Jane Austen (10 page)

In old age, he was proud of the early friendship with the celebrated Jane Austen, but said he loved her with a boy’s love’. He married a rich woman, Mary Paul, sister of a college friend, in 1799, and had nine children. He bought an estate in County Longford where his descendants still live.

Although Mr and Mrs Lefroy teased Tom out of his feelings of attraction to Jane and packed him off to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn under the watchful eye of his Uncle Benjamin they blamed the young man himself for precipitating this decisive course of action. They told their sons that Tom had behaved badly in paying attention to Jane when he knew he could not afford to marry for a long while yet. The Lefroys’ predecessor at Ashe Rectory, later known as Ashe House, was the Revd Dr Richard Russell and some have wondered whether Lady Russell in
Persuasion
, who gives dangerously prudential advice to Anne Elliot, blighting her youthful romance at nineteen, owes something to ‘Madam’ Lefroy.

The young Jane had fantasized about marriage, scrawling imaginary entries for herself and various young men on a blank page in her father’s church register, proclaiming the banns between herself and ‘Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam of London’, entering a record of marriage between herself and ‘Arthur William Mortimer’ and giving as the names of the witnesses Jack and Jane Smith, late Austen’.

But marriage was not to be, for either sister. Jane may have reflected later that lack of money had cheated Cassandra of the happiness she had a right to expect, and had also driven Tom Lefroy away. There is another legend in the Austen family that Jane liked and was liked by another young man who died prematurely. The meeting is supposed to have happened at the seaside: either at Teignmouth, Sidmouth or Dawlish, some time in Jane’s mid-twenties. Cassandra liked the young man and was persuaded he was worthy of Jane, that he was in love with her and that she would have accepted him. Cassandra was apt to judge people coolly yet she admired him as ‘unusually gifted with all that was agreeable.’

He arranged to meet the sisters at a later date but instead of a reunion all they had of him was news of his death. This story was told to Caroline Austen, James’s daughter, by Cassandra when she was an old woman. She told Caroline that he was pleasing and very good-looking. He is likely to remain another phantom romance in Jane Austen’s life, untraceable.

Jane was also attracted to Edward Taylor of Bifrons, a manor house in Kent, improved from its Elizabethan origins to a smart new Georgian residence. The young man, a year younger than herself, was the son of the Revd Edward Taylor. On a visit to Kent in September 1796 Jane mentioned the house as being the ‘abode of him on whom I once fondly doted’. Edward Taylor was a distant relative of Elizabeth Bridges, who by this time had married Jane’s brother Edward.

Jane was admired by the Revd Edward Bridges, Elizabeth’s younger brother. She first went to east Kent in 1794 when she was eighteen and two years later she danced with him at Goodnestone (pronounced Gunston), the Bridges family seat. Bridges playfully called her ‘t’other Miss Austen’ and in 1805, when Jane and he were staying at Goodnestone, Jane told Cassandra: ‘It is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions toward me; he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account.’

He seems to have proposed marriage, as Jane later implied they were still friends though she had not been able to accept his ‘invitation’. He was later married unhappily to a woman who suffered from ‘spasms and nervousness’. He got into the habit of taking refuge at Godmersham with his sister and brother-in-law.

Harry Digweed was a close friend and there is a family tradition that Jane Austen’s bossy Aunt Leigh-Perrot persuaded Jane’s father to leave Steventon for Bath because of a suspected romantic attachment between Jane and a Digweed. This seems improbable, as the Digweeds were perfectly eligible, though they only rented the Manor House, and it was no business of Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s anyway Be that as it may, George Austen perhaps thought his unmarried daughters would stand better chances of marrying if they met some new people. Harry married the feather-headed but lovable Jane Terry. The Terrys lived at Dummer House, near Steventon, a Georgian building which is still there.

Jane was also friendly with Charles Fowle of Kintbury brother of Cassandra’s fiancé. She asked him to buy some silk stockings on her behalf but withdrew the request when she realized she could not afford them. When he bought them anyway she was cross but they stayed on good terms until he died suddenly at the age of thirty-five. He practised as a barrister and was active in home defence in 1799 and 1804-5 when Napoleon threatened to invade England.

