Jane Austen (21 page)

George Austen, with a simple epitaph stating that he had been the Rector of Steventon and Deane in Hampshire. His true epitaph had been written by Jane, when she said: "His tenderness as a father, who can do justice to?"

On the death of her husband, Mrs. Austen and her daughters, with one maid, removed to lodgings at 25 Gay Street;

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Gay Street runs steeply down hill out of the Circus, and is therefore in a much more fashionable and frequented quarter of the town than Sydney Place or Green Park Buildings. The houses are small but elegant. Cassandra and Jane might have rejoiced to find themselves in Gay Street, if they had not been growing tired of Bath.

Very shortly after they had moved in, Cassandra went to Ibthrop; her visit was especially welcome to Martha, for old Mrs. Lloyd was very ill and not expected to recover. Jane wrote to her, as usual, an account of every day. She said they had been to see a Miss

Chamberlayne "look hot on horseback," and she recalled that seven years ago they had been to the same riding school to watch Mrs.

Lefroy's daughter Lucy. "What a different set are we now moving in!

But seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one's skin and every feeling of one's mind." She was now thirty; and to her mind the girl of twenty-three had quite disappeared; although to other people the alteration might seem less complete, for the grace and liveliness were still there, the eager interest in people and their doings, the open, delighted gaze upon the world, but her charm had suffered a sea-change; it was not now the over-lively fascination that had once alarmed Cassandra, but a simple elegance, a quiet but ready agreeableness, a friendliness that considered a little. Though she had not now the attraction of a brilliant girl, she was, to acquaintances in general, a center of interest and appreciation; on the whole, people were rather more anxious for her company than she was for theirs, though they had not the remotest notion of what she was. She was glad of society but she did not want too much of it; and in Bath they had almost more friends than she could cope with. She

"endeavored" to keep her intimacies in their proper place without their clashing with each other; after one particularly

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strenuous bout of entertaining, she hoped she might in future be preserved from so many dear friends all at once; but she had no trace of self-consciousness even in her private attitude towards them. Miss Armstrong, her friend of Lyme, was now in Bath, and, as Miss

Armstrongs will, taxed Jane with showing "a change" in her manner towards her. "Unlucky me," said Jane, "that my notice should be of such consequence and my manners so bad!" But she took Miss Armstrong for a walk; she said she really was a pleasant girl, and added: "Her great want of a companion at home, which may well make any tolerable acquaintance important to her, gives her another claim on my attention."

Before she could send the letter, news arrived from Ibthrop that Mrs.

Lloyd was dying. Jane wrote: "The nonsense I have been writing in this and my last letter seems out of place at such a time; but I will not mind it; it will do you no harm and nobody else will be attacked by it."

The death of Mrs. Lloyd opened the way for a new arrangement; the Austens asked Martha to come and live with them. It says much for the reasonable nature of Jane's and Cassandra's attachment to each other that, singularly profound as it was, they welcomed the idea of such a friend as Martha being included in their household. The plan was advantageous to everybody; now that Martha was alone, nothing could have been more welcome to her, and besides the pleasure of her society, her presence afforded Cassandra and Jane more freedom in going away without feeling that they were neglecting their

mother.

Martha was with them by August, and in that month they both

visited Godmersham. Edward's family had now increased to nine, his daughter Louisa having been born in 1804. Elizabeth was still the mild and lovely creature he had married; her husband's wealth

relieved as far as possible the

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strain of bearing so many children in such rapid succession; and besides being the devoted mother of all her sons and daughters she was still the elegant mistress of a large country house, and a charming hostess to her younger sister-in-law. When the hairdresser came to Godmersham to arrange a new coiffure for the lady of the house, he undertook Jane's hair as well. He charged Jane half a crown for cutting and dressing hers, which she agreed was a

moderate charge, but she was shocked at his rapacity towards the wealthy Mrs. Austen; he charged five shillings for each time he dressed Elizabeth's hair in the new manner and five shillings for every lesson he gave her maid Sace in how to do it.

