Jane Austen (12 page)

Edward changed his name to Knight in 1812 after Mrs Knight, who had always been most affectionate and generous to him, died. Jane wrote of him: I know of no one more deserving of happiness.’ She rejoiced that his income was so good, she told Cassandra, adding wistfully that she was as glad as she could be ‘at anybody’s being rich but you and me’. It cannot have been easy to see one brother elevated to wealth while she was eking out a meagre allowance and other brothers were struggling.

When Jane stayed at Godmersham she luxuriated in ease and elegance and could not imagine anybody being less than happy there. Guests drank French wines which Jane appreciated as being better than the mead, orange wine and spruce beer made in her home at Steventon. Cassandra was the petted favourite at Godmersham as she and Edward were dear to each other. It was when she was on these visits that she and Jane exchanged letters full of news.

Edward had been the first of the Austen brothers to marry. His bride was the beautiful Elizabeth Bridges, daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, baronet. They were a fertile family: Elizabeth was one of thirteen children and she gave birth to eleven. The eldest daughter of Edward and Elizabeth was Fanny, born 1793 and Jane’s favourite niece, who begged her spinster aunt for advice on marriage. The right man did come at last for Fanny, as her Aunt Jane had predicted, and at twenty-seven Fanny married Sir Edward Knatchbull, a morose widower twelve years older than herself with six children, and she bore him nine more.

In gentry and professional families the size of the Austens’ it was taken for granted that one or two of the sons would enter the Church. Opportunities elsewhere were not numerous and provincial doctors and lawyers had low status. George Austen sent his first and fourth sons, James and Henry, to Oxford so they could become clergymen, though Frank, who was deeply religious, might have been a wiser choice. Frank, after a spell ashore at Ramsgate, when he was raising a corps of sea-fencibles’ against invasion in 1815, was known in the navy as ‘the officer who knelt in church’.

By the time Henry graduated from Oxford war was raging against France. He was not old enough to be ordained so he joined the Oxfordshire militia, the equivalent of today’s Territorial Army, as lieutenant, rising to captain, paymaster and adjutant. He considered joining the regular army but became deputy receiver of taxes for Oxfordshire and had to visit that county several times. Henry eventually did go into the Church after the bank in which he was a partner failed and after the death of his wife. He had married in 1797 when Jane was twenty-one.

His wife was Eliza de Feuillide, widowed daughter of his father’s sister Philadelphia Hancock. She was sophisticated, musical and dazzlingly pretty, with enormous eyes and a pointed elfin face surrounded by powdered curls. Eliza may just possibly have been the child of her godfather Warren Hastings, through whom she inherited the £10,000 he had given her mother’s husband. She was ten years older than Henry but as his first cousin knew him and the rest of the family intimately.

In 1787 Henry had stayed at Eliza’s smart house in London’s Orchard Street. He was only sixteen and she was a glamorous society matron but it is probable that he first fell in love with her and with her lifestyle at that time. He was already six feet tall, handsome and personable. Ten years later they were married.

Eliza shrewdly judged that Henry was better suited to be a soldier than a parson. On her second marriage she wrote telling her godfather Warren Hastings that Henry had been for some time in possession of a comfortable income. She had resisted him for two years but was now persuaded by his excellent temper and understanding, his affection for herself and for her little boy together with his skilled management of her finances. She had also resisted Henry’s by then widowed elder brother James. In 1801 Henry gave up the army and the couple lived in Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square, ‘quite in style’ as her envious cousin Phila Walter, still single herself, put it. Eliza was enchanting, though she was frivolous and flirtatious and undomesticated, for which Phila could not forgive her. Eliza the socialite had married not one but two attractive husbands while Phila was still single. Eliza, whose son had meanwhile died, was afraid that Henry had a galloping consumption but he outlived her.

Eliza’s life had been sensational. Carefully educated with a French companion and sent to the Continent at fifteen after her father died, she learned to speak the language like a native. In 1780 she visited Versailles and watched King Louis XVI of France and his Queen Marie Antoinette at dinner. Through her eyes we get a first-hand glimpse of the
ancien régime
. The Queen, she wrote to her cousin Phila, was a fine woman with a beautiful complexion and elegantly dressed:

In her next letter Eliza insisted the Queen’s complexion was natural. ‘Rouge is, I acknowledge, much worn here, but not so universally as you imagine; no single ladies ever make use of it, and were they to do it, would be much disapproved of.’ Later Eliza described the celebrations for the birth of the Dauphin in 1782, when the King and Queen appeared in clothes embroidered with jewels. The scene was just like the enchanted palaces in the
Arabian Nights
. In 1784 Eliza watched a pioneer ascent in a hot-air balloon. Eliza’s life was vastly different from the lives of the Austens at Steventon. No wonder Henry was captivated by her.

Eliza’s first husband was Count Jean Capotte de Feuillide, whom she married in 1781. During the honeymoon she had boasted to her cousin Phila Walter that he was amiable in both mind and person and literally adores me’, although Eliza confessed that she was not in love with him. Eliza described herself as ‘mistress of an easy fortune with the prospect of a very ample one … the advantages of rank and title, and a numerous and brilliant acquaintance’.

Only the last claim turned out to be true. The Count lived in hopes of getting hold of some property in due course. Meanwhile he was financially embarrassed. In 1784 he obtained a grant of 5,000 acres of marshland from the King on condition he drained it. The work was completed in a year and a half and building works were set in hand. Eliza’s mother managed to stretch their £600 a year. The Count and Eliza lived in a rented château. Although Eliza described him in a letter as ‘aristocratic and
royaliste’
there is some doubt about his title. If she was disillusioned she never admitted it.

