Jane Austen (6 page)

It is perhaps worthwhile to consider
Clarissa
, since its story may help to dispel the delusion, under which some persons appear to labor, that living in a country parsonage

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at the end of the eighteenth century was like living fifty years later in a novel by Charlotte Yonge. At its worst the society of eighteenthcentury England was gross and disgusting; at its best it embodied a beautiful frankness, an honest acceptance of the facts of existence, and it differed from the unhealthy period of the mid and late

nineteenth century in that the innocence and elegance of its women were not based on ignorance.

How eagerly Jane Austen received the impression of Richardson's genius, how she "lived" among his characters, is shown by her frequent references to
Sir Charles Grandison
. Judged by impersonal standards, this novel, the latest of three, is also the weakest; it contains hardly any of Richardson's alarming excitement and no character to compare with Clarissa in beauty or with Lovelace in interest and conviction. On the other hand, it is entirely proper. True, the heroine, Harriet Byron, is abducted on her way home from a masquerade by a particularly brutal libertine, Sir Hargrave

Pollexfen; and as readers of
Clarissa
had realized that Richardson by no means considered a happy ending necessary to a heroine's story, the reader's alarm and that of Harriet's doting relations is extremely high, until it is learned that she has been rescued by
Sir Charles
Grandison
, whose entrance into the story at this heaven-sent moment is quite the best thing about him. The other six volumes deal with Harriet's friendship and gratitude to Sir Charles and his very lively and audacious sister, Miss Grandison, and her rapidly falling in love with the former, and with the good that Sir Charles does to a vast number of people. The happy conclusion is scarcely a climax, it is so gently led up to; and the charm of the story is in fact almost all meditative, retrospective, in earnest conversations in which all the chief characters are shown to be virtuous and deserving of

happiness,

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though, as frequently occurs in real life, some can gain it only at the expense of others. The hold the story, with its multitudinous figures, took on Jane Austen's imagination was extraordinary. Henry Austen said that she remembered and would speak of any date throughout the year on which any episode of the book was said to have taken place; on one occasion she was to wear a cap of white satin and lace,

"with a little white flower perking out of the left ear, like Harriet Byron's feather," because Harriet's costume for the fatal masquerade included "a white, Paris sort of cap, glittering with spangles and encircled by a chaplet of artificial flowers, with a little white feather perking from the left ear."

Catherine Morland, the enthusiastic, unsophisticated heroine of
Northanger Abbey
, makes her first acquaintance with fashionable novels under the guidance of her stylish friend, Isabella Thorpe, who says:

"'It is so odd to me that you should never have read Udolpho before, but I suppose Mrs. Morland objects to novels.'"

"'No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself; but new books do not fall in our way.'"

"'Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not? I remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume.'"

"'It is not like Udolpho at all, but yet I think it is very entertaining.'"

"'Do you indeed? You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.'"

It would be amusing to speculate which novel of the present century has made so strong an impression on its readers that in a hundred years' time the character of two people in a then contemporary novel could be estimated by their respective attitudes towards it.

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THE YOUNG ladies of Steventon Rectory were two very pretty

girls. They were rather above middle height. Jane especially was very slender and lightly moving; her hair was dark brown and curled naturally, her large dark eyes were widely opened and expressive.

Sir Egerton Brydges, who had admired her when she was a

schoolgirl, said that then her cheeks were too full, but a portrait of her as a young woman suggests that she outgrew this defect. She had a clear brown skin and blushed so brightly and so readily that Henry applied Donne's lines to her:

Her pure and eloquent blood

Spake in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought

That you had almost said her body thought.

Her voice was charming--sweet and clear and of exquisite

articulation--and though her behavior was quiet, her unconsidered, spontaneous remarks impressed themselves on the hearer's mind; her conversation was very pleasant when she had to make it in company, and brilliantly lively when she was in the freedom and safety of the home circle. Of the two girls, she was the immediately striking one, though she

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sometimes kept deliberately behind Cassandra. As the older sister to such a younger, Cassandra was an ideal being. She was very

intelligent--indeed, she had their mother's shrewdness--at the same time her outward appearance was completely tranquil; there was a gentle sweetness in her manner which was the more remarkable

because it did not bespeak an uncritical or easy-going nature. It is needless to say that she had not Jane's powers of intuition, but, as an ordinary human being, she possessed extremely good judgment and at the same time the tendency to like people and excuse them, and that other unusual combination of great gentleness and undeviating firmness in doing what she considered to be right. The family said of them that Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always

under control, and Jane had the happiness of a temper that needed no control.

The sisters slept together, and out of their bedroom opened a good-sized dressing room, plainly furnished but containing their personal possessions. The carpet had flowers on a brown ground; an oval looking-glass hung between the two windows; there was a chest of drawers of painted wood, with a bookcase over it; Cassandra's

drawing materials, and Jane's piano; also a writing desk, a box with a sloping lid.

The part of her life which Jane lived in this room, where she spent so many absorbed and happy hours, with Cassandra beside her, whose presence interrupted her not at all, did not interfere with her life below stairs. At this time Eliza de Feuillide said that Jane and Cassandra were both very pretty and breaking hearts by the dozen, and though the second part of the sentence could perhaps be

explained as Eliza's way of putting things, the Austen family, during Jane's late 'teens, were all alive with love-making and getting married. James, who had become the curate of a neighboring

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parish, had married the daughter of the great house, Ann Matthew, who was five years older than he was, but for whose discrepancy in age James' seriousness well made up. General Matthew allowed the couple £100 a year, and James had £200 of his own. On this it was possible to live in the country districts of eighteenth-century England very comfortably; Mrs. James Austen had her carriage, and, the Austen passion for sport being shared even by the pensive James, a pack of harriers was kept for the curate.

The marriage of Edward was also about to take place. Edward, the heir to Mr. Knight's great fortune and his estates of Godmersham and Chawton, was marrying in circumstances widely different from his brother's. He had become engaged to the beautiful Elizabeth Bridges, whose father, Sir Brooke Bridges, owned a considerable property.

His wife's miniature by Cosway remains to show that Edward

Austen's extraordinary good fortune was constant to him in marriage as well as in worldly prosperity.

Edward remained warmly fond of his relations and interested in their affairs, and though he was not so intimate with the family as a whole as he would have been if he had been brought up with them, he

claimed Cassandra as his own special sister, and from the time of his marriage she was constantly staying with him. Cassandra in the meantime was becoming very happy on her own account. Martha

and Mary Lloyd's kinsman, Lord Craven, another descendant of the Cruel Mrs. C., had a young cousin named Thomas Fowle. As a

visitor in the Lloyds' household he inevitably made the acquaintance of the Austens, and he fell in love with Cassandra Austen. With her parents' consent, the two became engaged. Fowle had just been

ordained, and it was confidently hoped that Lord Craven, who was very kind to him, would give him one of the several valuable livings in his gift.

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A certain Shropshire living, perhaps because it was about to fall vacant, was the one which everybody supposed would be given to Fowle. Because of the present slight uncertainty of his prospects and possibly because Cassandra disliked a bustle about herself, the engagement was not publicly announced.

In the meantime there was a wedding actually in their midst. Jane Cooper had accompanied her father, Dr. Cooper, on a cruise for his health, in the course of which she met Lieutenant Thomas Williams, and became engaged to him. Unhappily Dr. Cooper died before the wedding could be arranged, and after the period of mourning, Jane Cooper, having neither father nor mother, came to Steventon to be married from the house of her uncle and aunt.

Jane herself, whose only sister was already engaged, could "come out" as soon as she liked, even if the Austens rigidly observed the etiquette of not bringing forward the younger girls till the elder were disposed of, but so far her only romantic interest had been a standing flirtation with Mr. Lefroy's nephew, Tom, renewed whenever he

came to Ashe, and not considered as very serious at present by anybody.

Of this group of marriages which occupied so much of the family attention, James', the earliest made, was the shortest lived. His wife died while their daughter was so young that all she could remember of her mother was "a tall and slender lady dressed in white." The poor young widower was left with a child who asked continually for

"Mama," and, unable to bear it, or to make any suitable arrangement for the little Anna in his own house, he sent her to Steventon to be

"mothered" by her two young aunts. It is to the recollections of this child, remarkably intelligent for her age, that we owe the

descriptions of the dressing room, and of something else very

interesting. Jane, who began to be the perfect

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aunt long before she was twenty, would tell Anna stories that went on from day to day, and when Anna made up stories for herself, she dictated them to Jane, who wrote them down. But Jane was also

writing a story of her own; it was called First Impressions, and while Anna played quietly in the dressing room, Jane would read aloud the completed chapters of this story to Cassandra, who always burst out laughing. Anna heard so much of the story that she grew quite

familiar with the names of the people, and at last she began to talk about them downstairs; but no sooner did Cassandra and Jane hear her doing this than they both asked her to be very careful not to say another word about the story to anybody, because it was quite

private, and a secret that Anna had with them.

First Impressions
was not the only story Jane had produced.
Elinor
and Marianne
, a novel in which the events were related in letters, she had either sketched out or completed; but though she loved to write, and when actually at work proceeded with complete and

unerring self-confidence, as soon as she laid down the pen she became once more the modest, self-distrustful tyro. To their

acquaintances at large she would not be known to write for anything.

The contemporary novelist whom she admired most was a woman,

Madame D'Arblay, who as Fanny Burney had startled the literary world with
Evelina
, published in 1778, when she was a girl of twenty and Jane a child of three. Fanny Burney had followed her first success with
Cecilia
; at last in 1796, in Jane's twenty-first year, it was announced that she was about to bring out her third novel,
Camilla
. The public were, of course, invited to subscribe; several pages of the first of the five volumes are occupied with an imposing subscription list in alphabetical order, and among the A's is found the entry: Miss J. Austen, Steventon.

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According to family tradition, the Rev. George Austen paid the money to give his daughter this extreme delight. The anticipation, the eagerness and excitement with which the five thick, small

volumes, with their elegant large print, were received and carried off to the dressing room can be understood when we think of our

pleasure in getting hold of a book we have wanted very much to read, and multiply that many hundred times, by imagining ourselves without a cinema, without a wireless set, without a gramophone, without a daily newspaper. Nor were these anticipations

disappointed, and if Jane Austen's high opinion of Fanny Burney --or it might possibly be more accurate to say, the immense pleasure she took in Miss Burney's work--should surprise us, considering the immeasurable distance between them in their rank as novelist, we must remember that if Jane Austen were to take pleasure in a

contemporary novelist at all before 1815, when, three years before her death, Scott published Guy Mannering, it had of necessity to be in someone whose work was inferior to her own.

It must be agreed that despite her virtues, Fanny Burney's faults as a writer are too serious for people who have available for their delight the whole range of nineteenth-century novelists to consider her as more than an excellent but very unequal writer.
Evelina
,
Cecilia
and
Camilla
, and the first especially, contain scenes of a sharpness and gaiety approaching those of Sheridan, but they also contain noble characters who are intolerably priggish and verbose, and long

stretches of moralizing through which the reader flounders in