Jane Austen (11 page)

Unless a separate ‘settlement’ was made upon her, as soon as she married all a woman’s property and money became her husband’s. Yet risky as marriage was, it was considered better than single life. A man could not honourably break an engagement: only the lady herself could ‘release’ him from it. A man who broke his engagement was inviting legal action by the lady for breach of promise. Loss of marriage prospects was taken seriously, as lifelong maintenance and enhanced social status were at stake.

Jane Austen was acutely aware of these problems long before they impinged on her personally. In her teens she began a novel called
Catharine, or the Bower
which starkly depicts the plight of women in her day. The heroine is an orphan living with a repressive aunt. Her only friends are the daughters of a neighbouring clergyman, reduced after his death to dependence on rich and stingy relatives. The elder has been shipped off, like Jane’s aunt Philadelphia Hancock, to India with the ‘fishing fleet’ and is ‘splendidly but unhappily married’. The younger has been taken by a titled relative as ‘companion’ to her daughters, an uncongenial and dependent position. The new parson and his wife are haughty and quarrelsome, well-born and ill-mannered. They had hoped for better things than a country living. The monotony of Catharine’s existence is broken by a visit from a fashionable family with a snobbish, brainless daughter whose shallow accomplishments ‘were now to be displayed and in a few years entirely neglected’. This girl, who prefigures Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey imagines vaguely that it must be delightful to voyage to Bengal or Barbadoes or wherever it is’, and be ‘married soon after one’s arrival to a very charming Man immensely rich’. Catharine’s bower is the only place where she can think and pull herself together when she is depressed. Its symbolism is obvious. Jane did not finish this early story but it shows the teenage writer able to see social situations with clarity. Another early work,
The Three Sisters
, written when she was about sixteen, deals with mercenary marriages.

Despite her youthful popularity all Jane’s relationships with men came to nothing. Her obstinate heart forbade her to marry except for love. The flippant, flirtatious teenager faded into a middle-aged maiden aunt, dowdy not because she chose to be - indeed she loved clothes - but because she was poor. In a society where dowries were looked for, her poverty may well have been one of the reasons she never married. The plots of Jane’s novels and her refusal to marry for convenience make it plain that she believed in marrying for love, but she knew that in the real world most men had a way of falling in love with girls who brought money with them.

We have reason to be selfishly grateful that Jane Austen never did attach a husband. With a growing family she would have found it hard to concentrate, even if she had married a rich man. If she had married a younger son or a clergyman she would have been equally poor and rather more harassed. Instead of direct descendants, she left us the inimitable novels.

J
AMES, JANE’S ELDEST
brother, followed his father to St John’s College, Oxford, before becoming ordained. Clever and studious, his intellectual precocity enabled him to matriculate, that is to enter the university, at fourteen. His great-uncle the Master of Balliol invited him to dine. Dr Theophilus Leigh was by then well over eighty. At that time Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates wore academic dress, square tasselled caps and gowns, at all times in public. James, entering his great-uncle’s lodgings, was taking off his gown as if it were an overcoat, as he did not yet know the etiquette. ‘Young man,’ said Dr Leigh, ‘You need not strip. We are not going to fight.’

In 1786 James spent a year in Europe, visiting France, Spain and Holland. He was the most learned and scholarly of the Austen children.

James’s first curacy was at Stoke Charity and his second at Over-ton, both within a few miles of Steventon. He kept his university terms, popping down at intervals to perform his clerical duties. Living in the small vicarage house at Overton, he went hunting with the Kempshott pack. At that time Kempshott Park was rented by the Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV of England) and James was often in the field with royalty. Another hunting man, Mr William John Chute of the Vyne, presented James to the vicarage of Sherborne St John in 1792. While at Overton he did duty at nearby Laverstoke, where he met and fell in love with Anne Mathew, whose father, General Mathew, rented the manor house. James married in 1792, his father performing the ceremony. The bride’s mother was Lady Jane Bertie, daughter of the second Duke of Ancaster and sister of the third. James was twenty-seven. A country clergyman was not much of a catch, but Anne was well over thirty with a great deal of nose’, so the General accepted James as son-in-law and allowed the young couple £100 a year. James had, after all, expectations from James Leigh-Perrot. The Leigh family found him a living at Cubbington, Warwickshire. This brought the couple’s combined income up to £300 a year. Although nominally vicar, James never went to Cubbington, but employed a curate. He and Anne lived for a while at Court House, Ovington, but James needed a permanent home to take his pale, slender bride to, so his kind father employed him as curate at Deane and allowed him to live there rent free.

