Jane Austen (13 page)

Miss Mitford, while finding Jane’s novels ‘delicious’, originally thought
Pride and Prejudice
wanting in elegance. In her opinion, only an entire want of taste could produce a heroine so pert and so worldly as Elizabeth Bennet. ‘Worldly’ was a word of condemnation used by people who prided themselves on being strictly religious.

There is some evidence that Jane’s own religious and moral principles grew more rigid as she aged. If she did end up like a poker, she enjoyed her time as a social butterfly, going to dances in private houses and monthly assemblies at the Town Hall in Basingstoke. Entertainments were few, and people travelled considerable distances over rough tracks in order to enjoy themselves in company. In the absence of street lighting, balls were given for preference on moonlit nights. As the daughter of a clergyman with a well-born wife, Jane mixed occasionally with the aristocratic Bolton, Dorchester and Portsmouth families, and was invited to grand balls in Kent as an appendage of her rich brother Edward.

By her late thirties Jane could smile at social butterflies herself: ‘Dear Mrs Digweed! I cannot bear that she should not be foolishly happy after a ball.’ In her early twenties, balls provided her with activity, social contacts and gossip. A ball was not necessarily a grand affair: the word could be applied to a small private dance. When she was twenty-three, Jane wrote to her sister about a ball where there were thirty-one people, only eleven of them female. She listed her partners. Another time she reported that a ball had ‘nearly sixty people’ and sometimes there were seventeen couples, but ‘there was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together.’ This meant partnering each other, a desperate expedient. Jane Austen loved dancing and flirting.

On the evidence of
Northanger Abbey
(written in the late 1790s), it was the custom to dance two dances and then change partners. Two dances meant the twice up and down of the minuet which was danced at the beginning of every formal ball. It was slow and solemn, dignified rather than jolly, incorporating formal bows and curtsies, moving with measured paces, forwards, backwards and sideways, with complicated gyrations. One couple would open the ball. Not everybody was confident of his or her skill and ladies indicated their willingness to perform by wearing a particular kind of lappet on their headdresses.

The dances were hornpipes, quadrilles, cotillions and minuets, country dances, Scotch jigs and reels. Some were danced lengthwise, which kept the gentlemen and ladies in separate rows, offering small opportunity for flirtation, or even conversation. Some were square dances and others round dances. At the Coles’ party in
Emma
, published 1816, a space is cleared for dancing:

The most important lady present had the honour of starting off the dance: later in the story Emma has to give way to the newly married Mrs Elton. Quarrels about precedence were commonplace. Although the most distinguished lady was supposed to lead, embarrassment was sometimes avoided by drawing lots. Partners were sometimes chosen by the same method.

The waltz was invented in Vienna in the late 1780s, swept through France, and arrived in England about 1812. Old dances were performed to the new tunes. A book published the same year as
Emma
gives instructions for ‘that new and elegant system of dancing called Country dance Waltzing or Waltz Country dancing’, whereby figures were still performed in sets. Lessons in the new dance were advertised. The tunes arrived before the new way of dancing did.

Lord Byron wrote a long poem to the new dance, which he rhymes with ‘salts’:

he says, summing up social trends.

The poet suggests that such heated intimacy on the dance floor is likely to lead to promiscuity. As Byron’s poem emphasizes, the ‘seductive’ and even Voluptuous’ waltz was considered exciting, even immoral, because it offered unprecedented opportunities for grasping a partner round the waist, instead of leading her by the hand.

A waist without stays, according to the fashion of the day, was erotic, and at this time women were throwing their stays away. The natural waistline was abandoned until 1818, the year after Jane Austen died. According to Byron, morals were abandoned as well At the turn of the century women’s clothing became loose, comfortable and flimsy. Fashion victims damped their muslin gowns to make them cling to the body. They were starting to wear knickers, as men gave up knee-breeches for trousers. Rigid boned bodices (‘stays’) and hooped skirts gave way in the 1790s to high-waisted straight dresses modelled on Greek and Roman styles and to our eyes remarkably like maternity dresses.

