Jane Austen (33 page)

In August Jane was at 23 Hans Place in London as Henry had moved from his rooms in Henrietta Street to a house next door to his banking partner Mr Tilson. It was then nearly surrounded by fields, although behind Sloane Street. The fields were later built over to become Pont Street. Jane was agreeably surprised by the space and comfort of his rooms and the garden across which they talked to their neighbour was ‘quite a love’. Jane liked to live in the downstairs room that opened on to it. There were also a balcony and a conservatory. Henry employed one maid servant only, a creditable, clean-looking young woman, and a man.

James and Edward arrived: ‘their business is about teeth and wigs’, for being well into their forties they did not follow the fashion, as their younger brothers did, for wearing their own hair. Henry was friendly with Miss Harriet Moore and Jane was convinced he would soon remarry. Jane liked the idea of Miss Moore better than anybody else at hand, she told Cassandra. But nothing came of it.

Henry was talking of a visit to Chawton and mentioned the possibility of calling on friends on the way. In case this came to anything, Jane asked her sister to forward by Collyer’s coach her silk pelisse and a clean dressing gown which would come from the wash on Friday. On 2 September Jane was still at ‘delightful’ Hans Place, writing to Martha who was in Bath.

Jane was amused by the latest fashions, describing them in detail: coloured petticoats with braces over white spencers, and enormous bonnets. Long sleeves seemed universal, even for formal wear, waists were high and bosoms covered. Flounces were in. Without drawing breath or marking a paragraph, she continues she has seen ‘West’s famous painting … the first representation of our Saviour which ever at all contented me’. Benjamin West was President of the Royal Academy, painter of historical and religious subjects. The painting Jane had seen was
Christ's Rejection by the Elders
. Another intelligent woman who saw the picture, Melesina Trench, however, disliked it: for her, it was neither natural nor sufficiently noble for divinity.

Henry was convinced that the American war, declared 1812, would ruin the British. They ‘cannot be conquered, and we shall only be teaching them the skill in war which they may now want’. Jane hoped that Britain, as a religious nation which she did not believe the Americans to be, would receive Heaven’s protection. Her religious feeling ran deep. She read sermons for pleasure as well as for edification.

On 31 August Charles’s wife, Fanny Palmer, gave birth to her fourth daughter, two weeks prematurely, on board ship. Everything went normally but a week later plump, pink-faced, blonde Fanny was dead, aged twenty-four. Her little girl lived only another fortnight. Edward set off at once to comfort his brother.

Charles resigned from the
Namur
and looked for service abroad on the 36-gun HMS
Phoenix
, which was off to the Mediterranean. He sent his three surviving daughters to their relatives in Keppel Street, where their sour-faced aunt Harriet Palmer looked after them. Mrs Austen disliked her though she admitted that Harriet was very good and very useful and that her ill-health was to be pitied. In 1820 Harriet became the children’s stepmother as well as their aunt when she married Charles as his second wife.

Edward’s claim to the Chawton estate was being contested by the Hintons and the Baverstocks, who had been the heirs until Thomas Knight and Thomas Knight II cut off the entail. They were looking for legal flaws in the disentailing documents. Jane’s home was under threat as, if Edward had to relinquish the Great House, then Chawton Cottage would have to go too. The matter was not settled until 1818, after Jane’s death, when Edward had to sell £15,000 worth of timber from Chawton to buy the Hintons off and raise another £15,000 for legal expenses.

Jane was hoping for her publisher’s account while in London. She had visited Catherine Hill (née Bigg) at Streatham and was distressed that Catherine’s young children should grow up with such an elderly father. He was twenty-four years older than his wife.

Back at Chawton Jane sent Anna criticisms of her latest effort, which are interesting as an indication of Jane’s own practice and show her further punctilious attention to social detail:

Jane criticized Anna’s clichés such as Vortex of dissipation’ and said mildly her novel lacked incident. She turned to rival authors:

She meant it. Scott had recently published
Waverley
, his first novel. He however wrote a favourable review of
 Emma
when it came out in 1816. Scott was created a baronet in recognition of his literary work in 1820.

Anna Austen married Benjamin Langlois Lefroy on 8 November 1814. He had promised James he would go into the Church. Jane Austen approved of him as sensible, very religious and with some independence, by which she meant money. The young couple met every day that summer, taking the short cut across the meadows which reduced the distance between the Steventon and Ashe rectories to not much more than a mile. They spent a lot of time walking together in the Steventon shrubbery. Mary was irritated at being kept out of it by their devotion to each other, which she declared was foolishness, but she and James consented to the match.

Weddings were often extremely quiet by our standards: Anna’s grandmother and aunts were not invited. Anna’s half-sister, Caroline, was a bridesmaid and Anne Lefroy, the bridegroom’s niece, was the other. They wore white frocks and had white ribbon in their straw bonnets. Between nine and ten o’clock the bride, Ben’s brother’s wife Sophia, Anne and Caroline were taken the half-mile to Steventon church in James Austen’s carriage. All the gentlemen walked. Anna was like her Aunt Jane, with bright brown hair and hazel eyes. She wore a dress of fine white muslin with a soft silk shawl, white shot with primrose, embossed with white satin flowers, and on her head a small cap trimmed with lace to match. Mr John Henry George Lefroy, the groom’s brother, performed the ceremony and James gave his daughter away.