This was generous, as the Deane house had previously been let to a tenant, Mrs Martha Lloyd. Mrs Lloyd and her unmarried daughters then moved to Ibthorpe (pronounced Ibthrop), about sixteen miles from Steventon and not far from Andover. Mrs Lloyd, a clergy widow, was the mother of Martha and Mary, close friends of Jane. Eliza Lloyd had married her cousin the Revd Fulwar Craven Fowle, who with his brother Tom (Cassandra’s fiancé) had been one of George Austen’s pupils. When Mrs Lloyd, Martha and Mary left Deane, Jane made Mary Lloyd a tiny ‘housewife’ or sewing set as a leaving present. This was a very small bag of white cotton with gold and black zigzag stripes. Inside was a strip of fabric pierced by tiny needles and fine thread. On a scrap of paper Jane had written:

This little bag I hope will prove

To be not vainly made,

For if you thread and needle want,

It will afford you aid.

And as we are about to part,

‘Twill serve another end,

For when you look upon the bag,

You’ll recollect your friend.

Settled at Deane, James and Anne lived above their modest means: she kept a close carriage and he a pack of harriers. They had spent £200 on furnishing the house.

Great-uncle Francis Austen had died the previous year, aged ninety-three, and left £500 to each of his nephews. Now Charles had left home for the Naval Academy the pressure was less and Mr Austen cut down on the number of his pupils. Inflation meant that his charges had almost doubled, and were now £65 a year. Jane and Cassandra could have a spare bedroom next to theirs as a sitting room, always called the dressing room. The walls were cheaply papered and the furniture scanty, but Jane preferred it to the parlour downstairs as being more comfortable and elegant. She also now had a pianoforte. The room housed the sisters’ oval workboxes in Tonbridge-ware with ivory barrels holding reels of sewing silk.

James and his parents lived not much more than a mile apart and he liked to drop in nearly every day. Anne, after a pregnancy which forced her to spend whole days in bed, gave birth safely to a daughter, Anna. Her mother-in-law, presumably summoned by James, got out of bed in the middle of the night and walked along the muddy lane by the light of a lantern to help her granddaughter into the world. Mrs Austen was a practical woman. Anna’s godparents were her great-uncle and great-aunt, the Duke of Ancaster and his Duchess, and her grandfather, General Mathew, who gave the sum of twenty guineas to be divided between the nurse and the maidservants. Seventeen-year-old Jane, now aunt both to James’s daughter, Anna, and Edward’s daughter, Fanny, wrote messages to her new nieces. When France declared war on Britain in February 1793 the generous General bought James an army chaplaincy. It was not intended that James should go to war, but that he should draw a salary and pay a substitute.

James’s wife died suddenly when his little girl was two years old. Anne ate her dinner normally but collapsed afterwards. An emetic was administered but it did not help. She lived only a few hours and was dead before the doctor arrived. He told James there was some internal ‘adhesion of the liver’ which he thought had probably ruptured.

The young widower’s grief was intensified because little Anna wailed constantly for ‘Mama’. James, overwhelmed and feeling helpless, sent the child to his mother and sisters to bring up. Anna loved her aunts Jane and Cassandra and left affectionate reminiscences of them. They bought her a little cherrywood chair. Her grandfather Mathew was very proud of her and once whisked the little girl away from her aunts to a grown-up dinner party.

After an inconclusive attraction to his cousin Eliza de Feuillide, who preferred her ‘dear liberty and dearer flirtation’ as she put it after she was widowed in 1794, James was married again in 1797 to Mrs Lloyd’s daughter Mary, whose face was seamed with smallpox.

Eliza de Feuillide wrote to her cousin Phila Walter that Jane was much pleased with James’s match, which was natural as Jane had known Mary and liked her for a long while. ‘Despite being neither rich nor handsome, she is sensible and good-humoured,' said Eliza. Not only were the Lloyds old family friends but Mary was cousin to Tom Fowle, who was going to marry Cassandra and who had been promised a living in Shropshire by Lord Craven. The ties of love and friendship were being satisfactorily bound.

