Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (34 page)

I have almost come to the end of my work on
Emma
. She is a character I cannot suppose that anyone will very much admire, except for me—but perhaps I am a little weary of frivolity. Close observation of another young lady, of higher principles and dearer sacrifice, has taught me to value the word
heroine
. I only wish that I had achieved Justice—of which I spoke so often, and realised so little—for Mary Gambier in the end.

In this, the twelfth of Jane Austen’s detective adventures, we find the Georgian author embedded in the north Hampshire countryside she loved so well, and surrounded (with greater or lesser affection) by family and friends. The journal manuscript provides fascinating insights to Austen’s life during the period when England was once again at war with her former American colonies; and although Jane’s naval brothers, Frank and Charles, were not engaged in the War of 1812, their associates, such as Admiral Gambier, certainly were.

The interest Jane felt in the hostilities, including the negotiation of the Treaty of Ghent, is evident from her comments in a letter to Martha Lloyd dated Friday, September 2, 1814. She was staying with her brother Henry Austen in London at the time; and as Henry was a banker with connections among the Prince of Wales’s circle, he shared what he knew of official policy toward the Americans. “The[y] cannot be conquered, & we shall only be teaching them the skill in War which they may now want. We are to make them good Sailors & Soldiers, & [gain] nothing ourselves,” Jane writes
indignantly.
¹
She goes on to assure Martha that she places her faith in the protection of Heaven—which she cannot believe the Americans to possess. Something of this scorn for American life surfaces as well in her early conversations with Raphael West. He earns her mistrust by the simple expedient of having an American father, albeit one whose art Jane admired. In the same letter to Martha, she relates her joy at having seen Benjamin West’s “Rejection by the Elders” on this visit to London.

Austen’s depiction of Raphael West as an artist-cum-intelligence agent is intriguing. The elder son of Benjamin West has left few traces to history, other than a collection of his sketches from a period of travel in the Catskills of New York, and some studies undertaken on behalf of his father. His remarkable visage is captured, however, in several portraits by Benjamin West. In one, a likeness of Raphael and his younger brother dated 1796, and currently in the Nelson Watkins Museum of Art, he appears as a young man living at the height of European Fashion, with his hair cut in the mode of the French Revolution and his dark eyes full of arrogance and discernment. He may then have been living in Paris, a hotbed of Republican sympathies, and it is as well that Jane did not encounter him at this point in his life; they should not have suited each other.

Finally, it is refreshing to experience what Jane calls “the gaieties” of the Christmas season two hundred years ago. The rituals of the twelve-days between Christmas and January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, are steeped in the earlier mysticism of Celtic-Roman life in a way that feels uniquely British, and far different from the Germanic celebrations Queen Victoria would introduce some two
decades later. Even Jane’s enjoyment in the warmth and beauty of The Vyne—which may still be visited today through the National Trust—survives, despite her perilous brush with murder.

Stephanie Barron

Denver, CO

June, 2014