Other admirers were a Mr Heartley and John Willing Warren; Jane considered Warren ugly but pleasant. He was a college friend of her brothers James and Henry often staying at Steventon Rectory, and he contributed to their magazine.
The Loiterer
. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and was later called to the Bar, becoming a Charity Commissioner.

According to family tradition Jane received a proposal from a young landowner called Thomas Harding Newman, who possessed three large estates, Nelmes and Clacton Hall in Essex and Black Callerton in Northumberland. He was four years younger than Jane Austen, a sporting gentleman who shot and kept his own pack of foxhounds. Thomas’s eldest son, Dr Thomas Harding Newman, was for half a century the owner of the ‘Zoffany’ portrait, which may possibly be of Jane Austen’s second cousin, Jane Motley Austen, who became Mrs Campion. Mrs Campion’s brother gave the picture to Dr Thomas Harding Newman’s stepmother, an admirer of Jane Austen’s novels, while Mrs Campion was still alive, which suggests the portrait was not of Mrs Campion in youth but of some other girl.

About one proposal of marriage, however, there is no dispute. It came on 2 December 1802 from a man who was six years younger than Jane. Cassandra and Jane went on a visit to their old friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg, expecting to stay the usual two or three weeks. A week later, on a Friday, they turned up at Steventon Rectory where brother James had succeeded his father, now retired, all four women together in a carriage. Catherine and Alethea soon left after tearful and affectionate goodbyes.

James and his wife, Mary, were even more surprised when Cassandra and Jane demanded that their brother should immediately take them to Bath where the family were now living. Well-brought-up women could not decently travel without a servant or a male protector and James had a carriage. He had to arrange for somebody to take his Sunday services for him at short notice. His sisters insisted, almost hysterically, that he must do it, though he could not understand what the panic was about. Eventually he received an explanation: Jane was running away from a suitor she had rashly accepted the previous evening. That morning she had changed her mind and told the young man so. To stay under the same roof after that would have been embarrassing so the sisters had fled.

Jane was forced to throw herself on James’s mercy when she wanted to get back to Bath. A recurrent inconvenience for her was being dependent on lifts in other people’s carriages. Respectable women did not travel alone by stagecoach. Too often her friends and relations were going in the wrong direction or not far enough. Except for a few months when Jane was in her early twenties, her father had no carriage, and when he set one up found he could not afford it. This was as bad as having no car today.

Jane’s rejected suitor was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother of Alethea and Catherine Bigg. His father, Mr Lovelace Bigg, added ‘Wither’ to his name when he inherited property in 1789. The daughters remained the Misses Bigg. Harris was a well-off country gentleman, tall and well-built, but plain, awkward and unpolished. He stammered, and could never have matched Jane’s intellect and cultivation. She dreaded marriage to a man of inferior understanding. Harris was, however, a sensible man and many girls would have been happy to marry him.

To Jane he offered the prospect of social position and comfort with sisters-in-law who were already her friends. But she could not sacrifice her integrity in a marriage of convenience, though in refusing him she was giving up the prospect of luxury as mistress of Manydown, a stone Tudor mansion built round a courtyard, and with a splendid ironwork staircase going up to a handsome reception room on the first floor. She sacrificed the prospect of sharing a grand park, with oaks, a cedar and the fashionable ditch known as a ha-ha (because it created a barrier which deceived the eye from a distance), for a life of pinching and scraping. She knew the house well, for it was near Basingstoke and she had often spent the night there after dances. Manydown was demolished in 1965.

As she was nearly twenty-seven, the age of Charlotte Lucas in
Pride and Prejudice
and of Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
, she recognized this proposal as a last chance and the temptation to accept must have been powerful. She was already an ‘old maid’ according to the standards of her day, when girls were thought to have done well if they married in their teens and those in their twenties were considered to have lost the bloom of youth. With the pressure to marry so intense in her society because unmarried daughters were a financial burden on their parents, her renunciation was courageous indeed.