Mrs Austen wrote Mary a letter of welcome, ‘I look forward to you as a real comfort to me in my old age, when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire and Jane - the Lord knows where.’

Jane grew to like Mary less as time passed, judging her to be grasping and manipulative, referring to her coolly in letters as ‘Mrs JA.' Mary could be generous with time and trouble but was extremely careful with money. General Mathew for the sake of his granddaughter Anna continued to allow James the £100 a year he had given with his daughter Anne. Mary never overcame her fear of the General and doubtless was touchy about having taken his daughter’s place as James’s wife. Mary was not a secure or happy person. She may have felt, like other second wives, that she could not compete with James’s first wife; Anne had been so aristocratic. Mary had a sharp, abrupt way with her and a hot temper even with her own children. Although she was not actively cruel to Anna she had no crumbs of affection to spare, and favoured her own children, James-Edward and Caroline.

James was careful not to annoy Mary by making a fuss of his elder daughter and so remained remote from the child. He was, like many fathers, chiefly interested in his son. Anna’s father never mentioned his first wife and there was no portrait of her. All the child could remember was a pale, slim lady in white. Although intelligent and warmhearted, Anna was largely disregarded. Not surprisingly she grew up moody and difficult. The poor child’s life was twice disrupted, first by her mother’s death and then at four years old by her removal from her doting grandmother and aunts to a stepmother’s care. Understandably she made rebellious gestures. She horrified her family in 1808, when she was sixteen, by having her hair chopped off like a boy’s, which they looked on as a mutilation, though in fact Anna was merely following the latest fashion and her relatives had not caught up. At the same early age, anxious to assert her independence, she became engaged to marry, though she later broke it off. Anna never really accepted her stepmother. When in disgrace at home Anna sometimes took refuge with her aunts. Aunt Jane wrote down stories at Anna’s dictation before the little girl could write.

James soon reverted to his former habit of visiting his parents before breakfast, despite Mary’s reproaches. She was jealous and suspicious. Heavily pregnant with her first child, she was suffering from rheumatism and longing to give birth. Mary’s sister Martha was with them. Mary had hired an inexperienced girl ‘to be her scrub’ but James feared the girl would not be strong enough for the work.

Jane’s letter of 17 November 1798 tells Cassandra, ‘I believe I never told you that Mrs Coulthard and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary with this news.’ Next day Jane added that Mary’s baby had been born the previous night, a fine little boy, and everything was going on very well. Anna had been packed out of the way to the Lloyds at Ibthorpe.

When Jane visited James’s new son the baby was asleep but she was told that his eyes were large, dark and handsome. Jane was critical of Mary’s domestic arrangements: she was untidy, she had no dressing gown, her curtains were too thin. Seeing all this, Jane shuddered that she had no ambition to have a baby herself. Was there an element of sour grapes?

This baby was to become the Revd James-Edward Austen-Leigh, known as ‘Edward’, a name confusingly shared by his uncle and that uncle’s eldest son. Mr Austen-Leigh drew on the memories of his half-sister, Anna Austen Lefroy, and his younger sister, Caroline Austen, for his
Memoir
, when he was more than seventy years old and Vicar of Bray. He attempted when in his teens to write fiction and it was to him that Jane’s famous (though not entirely serious) letter about working on the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory’ was written.

Edward, Jane’s third brother, left home to live at Godmersham Park, where he had long been a favourite, when he was sixteen and Jane was eight. Instead of going to Oxford like his brothers James and Henry he was sent on the Grand Tour, a liberal education for rich young men. He may have spent some time at a German university, though his weakness in Latin suggests that he had no particular gift for languages. Travel and sightseeing probably suited him better than a rigorous course of study. The only one among the brothers who did not care for field sports, although he could easily have afforded to practise them, he found his greatest pleasure in attending to his estates. We are reminded of Mr Knightley in
Emma
. Edward’s adoptive mother, old Mrs Knight, relinquished her estate to him four years after her husband died in 1794, keeping only £2,000 a year for herself.