Wigs and hair-powder had disappeared, except for the stubbornly old-fashioned, and loose curls under large hats became fashionable. Heavy brocades went out of style and instead muslin (fine cotton) was widely popular, plain or patterned: the spotted, the sprigged, the mull (plain) or the jackonet (slightly heavier than mull) and the tamboured (embroidered), as we learn from
North anger Abbey
, White was considered the most elegant colour: in
Mansfield Park
Edmund Bertram praises his cousin Fanny’s taste when she wears white to a ball. The lower orders, though, were not encouraged to ape their betters. In the same novel, the young people’s aunt Mrs Norris is gratified to learn that two housemaids had been sacked for presuming to wear white gowns.

Although in Jane’s fictions women who think about nothing but clothes are laughed at, she took a keen and normal interest in bonnets and gowns and pelisses (overcoats) herself, the more so as a new dress was a rare and important purchase, involving serious consideration and planning, as cash was always short.

E
VEN IF SHE
was as socially invisible as Miss Mitford insisted, Jane had the honour of opening an evening’s dancing in Kent with Edward Bridges when she was twenty. At a small private hop ladies took turns to play the pianoforte and at this party Lady Bridges, her daughter Elizabeth and an Anne Finch played for different dances. Miss Finch was the unmarried sister of George Finch-Hatton of Eastwell, a nearby estate. Jane was mixing with the landed gentry but agonized whether to tip the servant five shillings or half a guinea.

In September 1796 Jane visited her brother Edward and his wife, who were living at Rowling, part of the estate of Goodnestone Park in Kent, then belonging to Elizabeth’s brother, where their first four children were born. Poignantly, in the event, Jane talked to friends of Cassandra’s engagement. This was when she went to Bifrons and contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of Edward Taylor.

Frank, who was with her, received good news: he had been appointed to serve on the
Triton
, a new 32-gun frigate commanded by Captain John Gore, and so had to leave for London. Jane was left hoping her father would fetch her home from London as she could not stay in the city alone. She had small hope that Henry would be coming her way. She wanted to travel by stagecoach but Frank would not let her.

We do not know how she eventually got home, as letters for the next eighteen months are missing. It was during this period that Cassandra’s fiancé died and was mourned and Cassandra must have felt the letters too personal and painful to keep. However the journey was managed, it would have been uncomfortable and probably slow. The usual speed of travel was six or seven miles an hour and the only vehicles were drawn by horses. When John Thorpe in
Northanger Abbey
boasts that he defies any man in England to ‘make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness’, he is exaggerating. The argument that follows his claim suggests that the actual speed on the twenty-three-mile journey from Tetbury to Bath was more like six and a half. Jane writes of covering the distance between Sittingbourne and Rochester in Kent, some eleven miles, in an hour and a quarter but she says the driver drove exceptionally fast. The next stage to Dartford, a slightly shorter distance, on a muddy road and with indifferent horses took them just over two and a half hours. The journey from London to Godmersham in East Kent in 1808 took ten and a half hours. Mr Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
says fifty miles on a good road should not take more than a morning, but morning meant from breakfast at ten o’clock till dinner time in the late afternoon or evening. Writing in 1814 to her niece Anna who was trying to write novels, Jane Austen advised her that characters had to be two days going from Dawlish to Bath, as they were a hundred miles apart.

It was around this time that the sisters, never particularly well dressed because lacking money, in the opinion of younger members of the family adopted the style of middle age unnecessarily soon. Cassandra and Jane took to caps, then worn by married women, widows and ageing spinsters, in their early twenties. This was not due to carelessness, as they were both fussy about neatness, but because Jane preferred wearing a cap to the bother of hairdressing. In a letter to her sister she says her hair is not much trouble except for washing and cutting. She wore it plaited and pinned up at the back. Hair was arranged at home, though for special occasions, such as the dances which made up so important a part of social life, a maid might be called upon. Anne (‘Nanny’) Littleworth attended to Jane’s hair when, aged twenty-three, she went off to a ball. Jane never had a personal maid of her own.

