Jane Austen

by Fiona Stafford

  BATH

  1798–1804

  ‘Well, here we are at Bath.’29 When Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra in May 1799, at the beginning of a six-week visit, she was in good spirits, despite the dismal weather and her mother’s ill health. As she had been to Bath before, her references to the fashionable venues and elegant streets – Sydney Gardens, Paragon, Queen’s Parade – have the ease of familiarity as well as the frisson of expectation. In the weeks that followed, she became more optimistic about her mother’s recovering strength and felt free to fill Cassandra in on the latest fashions in headwear and the most recent additions to their social circle. Eighteen months later, her attitude to Bath had changed completely. Instead of inhabiting her imagination as a dazzling white city, full of exciting strangers and outlandish outfits, offering the endless diversions of theatres, shops and public assemblies, it had become the destination of a dwindling family leaving its home for ever.

  In 1800, George Austen announced his plan to retire from his duties as the parish priest at Steventon and to settle in Bath. Jane, as an unmarried daughter, would of course accompany her parents, and so, by the new year, she was planning her departure from the house where she had been born and had lived for twenty-five years. Family recollections have led to a general perception that the removal from beloved Hampshire to Bath was one of the great disasters of Jane Austen’s life, but there is, as so often, very little direct evidence of her feelings on the matter. The letter she wrote in January 1801 is full of practical details about the relative living costs of different parts of Bath, but says little about her attachment to Steventon. Nevertheless, her confession to Cassandra – ‘I get more & more reconciled to the idea of our removal’ – suggests that the prospect of dislocation had been decidedly unwelcome.30 Nor is this very surprising for an exceptionally sensitive woman whose entire life had centred on a country rectory surrounded by beautiful, rolling hills, thick with every kind of tree and criss-crossed by winding lanes with high, arching hedges. Bath had its own beauty. It was an exciting place to visit. But the idea of living there permanently was a very different matter.

  Jane’s explanation to Cassandra of her gradual recon-ciliation to the departure plan suggests a determination to find some positive angle on catastrophe: ‘We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood, the Basingstoke Balls are certainly on the decline, there is something in the bustle of going away, & the prospect of spending future summers by the Sea or in Wales is very delightful.’31 The rapid accumulation of arguments makes each seem less persuasive than the last. Just as Elinor Dashwood would counsel her devastated younger sister to exert herself and conceal her distresses, Jane Austen appears to be rallying her own powers of self-possession in order to face an unavoidable fact. As her letter continues, she claims that leaving Steventon is no great sacrifice, and that she expects ‘to inspire no tenderness, no interest in those we leave behind’. She is effectively voicing the lesson later inflicted on Anne Elliot at her most self-punishing, ‘in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle’.

  Whatever the degree of distress induced by the departure from Hampshire, however, Bath did offer the possibility of a new life. Living in town might be noisy and unsettling, but it also meant a lot more people, some of whom might eventually emerge from the crowd as friends or even prospective husbands. As Jane Austen entered her late twenties, the pressure to marry was becoming more intense, so perhaps the balls in Bath would produce the right man at last? Any lingering thoughts about Tom Lefroy’s admiration had taken on a very different complexion when news of his marriage to the Irish heiress Mary Paul had arrived in 1799. The other men who had figured in Austen’s letters had found new girls to dance with, moved away or simply failed to ignite any real passion in her heart. Surely there was someone in Bath? And even if both she and Cassandra were destined to remain single, the complete change of scenery, daily routines and activities might well provide an immense boost to her writing.

  When she first returned from the city in 1797, her imagination had, after all, been fired by a new sense of possibility. The reaction to a first encounter with Bath recorded in Northanger Abbey is drawn straight from recent experience: ‘They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight; – her eyes were here, there, every where, as they approached its fine and striking environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted them to the hotel. She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.’ Thoughts of Bath could generate intense happiness, as Jane Austen knew very well, but the pleasures of life in the city could also seem superficial and artificial, just like its residents. By the time she was revising Northanger Abbey for publication, during 1801 and 1802, her own ideas about Bath seem to have undergone very substantial alteration.