But the round of domestic interests, visits, pleasures, duties, was suddenly impinged upon; in the autumn of 1805 occurred an event which roused the nation at large, and through the medium of Frank Austen was brought peculiarly close to the Austen family. The war with France had continued intermittently for so long that though people living on the coast were almost always in a state of

restlessness, and the girls in boarding schools near the sea kept under their beds blankets with tapes attached, known as Napoleon blankets, to be put on in case of a midnight alarm, the English people as a whole, excepting those with relations or friends in the Navy, tended to regard the war as something in the background of their lives; but despite this general lack of concern for the imminence of danger, and ignorance of the magnitude of its possible consequences, one man connected with the conduct of the war was a national idol. The procession of Nelson through the streets of London, in an open carriage with Lady Hamilton beside him, had caused scenes of

frantic enthusiasm, and his person, his features, his characteristics, had impressed themselves on the public consciousness, as his

extraordinary

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personality influenced those who served with him and under him.

In the October of 1805 Frank Austen wrote to Mary Gibson from off Tetuan, expressing a fear that, in spite of the nearness of a big engagement of the fleets, owing to the enemy's having escaped the blockade of Cadiz, he and his companions might be prevented by contrary winds from reaching it in time to join it. It was not, he said, that he liked fighting for itself, but "after having been so many months in a state of constant and unremitting fag, to be at last cut out by a parcel of folk just come from their homes, where some of them were sitting at their case the greater part of last war and the whole of this, till just now, is particularly hard and annoying." When he wrote a week later his worst fears had been realized. "Alas, my dearest Mary . . . The fleets have met, and, after a very severe contest, a most decisive victory has been gained by the English." For a naval captain to have missed the battle of Trafalgar was the

disappointment of a lifetime, but the death of Nelson was to Frank Austen a grief that over-rode even that. He had seen the Admiral at close quarters, and felt the magic exerted by the puny, fragile, half-blind little man with the empty sleeve. "I never heard of his equal, nor do I expect again to see such a man," he wrote. "He possessed in a superior degree the happy talent of making every class of persons pleased with their situation and eager to exert themselves in

forwarding the public service." Frank Austen's tribute is borne out by every other account of Nelson's achievement; but one cannot

properly appreciate it without some knowledge, however slight, of what the situation was of those seamen whom Nelson managed, not merely to command as their Admiral, but to inspire as fellow

workers in the service of their country.

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The question of Nelson's private life, than which few private lives have been more the public property, is especially interesting in connection with what Jane Austen said about the Navy; nor was it so much at variance with her view of the typical sailor's as might appear. She was always struck by that aspect of the sailor which combined great courage, hardihood and an enthusiasm for his

perilous profession, with a love of domestic happiness and a constant fidelity to it; and though Nelson's mistress, that overblown rose, glorious in Romney's portraits and in caricature obscenely gross, was something altogether alien to the taste and habits of the Austens themselves, yet the celebrated liaison did embody, though under so different a guise, something of what Jane Austen described as the characteristic relationship between sailors and the women they loved. She depicted them as husband and wife or betrothed lovers.

But Nelson's constancy to Lady Hamilton was so entire that in the eyes of many it ranked as the devotion of a husband to his wife; and what Lady Hamilton's was to him he proved when he said: "If there were more Emmas, there would be more Nelsons." "Be careful of my guardian angel," he said, when the ship's carpenters, clearing the Victory's decks for action, took down Lady Hamilton's portrait from the mast; and the concluding paragraph of Persuasion is one side of the story, of which Lady Hamilton wrote the other when she

scrawled across the letter Captain Hardy brought her after the Trafalgar action: "O miserable, wretched Emmal O glorious and happy Nelson!"

