Jane Austen (23 page)

In June 1808
Marmion
 a long poem by Walter Scott, had been published just four months, James was reading it aloud in the evenings to the company at Godmersham. Jane explained in a letter that she meant the late, or short, evening, between ten o’clock and supper. She wondered whether she ought to be enthusiastic about Scott’s poem, which is a novel in verse, but so far was not. Its subtitle is ‘A Tale of Flodden Field’ and it includes the well-known ballad ‘Lochinvar’.

A few months later she seems to have decided she liked the poem after all, as she sent a copy to her brother Charles in the West Indies along with a home-made rug. Charles had been blockading America’s Atlantic seaboard to ensure that America, which was neutral, did no trade with France. He became engaged in Bermuda to Frances Palmer, an English rose, plump, pink-cheeked and blonde. Charles was enchanted with her fair hair. They were married on 19 May 1807. She was just seventeen. He was not able to introduce his wife to his relatives for another four years, by which time the couple had two daughters, Cassandra-Esten and Harriet-Jane. Perhaps because she had not known them from the time when they were babies, Jane never felt close to Charles’s children, who were too much like their mother’s family - too 'Palmery' - to please her. She also considered them badly brought up.

Getting around the country continued to be a problem for Jane. It was going to be awkward travelling back to Southampton from Godmersham.

Edward was not going with his son back to school at Winchester, as Elizabeth was expecting their eleventh baby. Jane felt she could not impose on James and Mary, as James had no horse to ride, and she did not want to take his place or be an encumbrance. The previous day when in the carriage they had been rather squashed, and little Caroline had fidgeted. Jane was in fretful mood: ‘I am sick of myself and my bad pens.’

Anna had stayed with Cassandra at Southampton and Jane was pleased with her for liking the quay. Anna had also enjoyed a visit to the Isle of Wight with Cassandra and Frank’s wife, Mary. Jane tried to interest Anna’s father in the girl’s good taste but if James was impressed he said nothing about it. Anna seems to have been looked on as a leftover from his previous marriage and may have been understandably resentful. Jane could not resist a dig at Anna’s stepmother, Mary, who was turning huffy because she suspected that Anna, now at the awkward age of fifteen, was not going to answer her letter. It must be for the pleasure of fancying it,’ sneered Jane. In the event Mary’s fears were unfounded.

Kind brother Edward later relented and promised to take Jane all the way to Southampton, with young Edward. Before leaving, Jane spent a couple of days with Mrs Knight, who had sent Jane a welcome gift of money. ‘The rich are always respectable,’ said Jane with characteristic bitterness. Mary went with Jane to Canterbury and Edward drove her home. Mary found Edward’s ten children less troublesome than she expected. James took church services while at Godmersham, helping out the incumbent, whose wife was ill. Jane introduced him and her sister-in-law to Mrs Inman, the blind widow of a clergyman at Godmersham. Mrs Inman used to walk about the park with a gold-headed walking stick, leaning on the arm of her servant Nanny Part. She was very old and frail, but cheerful. The Godmersham children must have liked her for they used to take fruit to her after dessert. Jane wrote that they had eaten strawberries three times during the visit.

She wrote next to Cassandra that Alethea and Catherine Bigg were expected at Southampton. She was invited to stay on at Godmersham, but she thought it better to return to Southampton so that it would not look as if she were avoiding them. She explained this to Edward and Elizabeth, knowing they would understand. She did not want to forego her friendship with the Bigg sisters, whose brother she had declined to marry. He was now married to someone else. In addition, Jane was looking forward to being with Cassandra and Martha for a fortnight without her mother, who was going to Steventon.

‘Elizabeth,’ said Jane wryly, has a very sweet scheme of our accompanying Edward into Kent next Christmas.’ This scheme was too expensive to be thought of. It meant travelling with young Edward when he returned home for the Christmas holidays from Winchester. ‘A legacy might make it very feasible,’ Jane added sadly. ‘A legacy is our sovereign good.’ It was maddening that while she was pinching and scraping it never occurred to relatives with surplus wealth to give her any. Frank had returned to sea and Jane dreamed of his capturing a good prize.