  Although no manuscript has survived to offer clues about which passages belong to particular periods of composition, it seems likely that those conveying some of the less positive aspects of Bath belong to the process of revision rather than to the initial burst of creativity. In a conversation in the novel over the attractions of Bath, the newcomer’s keen appetite for everything the city has to offer is carefully balanced against the more jaded perspective of the habitual visitor. Catherine’s eager exclamations – ‘Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?’ – are carefully juxtaposed with Mr Tilney’s more considered assessment: ‘For six weeks I allow, Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world.’ Neither view is complete, but together they may reflect Jane Austen’s growing ability to invest traditional literary themes with the freshness of first-hand observation. In the same decade that William Blake created his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Jane Austen was exploring the contrary states in relation to her own life and her literary development.

  If, during her teens, Jane Austen had considered herself as being, like Catherine Morland, ‘in training for a heroine’, it was now perhaps dawning on her that she was more suited to take on the role of author. The narrative voice in Northanger Abbey, though infinitely sympathetic, is keen to emphasise the distance between the perspective of the storyteller and that of the main character. The rapid summary of Catherine Morland’s life prior to the age of seventeen introduces readers to the affectionate irony of the all-seeing narrator, but offers no direct communication from the heroine herself. We do not hear Catherine’s voice properly until halfway through the second chapter, when she whispers to Mrs Allen in the packed Upper Rooms: ‘How uncomfortable it is not to have a single acquaintance here.’ The difference between the heroine’s own words and the highly sophisticated sentences that have prepared the reader for her debut is only too apparent and, while the novel steadily allows for increasing focus on Catherine’s interior drama, its interest is sustained throughout by the narrator’s self-consciously skilful commentary.

  The joke about Catherine’s status as a heroine is a natural development from the parodic character of Jane Austen’s early writings. Her teenage compositions reveal a fascination with literary convention that emerges further in Northanger Abbey. The novel is much more substantial than early pieces such as ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’ or ‘Henry and Eliza’, with the exploration of literary matters integrated into a narrative that offers the additional satisfactions of convincing settings, astute observation, imaginative involvement with the characters and a proper plot. Its author had learned much about the development of different characters and the ways in which contrasting ideas could be conveyed through their letters when she wrote Lady Susan, but these discoveries were only the forerunners of what she achieved in Northanger Abbey. One of the most obvious differences between the two works is form. As Mrs Morland says goodbye to her daughter at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, the narrator observes: ‘It is remarkable . . . that she neither insisted on Catherine’s writing by every post, nor exacted her promise of transmitting the character of every new acquaintance, nor a detail of every interesting conversation that Bath might produce.’ In effect, Jane Austen was de
spatching both her heroine on her adventures and the epistolary novel to the honourable shades of literary history. Once she had abandoned the letter form favoured by Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney for their highly influential novels about the social challenges facing young women in the eighteenth century, Jane Austen was free to develop her own, independent narrative voice. Though she did not realise it at the time, she was also pioneering an entirely new kind of English fiction.

  Jane Austen could not have predicted the future of the English novel when she worked on Northanger Abbey, but she was certainly very conscious of the possibilities of her chosen form. She also knew that not everyone was as enlightened. Before the family moved from Steventon, a circulating library had opened in the village, making it possible for local people to borrow books and thereby greatly increase their scope for reading. When the proprietor, Mrs Martin, asked the Austens to subscribe in December 1798, she assured them that her library would stock not just novels, but all kinds of literature – an overture that produced some amusement at the rectory: ‘She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so.’32 Nevertheless, they recognised that Mrs Martin’s reassurances were probably necessary ‘to the self-consequence of half of her Subscribers’. Today, the genre is so well established that it is hard to imagine a time when people were embarrassed to admit to being ‘Novel-readers’, but during Jane Austen’s lifetime, novels were widely regarded as somewhat frivolous and even downright dangerous. For girls especially, reading fiction was often considered risky and generally undesirable. It was not every clergyman who would choose the latest Gothic fiction for his holiday reading, but Jane Austen describes her father engrossed in The Midnight Bell at the Bull and George in Dartford, on their way home from Kent in October 1798.33 More unusual still was George Austen’s readiness to share such books with his unmarried daughters.