It was a grey chilly morning and there were no heaters or flowers in the narrow-windowed church. No one was there but the wedding party, and no one else was asked to the breakfast, to which they sat down as soon as they got back. The wedding feast consisted of an ordinary good breakfast of the period: tongue, ham and eggs, bread, buttered toast, hot rolls. To mark the occasion, there was hot chocolate and there was a wedding cake. The bride and groom left soon afterwards as they had a long day’s journey to Hendon in front of them. Ben’s brother had a house there. Jane wondered whether the air there was polluted, as it was only twelve miles from London. Nowadays Hendon and other villages have long been swallowed up in what William Cobbett and Jane Austen called the Great Wen, or blemish on the face of the countryside.

Anna kept on writing for a while but after Jane died did not have much heart to continue. She was soon the busy mother of seven children. In one of her recurrent fits of despondency she threw her unfinished novel into the fire. Anna’s third daughter Fanny-Caroline, born 1820, sat on the rug watching the papers blacken and curl and throw out sparks. However, finding herself widowed with, in Cassandra’s words, a large family, a narrow income and indifferent health’, Anna published a novella,
Mary Hamilton
, in the
Literary Souvenir
for 1833 and two small books for children,
The Winter’s Tale
(1841) and
Springtide
(1842). She attempted to finish Jane’s uncompleted novel
Sanditon
but only managed some 20,000 words.

Motherless Fanny Knight had written to Jane in November 1814 to ask her advice about Mr Plumptre, the boyfriend whom she had at first fancied but was now uncertain about. Consulted in confidence, Jane concealed the letter even from Cassandra. She begged Fanny to write something which could be read or told to other people. The young man was worthy but Fanny found him dull and was worried he might become Evangelical. Jane, who had previously been blunt about her dislike of Evangelicals, was more cautious now: she was not convinced that everybody ought not to be Evangelical. Fanny replied in a letter now lost, and Jane responded that she and Fanny attached different meanings to the word. It would be illuminating if we could only know what she meant here. She disliked Edward Cooper’s sermons as too full of ‘regeneration and conversion’, which offers some clue. Fanny’s young man was so strict in his views that he thought dancing and social amusements should be avoided by Christian people. Jane and Fanny were both sincere Christians but such negation seemed excessive. Wisdom was better than wit, Jane continued. But on the other hand Fanny must not think of accepting him unless she really did like him. If Fanny did not want to marry him she must behave coldly so he would conclude that he had been deceiving himself. She warned Fanny not to rely on any other person’s opinions but to trust only her own feelings. Nothing could be worse than to be bound to one man and preferring another.

I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time … but it is no creed of mine … that such disappointments kill anybody,’ wrote Jane with her usual robust common sense. Fanny decided to throw coldness into her manner.

Jane took a hint from Fanny’s letter. ‘Your trying to excite your own feelings by a visit to his room amused me excessively. The dirty shaving rag was exquisite! Such a circumstance ought to be in print. Much too good to be lost,' wrote the published novelist. She would remember Fanny and the dirty shaving rag when she made Harriet Smith in
Emma
fetishize Mr Elton’s broken stub of leadless pencil and scrap of sticking plaster.

Fanny would be glad to hear that the first edition of
Mansfield Park
had sold out. Jane told Fanny the rich man’s daughter, frankly, T am very greedy and want to make the most of it; but as you are much above caring about money I shall not plague you with particulars. The pleasures of vanity are more within your comprehension and you will enter into mine at receiving
the praise
which every now and then comes to me, through some channel or other.’ People were readier, though, to borrow and to praise than to buy, said Jane, making the usual complaint of authors. ‘Though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls
pewter
too.’

Towards the end of November Edward and his eldest son took Jane to London to stay with Henry and negotiate a second edition of
Mansfield Park
. Egerton was unwilling to reprint and the second edition came out from John Murray in 1816 with corrected nautical details in the Portsmouth scenes thanks to help from Frank, conveniently near at hand in the Great House, which Edward had lent him. Henry was still at 23 Hans Place.

Jane went to the theatre and saw Miss Eliza O’Neal in David Garrick’s
Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage
. The plot concerns a grandfather who wants to adopt a child on condition it is separated from its mother, and a husband who returns from afar to find that his wife, thinking him dead, has remarried. Mrs Siddons in the part had wrung tears from audiences but was now retired. The acting as usual disappointed Jane, because at this period it tended to be highly stylized and rhetorical, and with her sharp nose for anything false she longed for something more natural. 'I took two pocket handkerchiefs, but had very little occasion for either,’ she wrote drily.

James-Edward, hearing of a possible second edition of
Mansfield Park
, sent his Aunt Jane an anonymous request for a fourth volume giving the ‘useful and amiable’ married life of Edmund and Fanny. The only fault of the novel, wrote the admiring nephew, was in being too short.

She visited Charles’s daughters who were with their Palmer relations in Keppel Street. Three of her brothers were now widowers. She went to see Anna in Hendon and reported to Fanny that Anna’s having a pianoforte was foolishness as her playing would never amount to anything and the couple would wish the twenty-four guineas had been laid out in sheets and towels. Anna had bought a purple pelisse. ‘I do not mean to blame her. It looked very well and I daresay she wanted it. I suspect nothing worse than its being got in secret, and not owned to anybody. She is capable of that, you know.’ Perhaps Anna had been spending her husband’s money behind his back.