Anne worked for Jane’s parents as a general servant and was married to brother James’s coachman. Jane spells the name ‘Littlewart’, probably the way it was pronounced. When ‘Nanny’ was ill in bed with fever and a pain in her side the Austens were forced to employ charwomen. Eventually they found a new maid whom they were determined to like, though she would have to be taught about dairy work. She was a good cook, was strong, and claimed to be a good needlewoman. Clearly a servant in a modest household had to be versatile.

Three days after her twenty-third birthday Jane grumbled that the forthcoming ball in Hampshire would be ‘stupid’: people were getting ‘so horribly poor and economical in this part of the world’ that she had no patience with them. Kent was ‘the only place for happiness’ as ‘everybody’ was rich there. A new acquaintance was agreeable but, perversely, Jane found this irritating: she didn’t want people to be too agreeable because she couldn’t be bothered to like them too much. She was growing restless. Her eyes were becoming weaker and she eventually needed spectacles. When she was unable to read or sew she practised her music. Life was passing her by.

Jane and Cassandra had their six-monthly allowance often pounds each to spend and Jane was planning new winter clothes. She had borrowed the trimming for a cap from Cassandra while Cassandra was away. She put a narrow thread of silver round it twice without any bow and instead of the black military feather suggested by Cassandra planned to put in a coquelicot (poppy red) one instead.

In January 1799 Jane went with her brother Charles, who only just managed to be home in time, to Lord Dorchester’s ball at Kemp-shott Park. Charles enjoyed as much social life as he could when he was on shore and Jane manoeuvred to get him invitations to balls at great houses where the middle classes were occasionally allowed in. But often his naval duties prevented his attendance.

Jane decided against her white satin cap and borrowed a fashionable ‘Mamelouc’ cap, a kind of fez with a trailing scarf, from James’s wife Mary, who had been given it by her cousin Charles Fowle but thought it too smart for a country parson’s wife. The Battle of the Nile in 1798 had made everything connected with Egypt all the rage. Contemporary fashion plates showed Mamelouc cloaks and robes in flowing red cloth. Hats were decorated with ‘Nelson rose feathers’. The very smartest ladies wore green morocco slippers bound with yellow and laced with crocodile-coloured ribbon. Jane wore her green shoes and took her white fan. A provincial lady, Jane delighted in being up to date.

She spent the evening chiefly among the Bigg sisters of Manydown and their party, but despite her fashionable get-up was rarely asked to dance. Who was she, after all, however grand her mother’s antecedents, but Parson Austen’s younger daughter, a girl with no fortune except her still-hidden talent? A good-looking officer of the Cheshires, people told Jane, wanted very much to be introduced to her but to her regret did not bother to put this wish into effect. Lord Bolton’s eldest son was such a bad dancer that though he politely asked her Jane preferred to sit out. She stayed with Martha Lloyd at Deane. Jane and Martha shared the bed and talked till two in the morning while the baby James-Edward and his nurse made do with the floor.

The next ball Jane went to was a couple of weeks later with only eight couples in the room, and twenty-three people altogether, including the vulgar Jervoises, a neighbouring family, and the noisy Terrys. Charles was by then at Deal, having been made second lieutenant. He had been home for something more than a week. Now that he no longer powdered his hair and had it cut short, following the new fashion, he was agreed to be handsome. The
Tamar
was in the Downs and Charles, returning to Deal, was rather hoping to be too late for her before she sailed so he might get a better station. He took one of the night coaches and Jane would have liked to go with him but did not want to come back by herself. She dreamed of going part of the way and dropping in at Godmersham, now Edward’s home.