Jane Austen
Authors: Valerie Grosvenor Myer
9 DANCING AND SHOPPING, 1796-1800
23 SHIPWRECK, BANKRUPTCY AND OTHER DISASTERS, 1816
Copyright © 1997, 2011 by Valerie Grosvenor Myer
Family Tree © 1997, 2011 by Stephen Dew
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-657-8
Also by Valerie Grosvenor Myer
C
HARLOTTE
B
RONTE:
T
RUCULENT
S
PIRIT
C
ULTURE
S
HOCK
L
AURENCE
S
TERNE:
R
IDDLES AND
M
YSTERIES
M
ARGARET
D
RABBLE:
A R
EADER’S
G
UIDE
S
AMUEL
R
ICHARDSON:
P
ASSION AND
P
RUDENCE
T
EN
G
REAT
E
NGLISH
N
OVELISTS
To Jean Gooder
I have now attained the true art of letter-writing which, we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you as fast as I could the whole of this letter.
Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, 5 January 1801
Jane Austen was never secure financially and was less secure socially than many readers of her novels have assumed. She belonged not to the squirearchy but to the upper end of the professional middle class and spent her entire life as a poor relation. Although socializing with richer neighbours and visits to landed relatives gave her an insight into the way wealthy people lived, it was very different from her own life of genteel poverty, especially after her father’s retirement. She lived on the outside looking in. Correctly speaking, she was not even ‘Miss Austen’. As a younger daughter, less admired than her sister, who took precedence of her, she was merely ‘Miss Jane Austen’. Seniority counted. Her immediate family had brains, energy and titled connections, but not much money. They were constantly in difficulties. As a single woman without money, she was marginal to society. Her equivocal position moulded her outlook, and her surviving letters betray moments of bitterness. Although a rich man proposed, her obstinate heart prevented her from marrying except for love. Despite a few years of growing reputation as a writer, which she keenly enjoyed, hers was a life of disappointment and frustration. Her criticisms of other writers show she knew the value of her own work and she fretted that it was not better paid. She admitted being ‘greedy’ for money and grudged Walter Scott his place among the novelists when he was already rich and famous as a poet. Such recognition as she received came late in her short life and during her lifetime only four of her books were published, all of them anonymously.
For generous help and advice I have to thank Tom Carpenter, Keith Crook, Rodney Dale, Sylvia Greybourne, David Keane, Gina Keane, Jascha Kessler, Susan McCartan, Derek McCulloch, Ken May, Brian Sibley, Ken Turner, David Weeks and Margaret Wilson. Yvonne Holland’s sympathetic and creative editing has been invaluable: and for his proofreading skills, inwardness with Jane Austen, and constant support, I am grateful to my husband, Michael Grosvenor Myer.
What Was She Like?
P
EOPLE WHO KNEW
Jane Austen described her as pretty. She was attractive, both in appearance and in personality. The only authenticated likeness is an amateurish pencil and watercolour drawing, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Jane’s elder sister, Cassandra. Yet Cassandra’s drawing shows a woman more sharp-featured than appealing: the eyes are, large and beautiful, glancing keenly at something to the left of the picture, and the eyebrows are well marked. Her curls escape charmingly from the cap, but there are lines of disappointment running from nose to mouth, and the mouth itself looks small and mean. She looks like a peevish hamster. Her niece Anna Austen Lefroy, daughter of Jane Austen’s eldest brother, dismissed the portrait as hideously unlike.
An even more mysterious picture of Jane by Cassandra is a pencil and watercolour sketch giving a back view of her in a pale blue dress, and in which most of the face is concealed by a large blue bonnet.
Although it was said by a fellow author that her cheeks were ‘a little too fair when she was a young girl, she was agreed to be good-looking, with a fine complexion of a rich colour, brown rather than fair. Her reddish-brown hair curled naturally. A lock survives but time has bleached it. Her nose was narrow and possibly rather long, like those of her mother and sister.
In 1944 a bookseller found a profile silhouette pasted into a copy of the second edition of
Mansfield Park
(the 1816 edition, the first having been published in 1814). Unfortunately there was no bookplate or other evidence of ownership of this volume but underneath the silhouette an unknown hand has written
‘L'aimable Jane.'
This cannot refer to a character in the novel, for though
Pride and Prejudice
has Jane Bennet and
Emma
has Jane Fairfax there is no Jane in
Mansfield Park
. So this tantalizing outline is presumed to be a portrait of Jane herself. Jane’s niece Caroline Austen, Anna’s half-sister, recorded that her Aunt Jane was the first person she consciously thought of as pretty. This silhouette picture shows us a young woman who could certainly be described as pretty, and probably less than thirty years old. The sitter has neat features balanced by a trim chignon worn fairly high, a graceful neck and shoulders, and a high, firm bosom. She is wearing some sort of necklace.
Another silhouette owned by the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral, and ‘supposedly done by herself in 1815’, shows a woman with the Austen family nose and apparently not wearing the cap she habitually wore.
At one time a full-length portrait of a young teenager, which may just be by Johann Zoffany (who died in 1810), was thought to show Jane Austen, but costume experts have confidently dated it at about 1805, when Jane was thirty. At that time, Jane’s father died, and she and her widowed mother were reduced to poverty. They could not have risen to the extravagance of employing a fashionable portrait painter. It has been suggested that the artist is in fact Ozias Humphrey (or Humphreys or Humphries) and that the face is Jane’s, but the bone structure looks different from that suggested by Cassandra’s sketch. The painting shows a round face, unlike the pointed chin of Cassandra’s picture. It may be of a younger, distant cousin also named Jane Austen.
When the
Memoir
by Jane’s nephew the Revd James-Edward Austen-Leigh was published in 1869, although dated 1870, a Mrs Charlotte Maria Beckford, who as a child had known Jane in middle age, was disappointed with the portrait used as the frontispiece. Cassandra’s original drawing had been softened and falsified in a miniature watercolour by a Mr Andrews of Maidenhead, the eyes enlarged, the mouth forced into a demure smile. This picture was a bland lie: it failed to tell any sort of truth about either Jane’s personality or her looks. The steel-engraved version of Mr Andrews’s picture was worse: it made her look smug instead of sharp, and sentimentalized her into a mimsy Victorian icon in a prettified cap with added ribbons and lace.
Regrettably this travesty is still often reproduced. Only the pose and the costume bear any resemblance to Cassandra’s sketch of a wary, watchful Regency lady. Mrs Beckford remembered a tall, thin, spare person with very high cheekbones, colour in her cheeks, and sparkling eyes, which were not large but joyous and intelligent. She said Jane’s face was by no means as broad and plump as represented. She recalled Jane’s keen sense of humour and, like Jane’s own nieces, said children liked her because she entered into their games.
Perhaps some clue to what Jane looked like are two portraits of her niece Anna Austen Lefroy in middle age. Anna resembled her aunt in colouring, with the same chestnut hair and hazel eyes, and in figure. She looked, too, like Jane’s brothers, of whom we have convincing likenesses, and fits Mrs Beckford’s description. We know that Jane’s step was light and firm, that her speaking voice was sweet - she excelled in reading aloud - but we cannot find a real face. However, enough evidence exists to reconstruct something of the real woman, who was more interesting and less inhibited than we have been allowed to believe.