Younger sons of good family in Holy Orders and with no money were plentiful in her circle: single men in possession of a good fortune were not. In Maria Edgeworth’s novel
Patronage
, published in 1814, a book Jane Austen read, a husband’s income of £2,000 entitled a woman to be called ‘pretty well married’ but to rate as Very well married’ she would need a man with £10,000 a year.

The gap between a five-figure income and the actual stipends earned by well-born, well-educated clergymen, the younger sons with no inheritance to look forward to, was enormous. A contemporary of Jane’s described such young men as being ‘shoved off about the world to scramble through it as best they could with nothing but their good blood to help them.’ These were the potential husbands within Jane Austen’s own reasonable expectations. To be addressed by a landowner was beyond them.

Cassandra later destroyed the letters covering the Bigg-Wither episode, but not before letting her niece Catherine Hubback, Frank’s daughter, read them. Catherine gathered that Jane was much relieved when the affair was over, and that she had never been attached to him. Harris Bigg-Wither two years later married Anne Howe Frith, an Isle of Wight heiress, who bore him five sons and five daughters. Jane’s letters between 1801 and 1804 are missing, either because they dealt with this matter which Cassandra considered private, or because Jane was generally disgruntled and Cassandra did not wish to be reminded of her sister’s unhappiness. She was living at the time in Bath, where she was never even moderately contented.

It was a commonplace of the time that what was openly known as the ‘marriage market’ was overstocked with well-dressed spinsters, trapped at home with their parents with no hope of escape until an offer of marriage turned up. As Charlotte Lucas says in Pride and Prejudice, ‘I am not romantic, you know. I never was. All I ask is a comfortable home.' There were many like her, whose hopes were doomed to disappointment. The problems of the Bennet girls in
Pride and Prejudice
, of embarrassing relatives and minimal dowries, are solved in fairytale fashion. In real life their chances of marrying well would be small, and Mrs Bennet’s anxieties, however foolishly expressed, represent social and economic realities.

Jane was fond of joking that she would like to marry the poet the Revd George Crabbe. According to her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh, she enjoyed Crabbe’s work ‘perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail’. Jane wrote when the death of Crabbe’s wife was reported in 1813 that she had only just worked out from one of Crabbe’s prefaces that he was married. ‘Poor woman! I will comfort
him
as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any.’ This was a mere fantasy Jane never met Crabbe.

Crabbe’s verses depict the lot of the rural poor with grim realism. They were written as a corrective to the fashion for romanticizing cottagers’ lives. Although Jane Austen does not foreground the poor in her books, they were all around her. As befitted the parson’s daughter she gave them presents of clothing. She reported to Cassandra on 24 December 1798 that she had given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins; amounting in all to about half a guinea’. She was overjoyed when her prosperous brother Edward gave her £10 to spend among the cottagers at Chawton, her final home, and when his adoptive mother bequeathed £20 to the parish’.

Just before she died, having reached the age of forty as a single woman, Jane, supported mainly by the charity of her brothers, wrote to her niece Fanny Knight, not yet transformed into Lady Knatchbull, ‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor -which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.’ Earlier, though, she had warned Fanny that nothing could compare with the misery of being bound without love. Jane had seen a loving marriage between her own parents and knew its worth. Anything was better than marrying without affection, but on the other hand, as she was at pains to point out to Fanny, want of money, and sheets turned sides to middle were not inviting prospects. She comforted Fanny, who was in her mid-twenties and still single, by telling her not to be in a hurry; the right man would come at last.

The choice of the right marriage partner was crucial, for marriage was all but indissoluble. Divorce was possible only for the very rich, as it needed an Act of Parliament. Husbands could divorce unfaithful wives, as Mr Rushworth in
Mansfield Park
does after Maria runs away with Henry Crawford, but it was difficult for a wife, however ill treated, to be legally freed from a violent or dissolute husband. Once married, wives who had chosen unwisely had to put up with it.