When accused in 1794 he tried to save his skin by claiming, perhaps truthfully, to be of humble origin but was not believed. He had returned to France in 1788 under the impression that the seething turmoil was beginning to calm down but Eliza stayed in England because her little boy was sickly (indeed, malicious Phila Walter thought him retarded and hoped he was not going to be like ‘poor George Austen’), and because Eliza’s mother, Philadelphia Hancock, was failing. The Bastille was stormed in 1789. In 1791 the Count returned to England for a brief while. A soldier, he received messages from France that he had overstayed his leave and that if he remained in England his property would be confiscated so he went home in a doomed attempt to save it.

Civil commotion had spread, from France to England. After Eliza’s husband left for Paris her carriage was caught in a London riot. A mob was demolishing houses and fighting mounted Guardsmen. ‘The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the Guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my coachman, the firing at one end of the street… alarmed me,' she wrote to Phila.

Eliza’s husband could not get away from Paris. In 1794 he attempted to bribe a witness who had accused the Marquise de Marboeuf of producing a famine by planting the wrong crops on her land. He and the Marquise were executed on the same day. Eliza, who had, it is said, been in France with her husband at the time, fled, according to family tradition, to the coast and safety in England along with French refugees, though this story seems too romantic.

Widowed Eliza showed an admirable toughness and coolness. After the Peace of Amiens she returned with Henry, by then her second husband, to France in March 1802 hoping to recover some of the Count’s property. Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, had ordered that all English travellers should be arrested. Eliza’s perfect French enabled her and Henry to escape undetected. She dealt with the travel arrangements, telling people that her husband, muffled and bundled up in the back of the carriage, was a helpless invalid.

The story of her cousin’s husband’s fate left Jane Austen with a horror of France and of revolution. The family politics were Tory and Jane’s values were in the main conservative.

After Eliza and Henry came back to England they settled in London and Henry became a banker. Eliza died in 1813. Two years after her death Tilson’s bank, in which Henry was a partner, collapsed. Henry followed his father and eldest brother into the Church, taking curacies at Farnham and Bentley near Alton in his native Hampshire. He was witty and wrote good sermons but never fulfilled his early promise. At nearly fifty he married Eleanor Jackson. He never had any children.

In later life he grew pompous and the word-picture he left of his sister Jane is a whitewash, describing a woman too good to be true. He says her real characteristics were ‘cheerfulness, sensibility and benevolence’ when we know that she was often fighting depression and anger and could be detached to the point of malice. ‘Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,’ she said. As for ‘sensibility’, she wrote a novel which illustrates the eighteenth-century conviction that excessive emotional indulgence can be dangerous. But Henry and Jane were very close, which may be the reason behind his rose-tinted view of her.

T
WELVE YEARS YOUNGER
than Jane Austen, another writer, largely forgotten in our own day but celebrated in hers, was Mary Russell Mitford, author of
Our Village
, a series of fictionalized sketches of country life. Her mother, Miss Russell, later Mrs Mitford, knew the Austen family at Steventon when Jane was a child, and Miss Russell's father was Rector of the neighbouring parish of Ashe. Her daughter. Miss Mitford, wrote in
Our Village
, ‘Nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels,’ but in her letters she allowed herself to be more acid. She reported that her mother had described the young Jane Austen as ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers’. Cattily she describes Jane as an old maid (I beg her pardon -1 mean a young lady).’ Jane was forty at the time.

Jane’s letters when a young woman certainly show a healthy streak of frivolity. There is some dispute as to whether Mrs Mitford, who left the district when Jane was eleven, ever saw Jane Austen after she reached her teens or whether Mrs Mitford relied on gossip. Both she and her daughter were plain and dumpy, which may have coloured the mother’s judgment.

Jane mixed with landed neighbours and did her best to conform to their lifestyle, to be a socialite, enjoying parties and dances from her mid-teens onwards. A graceful and accomplished dancer, she was proud of being able to dance all evening without fatigue. She objected to partners who danced badly. As she grew older partners were less easy to find. She sometimes reported sitting out without being asked to dance, and pretended she did not mind.

Miss Mitford added:

One wonders why Miss Mitford’s informant Miss Hinton bothered to visit Jane at all when we learn that Miss Hinton’s brother-in-law was contesting Jane’s brother Edward’s rights of inheritance from his adoptive family, the Knights. The Hintons, being near neighbours, kept up a pretence of civility. If Jane was reserved with this false friend she was right to be wary. Excessive familiarity, gush and superlatives were considered vulgar, as we see from the empty-headed characters in the novels. Jane was brought up in the English stoical tradition in which one kept one’s griefs to oneself and presented a cheerful face to the world. It was selfish to burden others with personal problems. To do so was to fail in consideration, in what Jane called ‘good breeding’ and ‘decorum’. As she grew older, Jane grew more and more reserved with strangers though still warm and lively within the family. Her brother Frank described her as cheerful when she was a young woman. He admitted she had sometimes been accused of haughtiness but said her wit and drollery kept those close to her in fits of laughter. Her brother Henry, who loved his sister and knew her better than most, wrote after her death: ‘She was tranquil without reserve or stiffness; and communicative without intrusion or self-sufficiency.’ Whatever false picture Henry may have painted of Jane elsewhere, at least here he can be thought to be reliable.