Edward would bring Jane home but there would be time to call neither on the Moores at Wrotham nor the Walters at Seale nor the

Cookes at Bookham as Edward wanted to reach Guildford by nightfall so they could spend a couple of hours at Alton. Jane’s wishes had to give way to her brother’s convenience. ‘Till I have a travelling purse of my own, I must submit to such things,’ Jane told Cassandra wearily.

Four days later she was delighted to hear that Frank was coming home ‘in the true sailor way, just after our being told not to expect him for some weeks.’ The wind had been against him, but Jane hoped he was nearing Godmersham as she wrote. Fanny was in ‘hourly expectation’ of him there. Jane thought Frank’s wife Mary, who was staying on the Isle of Wight with little Mary-Jane, would probably shorten her stay now her husband was coming back.

Jane wrote asking Cassandra if she could recommend a small present for ‘Mrs FA’, Mary. Perhaps a silver knife or a brooch would do? The weather had been cold and disagreeable, although it was the end of June. Jane was writing in the comfort of the library at Godmersham, where there was a fire. ‘I daresay you have fires every day. My kerseymere spencer is quite the comfort of our evening walks,’ wrote Jane, who had no surplus flesh. A kerseymere spencer was a short woollen jacket.

Jane had visited old Mrs Knight again and been with Elizabeth’s mother, the dowager Lady Bridges, at dinner, but what with the Goodnestone and Godmersham parties and Mrs Moore there had been time for only brief chat. All Lady Bridges could do was be kind and amiable, give Jane good-humoured smiles and make friendly inquiries. One card table was formed, the rest sat and talked, and at half-past nine the party broke up. Next day James and Edward went from Godmersham to Canterbury and John Bridges left for London on his way to Cambridge, where he was to take his master’s degree.

Jane grumbled that she was tired of writing long letters, but enjoyed receiving them. A relative, Miss Fanny Austen, had married Captain Holcroft of the Royal Artillery. This seems to have been a shotgun wedding as Jane was ‘sorry she has behaved so ill. There is some comfort to
us
in her misconduct, that we have not a congratulatory letter to write.’

That summer Elizabeth, though more than six months pregnant with her eleventh child, was talking of taking her three girls, Fanny, Lizzie and Marianne, to her sister Harriot Moore at Wrotham while Edward was with James and Mary in Hampshire. Elizabeth was looking well except that she’d had a cold. She was considered indeed as more than unusually active for her situation and size, Jane wrote bluntly. It may have been the frankness with which Jane discussed pregnancy that upset Elizabeth’s daughter Fanny after she became Lady Knatchbull. For the mid-Victorians, pregnancy was not to be mentioned except by euphemisms such as ‘in the family way’ and ‘in an interesting condition’. Somebody, probably Lady Knatchbull’s son Lord Brabourne, has scratched out a reference to Mrs Tilson, wife of Henry’s banking partner, in the same letter:
'
 … poor woman! How can she honestly be breeding again?’

James and Edward during their day out, had visited Mr and Mrs Deedes. (Mrs Deedes was Elizabeth’s sister Sophia Bridges.) James, who had only three children himself, was struck by the number of children: there were eleven little Deedeses and three little Bridgeses with them. William and Sophia Deedes eventually had nineteen children. No wonder Jane lamented Sophia’s frequent pregnancies and in 1817 recommended as a contraceptive measure ‘the simple regimen of separate rooms’. William was Colonel of the South Kent Volunteers and Member of Parliament for Hythe from 1807 to 1812. During the peace of 1814 the Czar of Russia passed through Hythe and one of the Deedes daughters had the honour of pouring coffee for him.

Jane was not looking forward to leaving Godmersham. She had many friends in Kent and wrote feelingly that it was pleasant to be with people who knew about her connections and cared about them. Things had been very different with her Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s circle in Bath. It was two years and a day since they had escaped from Bath. Kind Mrs Knight was hoping that the Austen women would benefit from their rich relations, but the Revd Thomas Leigh was still hurrying about the country and not thinking of doing anything for anybody. In a week’s time, Jane wrote mournfully, her having been at Godmersham would be like a dream. Soon she would have to make orange wine. ‘But in the meantime for elegance and ease and luxury: the Hattons and the Milles dine here today, and I shall eat ice and drink French wine, and be above vulgar economy.’ However she assured Cassandra that when she got back to Southampton the pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinions, would compensate for having to make do with orange wine.