In the following June Captain Frank Austen was married, and he and Mary settled at Southampton. Ultimately a house was taken large enough for him and Mary, Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, Jane and Martha to live in together; and 1806 saw the removal of the Austens from Gay Street "with

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what happy feelings of release!" said Jane; but before the new year and the round of visits which preluded their arrival at Southampton she had finished her little sketch, afterwards to be known as
Lady
Susan
.

The story is intrinsically interesting, but in a consideration of Jane Austen's work it is invaluable; it establishes once for all the dangers one may fall into in saying that this one or that of her characters "is"

some person in real life. The death of Mrs. Lloyd in April 1805 had perhaps recalled to Jane the story of the old lady's early years, or possibly it made her feel that there was now no harm in using a story which some scruple might have prevented her from treating while one of the actors in it was still living. The story of Lady Susan is of course based on that of "the cruel Mrs. Craven"; the lovely, fascinating mother, so caressing and soft in her manners in public and so brutal to her daughter in private, and the condition of the daughter, brought on a visit by her mother, but kept as much as possible locked up in her mother's dressing room and rendered stupid by misery and fear, make it unmistakable; and, this being the case, when one is confronted with a portrait of Lady Susan, sketched lightly but with Jane Austen's skill, and having thus all the

appearances of an actual woman, the temptation is to say that of course Lady Susan "is" Mrs. Craven. It is only when we remember that Jane Austen never saw Mrs. Craven, and that her study shows Lady Susan in relation to a variety of people, of whom her daughter is only one, that we see the essential falseness of such a conclusion, though it may at first sight appear irresistible.

The more the story is considered, the more widely it is seen to differ from its origin. From the scanty accounts of Mrs. Craven which have transpired, it is tolerably plain that the original was on a larger and darker scale altogether

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than the offspring. Lady Susan is cold-blooded and completely

heartless, hypocritical, unscrupulous and mean; her callousness, indeed, makes her a formidable character; but what she does is done from a quite understandable, though entirely selfish standpoint. She is cruel because she wants to get her own way and does not intend to be influenced by a consideration of anybody's feelings, but she is not morbid or perverse; she is an extremely bad character, but she is not a nightmare; on the contrary, she is so completely convinced that her course of action is merely what she owes it to herself to do that she becomes, at times, almost disarming; and she is so far from

physically ill-treating her daughter or wishing to degrade her, that she establishes her at a highly exclusive finishing school, of which, as she says, "the price is immense, and much beyond what I can ever attempt to pay," and is very angry at the girl's stupidity in refusing an eligible suitor.

The slightness of the tale is not a matter for regret such as we feel at the unfinished condition of
The Watsons
; it contains no one character of such charm and worth that we long to read the remainder of his history; but as it stands it is a remarkable structure, comprising, within a very little space, a great deal of light and shade, and that most satisfying kind of excitement which is produced in the reader by turns of action at once dramatic and inevitable. The threads of interest which converge upon Churchill, the country house of the Vernons, are a characteristic example of Jane Austen's instinctive brilliance in the handling of plot. Lady Susan, the widow of Mr.

Vernon's brother, is invited by him to pay Churchill a long visit.

Lady Susan is far from wishing to do anything so much in the nature of a dead bore, but she is obliged to leave the house of the

Mainwarings where she has been staying, because, as she has made Mr. Mainwaring

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deeply in love with her, and drawn off his sister's suitor, Sir James Martin, Mrs. Mainwaring and Miss Mainwaring have combined to

make the house impossible to her. Being extravagant and poor, she therefore avails herself of the invitation to Churchill, to the annoyance of Mrs. Vernon, who, far shrewder than her goodnatured, unsuspecting husband, has heard too much about Lady

Susan's goings-on, and mistrusts her from the start. Nevertheless she is obliged to admire her beauty, so exquisitely fair, her grey eyes with their dark lashes and her youthful appearance which makes her appear twenty-five, though she is actually ten years older. Mrs.

Vernon is also surprised at Lady Susan's manner, so simple, frank and unassuming, though her penetration allows her to see that it is only a pose to gain their confidence.