
itable for the ears of such a little girl, the recollection shows how much Anna’s older relations enjoyed Aunt Jane’s stories.28 On Jane’s nineteenth birthday, George Austen made a symbolic gesture of support by presenting her with a writing desk, but, by November 1797, he was ready to make the more public statement of sending ‘First Impressions’ to the leading London publishing house of Cadell & Davies. The offer of the manuscript was rejected by return of post, but any pangs of disappointment Jane may have felt were partially assuaged by the very idea of publication and by the parental faith embodied in George Austen’s letter. It seemed only a matter of time before the talented young woman would become a published author.
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