Henry came down for the first week of July, and he and James went to Deal to welcome Frank, who had just arrived back on the
St Albans
. James and his family went back to Steventon on 7 July, and the next day Edward took Jane back to Southampton, spending a night at Guildford on the way Mrs Austen went to Steventon for the second half of the month, and while she was away Catherine and Alethea Bigg stayed with Jane and Cassandra in Castle Square. Catherine had become engaged to the Revd Herbert Hill, who was formerly chaplain to the British factory [trading post] at Oporto, Portugal, but who had returned to England in 1801 because of the war. Mr Hill, quite an elderly man, was an uncle of Robert Southey Jane hemstitched some pocket handkerchiefs as a wedding present for Catherine, adding a verse:

That summer the Portuguese and Spanish rose against Napoleon and England supported their fight for freedom. The conflict became known as the Peninsular War. Frank had to escort troopships to the Portuguese coast. On 21 August he watched the land battle of Vî-meiro, Britain’s first victory. Next day he collected the wounded and the French prisoners and early in September returned to Spithead to put the Frenchmen in the hulks. The Castle Square house was growing too small for six people and a baby plus one or two servants so Frank moved out with his wife and daughter. He went into lodgings at Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Perhaps Mrs FA did not get on with her mother-in-law. Possibly the arrangement did not, in today’s parlance, work out.

E
DWARD’S ACCESSION
to Godmersham Park in east Kent brought Jane Austen social opportunities beyond the reach of most young women who lived in country parsonages, but with them came the strain of trying to hold her own among moneyed folk. Edward lived there after 1797, when old Mrs Knight, widowed in 1794, relinquished it to him, moving to a house called White Friars, formerly an Augustine Friary dating back to 1325. The site of White Friars now underlies an urban shopping centre in Canterbury.

Godmersham lay in wooded undulating country about ten miles to the south-west of Canterbury on the River Stour. There was a deer park with shady trees. The house was a long low building, a Palladian mansion of white stone with two wings and a columned portico, with one summerhouse in the form of a Doric temple and another in that of a Gothic hermitage. In the centre of the house was a great square hall, rich in arched carved doorways flanked by white pilasters and surmounted by pediments. The library had a white-painted wainscot embellished with large and richly framed panels filled with family portraits. There was a model of a ship in a passage.

Rich people lived in grandeur but there was little comfort by modern standards. Carpets were scanty and there was often only one sofa, rigid rather than squashy. There were no deep easy chairs until Queen Victoria’s reign. Before that everybody except old people and invalids was expected to sit up straight on chairs we would consider suitable only for dining rooms. Springs in chairs date from 1828. Knick-knacks were few and far between.

Godmersham was almost a second home to Jane but even more so to Cassandra. Jane, who went to balls at Ashford, appreciated Edward’s generosity as host in doing the honours to his visitors and providing for their amusement. Both sisters were fond of their sister-in-law Elizabeth, whose eldest child Fanny, born when Jane was seventeen, was Jane’s favourite niece, although she remained exceptionally fond of James’s daughter Anna, too. Anna was encouraged by her aunt’s example and kind critiques to attempt novel-writing herself but Fanny was the petted one. Jane kept them amused with running serial stories continued from visit to visit. Both girls were motherless, Anna from the age of two, Fanny from her mid-teens. They consulted their Aunt Jane about their private problems and relied on her absolute discretion, knowing her sense of honour was so strong that she would never pass on anything told her in confidence, not even to Cassandra.

Jane several times mentions Susannah Sackree, the Godmersham children’s nurse, in her letters. Sackree lived to be ninety and saw the children of her charges. She is buried in Godmersham churchyard where she is described as the faithful servant and friend, for nearly sixty years, of Edward Knight, of Godmersham Park, and the beloved nurse of his children’.