  When Jane Austen depicted Catherine Morland being introduced to the newest ‘Horrid Novels’ by Isabella Thorpe, she was playing on contemporary fears about the harmful influence of fiction – but, with a characteristic refusal to submit to prevailing assumptions, she used the scene as an opportunity to defend her favourite literary form. In answer to the dismissive attitude so common among her contemporaries – ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ – the narrator of Northanger Abbey famously retorts that it is ‘only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’. As she worked on her own novel, Jane Austen was beginning to recognise just what a task she was undertaking.

  The celebration of fiction in Northanger Abbey extends well beyond the startling defence in chapter five. John Thorpe’s failure to get through more than the first volume of Frances Burney’s new novel is an indication of his other character deficiencies, while Henry Tilney’s detailed knowledge of Mrs Radcliffe’s work is one of his many charms. Although Catherine herself is led into excruciating misunderstandings by her undisciplined, Gothic-fuelled imagination, her unaffected pleasure in books, as in everything else, delights all those she meets, especially her own readers. As Jane Austen presented her heroine interpreting life according to the books she enjoyed, she was exploring the complexities of her own art and her responsibilities as a writer. When Catherine exclaims at Northanger, ‘Oh! Mr Tilney, how frightful! – This is just like a book!’, she demonstrates her author’s sophisticated understanding of the dimensions of fiction. Not only does the narrator prompt us to consider what we are doing when we read a novel, so do the characters. Catherine Morland’s propensity to see herself in a fictional world is, after all, understandable enough, given that she is a character in a novel.

  In her early writing, Jane Austen had moved happily between the recognisable world of Hampshire and the realms of her own reading, revelling in the comedy that could be extracted from sudden jumps from one to the other. Now she explored an altogether more subtle kind of fiction, in which the literary and the real cohabited far more harmoniously. Crucial to the success of her new novel was its more realistic representation of settings, conversations and action. Familiarity with Bath enabled Jane Austen to create a fictional world that instantly rings true. Unlike the Scottish or Welsh references in ‘Lesley Castle’ or ‘Love and Freindship’, the city in Northanger Abbey is a real place, conjured up by the names of streets and buildings that occur naturally in the course of the narrative. ‘They were soon settled in comfortable lodgings in Pulteney Street’ has a matter-of-fact quality that enables readers to enter into the world of the novel, whether or not they have any first-hand knowledge of Bath. The description of Catherine’s journey in John Thorpe’s carriage through Laura Place and into Argyle Buildings is so convincing that the heroine’s distress seems only too real, just as her subsequent enjoyment of the ball is enhanced for readers by its taking place in the Octagon Room. No detailed description of the architecture of Bath is given, but the way in which both characters and narrator refer to the various venues, just as readers might describe things to a local friend, is far more effective than an elaboration of sash windows, Sheraton tables and chandeliers.

  Bath offered more than a rich landscape for Jane Austen’s characters. Apart from her early educational experiences, she had spent much of her life in the company of her own extended family and the neighbours who lived in the parsonages and manor houses round about. She knew the servants at home and the labourers who worked in the nearby fields. She went to the shops in Overton and the balls in Basingstoke. She had stayed in Kent when visiting Edward’s family and had been to London to see Henry. Beyond this, however, Jane Austen’s experience of human life was not very extensive, and so Bath’s appeal to people of all ages and varied backgrounds greatly increased her knowledge of the world. Mrs Allen’s obsession with muslins, for example, is beautifully observed and, though reminiscent in some ways of Charlotte Luttrell’s preoccupation with food in ‘Lesley Castle’, conveys all the atmosphere of 1790s Bath. Nor were Jane Austen’s horizons broadened by only the enormous range of individuals who came and went for medical or social reasons. She was able to experience life in town and to develop ways of recreating a smart, urban environment in her fiction. Catherine Morland’s first excursion vividly evokes the alarm that may be felt by a girl from the country who finds herself overwhelmed by a mass of strangers in a confined space. Once adjusted to Bath, however, Catherine is able to navigate the streets with ease, while her creator uses the skilfully evoked sense of endless movement to introduce new characters and chance encounters unexpectedly, though not improbably.

