Jane Austen (2 page)

Jane’s was the restricted life of a respectable spinster, though her age was violent and raffish enough. The American Revolution happened the year she was born, 1775, and the Bastille was stormed at the height of the French Revolution when she was thirteen. England was threatened with revolution, and was at war with France for a large part of her adult life. Invasion was feared. Nor were England’s towns and countryside always safe and peaceful places to live. The Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York were robbed in broad daylight in London, near Berkeley Square. It was estimated that there were 100,000 criminals in London alone. Highwaymen lurked on Hounslow Heath. Thieves were hanged in public. On 23 February 1807 a triple hanging in London attracted a crowd of 40,000 people. In 1813 seventeen machine-breakers were publicly executed at York.

Jane’s own conduct was blameless but she took a keen pleasure in gossip and the sensational. She read and enjoyed the Gothic horror novels she makes fun of in
Northanger Abbey
, She had a robust and wicked sense of humour and liked to tease her prim sister, Cassandra, by being outrageous. Her teenage writings deal flippantly with sibling rivalry, drunkenness, adultery, seduction, illegitimacy, destitution, suicide, mercenary marriage, murder, prison, the gallows, deformity, speech impediment, galloping consumption, steel mantraps, physical injury. There is allusion in
Sense and Sensibility
to duelling, in
Mansfield Park
to sodomy, in
Emma
to slavery, in
Pride and Prejudice
to prostitution.

Jane was a keen reader of newspapers. Tantalizingly, she mentions ‘political correspondents’ with whom she discussed the issues of the day but these unknown correspondents would have seen no reason to keep her letters. The letters that have survived, especially those to her sister, Cassandra, are full of gossip and family news, with occasional flashes of spite and anger. They can be epigrammatic: ‘Lady Elizabeth Hatton and Annamaria called here this morning; yes, they called, but I do not think I can say any more about them. They came and they sat and they went.’ They are also full of astringent comments on her acquaintance and constant wistful remarks about not being rich. Cassandra, fortunately for us, had the foresight to keep Jane’s letters but in old age looked them over and burned most of them. More letters were destroyed than survive and those that did survive had bits chopped out.

Jane’s surviving relatives, particularly those who lived into the second half of the nineteenth century, pretended the waspishness of the letters and the biting satire of the novels did not represent the real woman. They were concerned to gentrify her, to portray her as cosy and sweet, ignoring the vinegary vein which fascinates us. They censored her letters and doctored her image. She was tougher, more irritable and more sardonic than they liked to acknowledge.

Jane’s letters express appreciation and envy of the ease, elegance and luxury to be found at Godmersham Park, the home of her rich brother, Edward, who had, like Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
, been adopted by wealthy relatives, the Knights. Edward was the father of Jane Austen’s eldest and favourite niece, Fanny Knight, who became Lady Knatchbull. At the age of eighty-five, Fanny wrote to her younger sister Marianne:

Old Mrs Knight had adopted Fanny’s father, Jane Austen’s brother Edward, as her heir when Edward was sixteen. Fanny, unlike her aunts, was brought up in wealth and comfort. We can only wonder what sort of refinement the fastidious Jane Austen can have been deficient in and what sort of ‘common-ness’ she might have had to grow out of. She criticized a Mrs Britton in a letter written in November 1813: ‘she amuses me very much with her affected refinement and elegance’. At the same time she admired the manners of Lady Honeywood for their ‘ease and good humour and unaffectedness’. Who could quarrel with these comments on good manners?

Possibly Lady Knatchbull remembered Jane and Cassandra wearing pattens, wooden soles mounted on iron rings to raise shoes above the mud. Later pattens were worn only by the poor. Perhaps Jane’s pronunciation was old-fashioned? Since her Oxford-educated brother Henry praised the sweetness of her speech, and both her parents would have been well-spoken, a Hampshire accent is unlikely. Purity of accent was valued in the better educated women of the gentry class in the eighteenth century. Her brother James’s daughters, Anna and Caroline, both of whom loved her dearly, emphasize Jane’s charm of manner. They admit she was not well dressed, as she could not afford to be, but Lady Knatchbull's discomfort seems to have deeper resonances. Embarrassed by her aunt Jane Austen, Lady Knatchbull chooses to emphasize her own glory as a member of the rich Knight family (by adoption), though her paternal grandmother, Mrs Austen, had aristocratic Leigh antecedents. Lady Knatchbull's mother was the expensively educated daughter of a baronet and may have found Jane provincial or uncomfortably sharp. Jane the spinster aunt was not fully appreciated, according to Fanny’s cousin Anna, tolerated rather than loved in the wealthy, well-bred but unintellectual Godmersham household where Fanny grew up, though Fanny was appreciative enough of her aunt’s talent to read
Pride and Prejudice
aloud once more to her sister Louisa fifty years after Jane’s death.

Lady Knatchbull has been censured for this notorious judgment as heartless and snobbish but Jane was just too plain-spoken to suit a later generation. Fanny Knatchbull's letter reflects the change in manners between the Regency and the later Victorian age, when under the influence of the Evangelical movement the middle classes became careful to distinguish themselves from the foul-mouthed, blaspheming proletariat by fastidious avoidance of any expressions which could be stigmatized as ‘coarse’ or ‘common’. Bad language became known in polite society as ‘Billingsgate’, the name of the fish market, where the swearing by the porters was notorious.