  If Bath provided a stimulating environment for Jane Austen’s active imagination, it also offered daily reminders of what might result from determined efforts to shape language, wit and human interest into an engaging narrative. At Steventon, the opening of a circulating library was a major event. Bath, on the other hand, was so well endowed with bookshops and libraries that the Austen family was able to keep up with the latest publications far more easily. To be surrounded by new books, and, equally importantly, by people who bought new books, was likely as crucial to Jane Austen’s development as the fresh material that furnished her inner world. Although ‘First Impressions’ had been rejected out of hand, it seemed worth having another attempt at convincing a publisher that her work was worthy of attention. Crosby & Co. had outlets in the Bath book trade and published a considerable range of titles, including domestic and Gothic novels. The firm was doing well, made efforts to market its books effectively and welcomed ‘eye-catching’ scripts.34 Henry was now established as a banker in London and, with the help of one of his new contacts, William Seymour, Jane Austen’s novel found its way into the offices of Crosby & Co. early in 1803. To the author’s very great delight, it was accepted.

  At this stage of its development, the novel eventually published as Northanger Abbey was called
‘Susan’, a title that made its first public appearance among the lists of new books being advertised by Crosby within months of acceptance. Such rapid literary success must have done much to ease any residual sadness over departure from rural Hampshire and help reconcile Jane Austen to her new urban lifestyle. Not yet thirty, Jane’s talents were being recognised beyond the warm, but inevitably partial, gaze of her immediate family. The ability that had always been channelled into private entertainments was now to find a much larger audience. ‘Susan’ was about to make her entrance into society, and she was ready to be jostled and admired by a crowd of unknown readers.

  The novel, however, did not appear. Despite his agreement to publish, and the fee of £10 sent by Crosby in return for the manuscript, his firm never printed ‘Susan’. Nor did he give any reason for his decision to withhold publication. Gradually, the months of waiting for news of the book turned into years. The heady joy of acceptance became the hard fact of rejection. For a single woman approaching her thirtieth birthday in the early nineteenth century, the feeling of being unwanted was beginning to close in on Jane Austen from various directions.

  FROM HOME TO HOME

  1804–9

  ‘But you know we must marry.’35 It is not difficult to discern some of Jane Austen’s own preoccupations behind the dialogue she began to draft after her first novel had been sent off to the publishers. She abandoned ‘The Watsons’ after only forty pages, but what survives of her story reveals much about a writer whose life seemed oddly suspended between hope and disappointment. The fragment opens with Emma Watson returning to her immediate family after growing up in the happy home of an aunt who has just remarried and gone to join her new husband in Ireland. On the journey into Surrey, Emma is accompanied by her elder sister Elizabeth, who seizes the opportunity to recount the sorry tale of her broken romance, while insisting that Emma must, nevertheless, find herself a husband. The reason the Watson sisters are faced with no alternative to early marriage is economic: ‘Father cannot provide for us, & it is very bad to grow old & be poor & laughed at.’ Emma is shocked by her sister’s words, and, reluctant to concur, insists: ‘Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education & feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest . . . I would rather be Teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a Man I did not like.’ Although the satiric touch about teaching is reminiscent of the early writings, the tone of the conversation is altogether more serious, suggesting that its subject could not be kept entirely under comic control. The painful debate between two far-from-wealthy sisters about their possible futures was only too close to Jane Austen’s own experience.