Jane and Cassandra were sometimes embarrassed by their mother’s cheerful indifference to what they felt to be propriety: they were afraid she was likely to darn stockings in the parlour in front of visitors. As the great-niece of the Duke of Chandos she had perhaps married beneath her and could afford an aristocratic indifference to petty notions of correctness. In 1805 Jane Austen described one acquaintance as being, like other young ladies, considerably more genteel than her parents. The word is used without irony as a term of unqualified praise. The notion of progress in politeness was already established. By the time Fanny Knatchbull wrote the infamous letter to her younger sister Marianne, the word ‘genteel’ had lost any cachet it might once have had and was considered a vulgarism. Today it implies an uneasy, affected anxiety about polished manners, and nervous use of euphemisms.

The progress towards prudery had already started by the 1780s, when the term ‘pregnant’ was considered more polite than the traditional expression ‘with child’, and instead of being ‘brought to bed’ or ‘delivered’, a woman was ‘confined’ or even had an ‘accouchement’ as in French. In her letters of the early 1800s, Jane Austen unblushingly uses the older forms. But even as early as 1818, the year after she died, Dr Thomas Bowdler brought out the
Family Shakespeare^
with the bawdy cut out. The range of permissible topics for conversation dwindled as the nineteenth century became increasingly mealy-mouthed.

Another possible explanation for Lady Knatchbull’s embarrassment is that Jane Austen was animated. In 1838, Fulwar-William Fowle, who was born in 1791, remembered her as ‘pretty, certainly pretty - bright and a good deal of colour in her face - like a doll - no, that would not give at all the idea for she had so much expression - quite a child, very lively and full of humour- most amiable, most beloved…’ Fulwar-William said she was attractive, animated and delightful. But expressiveness was not valued by Victorian society matrons. The fashionable manner was a haughty reserve, an icy indifference.

Nor might Lady Knatchbull have approved the topics of her aunt’s letters. Writing from London in 1814, Jane hoped her little niece Cassandra, her brother Charles’s eldest girl, had ‘found my bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas’. In her next letter, Jane writes resignedly, ‘If Cassandra has filled my bed with fleas, I am sure they must bite herself.’ This may have been a family joke, or perhaps the little girl, then aged eight, did have fleas. Either way, Lady Knatchbullwould not have been amused and would have thought any mention of parasites in poor taste.

Jane Austen, two days after her twenty-third birthday, wrote to Cassandra: ‘My mother continues hearty, her appetite and nights are very good, but her bowels are still not entirely settled, and she sometimes complains of an asthma, a dropsy, water in her chest, and a liver disorder.’ When Lady Knatchbull’s son, the first Lord Brabourne, edited Jane Austen’s letters for publication in 1884, he excised the references to bowels and to fleas, together with ones to bad breath and pregnancy. He censored Jane’s irritated references to her brother James, and softened her anger at the way married women became breeding machines. He insisted that while a vein of ‘good-natured satire’ might be found in the letters and conversations of many of the Austen family no malice ever lurked beneath. No one, he emphasized, was in reality more kind-hearted and considerate of other people’s feelings than Jane. This concern with a ‘reality’ at odds with the evidence suggests that Lord Brabourne’s celebrated great-aunt needed, in his view, some apologizing for. Jane’s letters were only too often demolition jobs on the neighbours.

Jane grew up in the last quarter of the plain-spoken eighteenth century among clever and interesting relatives, who expressed themselves with frankness, elegance and precision, in conversation and in letters. Her mother composed messages in verse, her father was a classical scholar, and her elder brothers published a satirical Tory journal which offered burlesques on the sentimental literature of the day Her earliest works were comic parodies along similar lines. Her mature works are social comedies ending, after difficulties and misunderstandings have been overcome, in marriage. Her pleasant female characters are rewarded with loving husbands, her unpleasant ones remain single or are caught in bad marriages. Among possible motives for writing are wish-fulfilment and resentment. Both have been detected in the novels of ‘gentle Jane’, who could be scathing. After she died, her brother Henry wrote, ‘Though the frailties, foibles and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness.’

Henry lied, probably in defence of what he thought of as his sister’s reputation, or he may not have seen the letters to Cassandra, with their touches of black humour. Jane Austen could never resist a joke, even one about an acquaintance ‘brought to bed yesterday of a dead child’, prematurely born because of a fright. Jane pretended to think the stillbirth was caused by the mother happening ‘by chance to look at her husband’. This appalling sick joke has the power to make us wince, even today Dead babies are not funny. Certain of her admirers dismiss these ‘remarks in bad taste’ as aberrations, nothing to do with ‘dear Jane’. On the contrary, they express an important part of her personality. She could be savage in her comments about people, the real people she moved among; and when it comes to her invented characters, she makes them expose themselves in all their awfulness.

Jane was, though, also warm and affectionate. She and Cassandra, who were less than three years apart, loved each other deeply. With only two years’ formal education, they had small chance to develop the school and college friendships which became so important for women in later generations. In their day, parents were often remote and families large. Children were likely to make themselves into tightly knit groups. Jane liked first cousins to be friends, as they were, she said, but one remove from brother and sister. Her relatives emphasized her attachment to family, but while Jane Austen cannot be understood in isolation from her relatives, the account of her they handed down to us should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

J
ANE AUSTEN
was born on 16 December 1775. Her mother had had a long and difficult pregnancy, the baby arriving a month later than expected. Her delighted father, the Revd George Austen, described her as a ‘present plaything for her sister Cassy and a future companion’. He wrote to his sister-in-law: