Jane Austen (35 page)

This implies that he wanted Jane Austen to write a novel which would be an instrument of revenge on the ‘high priest’. This term is clearly sarcastic, suggesting that the parson concerned was arrogant and overbearing, as the term ‘high priest’ is not in use in the Church of England, and is only used in connection with pagan religions. He confides: ‘I have never recovered from the shock.’ Immediately he returns to the task of urging Jane Austen to write a novel according to his peculiarly personal recipe. ‘Carry your clergyman to sea as the friend of some distinguished naval character about a court…’ Mr Clarke is clearly yearning to appoint himself Jane Austen’s plot consultant, as he reveals he was himself at sea and tells Jane he has arranged to send her some ‘sermons which I wrote and preached on the ocean’.

Jane did not reply to this letter. Mr Clarke had not given up. Writing at the end of the following March to thank her for the Prince’s presentation copies, he implored her to go on writing. Lord St Helens and many of the nobility who had been staying at the Brighton Pavilion had paid the just tribute of their praise. Mr Clarke boasted of his new appointment as chaplain and secretary to Prince Leopold of SaxeCoburg, who was about to marry the Prince Regent’s daughter Princess Charlotte of Wales. ‘Perhaps when you again appear in print you may choose to dedicate your volumes to Prince Leopold: any historical romance illustrative of the history of the august house of Coburg would just now be very interesting/ he nudged.

This was not so foolish as it sounds. The Royal Family was beset by scandal. King George III, whatever the cause of his illness, was mad; the Prince Regent was estranged from his wife, and the royal princes were living with various mistresses, refusing to marry and beget legitimate heirs. The Prince Regent’s sole legitimate daughter, troubled child of a disastrous marriage, was Princess Charlotte. The newspapers were fall of coarse satires on the Royal Family. These seem to have been justified. Princess Charlotte told her father that her mother had left her alone with a cavalryman, Captain Charles Hesse, in Charlotte’s own bedroom and locked them in, saying in French, Tm going now: enjoy yourselves.’ Charlotte suspected that her mother wished to compromise her and promote Charlotte’s illegitimate half-brother.

The Prince Regent decided Charlotte should be married off as soon as possible but when the drunken Prince of Orange was suggested to her she fled in a hackney coach to her mother’s house.

Sense and Sensibility
was recommended to Charlotte by one of her 'wicked uncles’, the Duke of York, who was convinced it had been written by the notorious Lady Augusta Paget. Charlotte enjoyed the novel. It certainly is interesting and you feel quite one of the company,’ she wrote to a friend.
‘I
 think Marianne and me
[sic]
are very alike in disposition, though certainly I am not so good. The same imprudence, etc, however remain very like.’

Headstrong Princess Charlotte had met and fallen in love with Prince Leopold when he came to London with the Russian Czar in 1814 for the celebrations of a peace which turned out to be temporary. A royal romance was going to be good, it was hoped, for the battered image of the House of Hanover. In August 1814 the Princess of Wales, Princess Charlotte’s mother, had sailed to the Continent of Europe, where, lost to all dignity and decorum, she drew attention to herself and revenged herself on her husband by scandalously indiscreet behaviour. It was rumoured that in Italy she had danced naked in public. George IV finally decided to divorce his wife Caroline when he became King in 1820 and she wanted to be recognized as Queen, but she died in 1821 shortly after the coronation. George IV consoled himself with his final mistress, Lady Conyngham, known punningly as the Vice Queen. Jane Austen must once have seen her at a ball, possibly on a visit to Kent, because in 1798 she had written to Cassandra that she had changed the trimmings on her cap and was pleased to say it made her look more like Lady Conyngham than it did before, ‘which is all that one lives for now’.

In 1815 it seemed to Mr Clarke that if that elegant writer, Miss Jane Austen, could be persuaded to romanticize the royal union in fiction by glamorizing the foreign bridegroom’s family in order to provide the war-weary nation with a fairy-tale wedding, it would be a brilliant stroke of public relations. The young couple had been pictured at the opera by the painter George Dawe, and black and white printed copies were distributed. Jane Austen had passed their new home, Claremont Park in Surrey, on her way to London in May 1813.

The house of Saxe-Coburg was unheard of outside Prince Leopold’s native Germany, where princelings were numerous. He was handsome in his cavalry uniform but so poor he lived in rented rooms above a grocer’s shop. The couple married in May 1816 but Princess Charlotte was to die in childbirth in November 1817, four months after Jane Austen herself. Mr Clarke lived until 1834 and the artist J M W Turner went to his funeral.

Prince Leopold’s sister married the Regent’s brother the Duke of Kent, who as King William IV of England was the uncle of Queen Victoria. Victoria’s husband Prince Albert was another Coburg, who brought this family into the direct line of British royal descent.

On 1 April 1816 Jane decided that the nonsensical correspondence with Mr Clarke had gone on long enough. She made polite excuses for answering two letters with one, then came to the point:

She knew her own value and the quality of her work. Jane could not resist incorporating some of Mr Clarke’s more self-serving notions into a satirical ‘plan of a novel’. This would send a clergyman hero to sea as chaplain to a distinguished naval character about the court, burying his own mother (‘heroine’s lamented grandmother’). The plot outlined Mr Clarke’s more absurd suggestions, combined with a melodramatic story. Eventually the ‘poor father, quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the ground, and after four or five hours of tender advice and parental admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives against holders of tithes’.

Emma
was advertised as forthcoming on 2 December 1815 in the
Morning Post
, but was not in fact ready till the last week of the year, and the title page said ‘1816’. She wrote to Murray by messenger, ‘As I find that
Emma
is advertised for publication as early as Saturday next, I think it best to lose no time in settling all that remains to be settled …’ She agreed to leave the terms of trade to him. She wanted the edition cleared rapidly and enclosed the revised copy of
Mansfield Park
.

Until 16 December, her fortieth birthday, Jane was still in London, but looking forward to going home. She told Cassandra she positively liked the ‘nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close muggy weather,’ enjoying it ‘all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally’ and selfishly hoped it would last another twenty-three days till Christmas. She ended her letter of 2 December, ‘Excuse the shortness of this, but I must finish it now, that I may save you twopence.’ She never went to London again.

J
ANE RECEIVED WHAT
seemed like discriminating praise from Countess Morley, thanking her for a presentation copy of
Emma
, I am already become intimate in the Woodhouse family and feel that they will not amuse and interest me less than the Bennets, Bertrams, Norrises and all their admirable predecessors. I can give them no higher praise,' wrote the Countess.

Lady Morley, formerly Frances Talbot, was initially suspected by Mary Russell Mitford of having written
Pride and Prejudice
. Frances was the Earl’s second wife. His first wife, Lady Augusta Paget, was believed by Princess Charlotte to have written
Sense and Sensibility
. The Earl had divorced Augusta after she ran off with another man. The Earl and Countess owned Saltram House in Devon, used when the film
of Sense and Sensibility
was made in 1995. However in private the second Lady Morley told her sister-in-law that she actually preferred
Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield Park
to
Emma
.

Jane said that her ladyship’s approbation was gratifying. ‘It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which
Emma’s
predecessors have experienced, and to believe that I have not yet - as almost every writer of fancy does sooner or later -overwritten myself.’ Like every creative artist she was afraid of drying up.

Jane’s brother Frank liked
Emma
enormously. He preferred it to
Pride and Prejudice
, which might be considered to have more wit, and to
Mansfield Park
with its higher morality.
Emma
was like life. Cassandra liked
Emma
more than
Pride and Prejudice
, but not as much as she did
Mansfield Park
. Mrs Austen thought
Emma
more entertaining than
Mansfield Park
but not as interesting as
Pride and Prejudice
. She thought nobody in
Emma
compared with Lady Catherine and Mr Collins. Edward the farmer teased his sister about a slip in the strawberry-picking scene: ‘Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those apple trees of yours that come into bloom in June.’ Edward’s daughter Fanny did not like the book as well as
Pride and Prejudice
or
Mansfield Park
, because she disliked the heroine. She found Mr Knightley delightful and would have liked to see more of Jane Fairfax.

Jane had not yet met her first great-niece, Anna-Jemima Lefroy, Ben and Anna’s daughter. She sent Anna a note: ‘As I wish very much to see
your
Jemima, I am sure you will like to see
my Emma
, and have therefore great pleasure in sending it for your perusal. Keep it as long as you choose…’

Anna’s comment was interesting.
Emma
was not as brilliant as
Pride and Prejudice
, nor as ‘equal’ as
Mansfield Park
, by which she meant ‘consistent’. The characters were admirably well drawn and natural. Her favourites were Mr Knightley, Mrs Elton and Miss Bates. One or two of the conversations were ‘too long’. Anna’s daughter Fanny-Caroline Lefroy said many years later that in the eyes of several people the character of Emma, especially the way she looks, pointed to Anna, if only unintentionally. Indeed, the portrait combined Anna’s appearance with something of her richer cousin Fanny’s situation.

Dear Mrs Digweed said she could never have got through the book if she had not known the author. Maria Edgeworth also received a presentation copy which she did not acknowledge. She thought the book dull and plotless. Susan Ferrier, who had not yet finished writing her novel
Marriage
, also thought there was no story to
Emma
, but the characters were true to life and the style piquant: there was no need of mystery and adventure.

The book attracted eight printed reviews. Some people found Miss Bates a bore. John Murray privately thought the book wanted incident and romance but as publisher of the influential
Quarterly Review
he asked Walter Scott to review it. Scott praised the novel for being lifelike and wrote about Jane’s other books as well but had not heard of
Mansfield Park
. He quoted, though, as an example of
Emma’s
quiet though comic dialogue, the conversation between Mr Woodhouse and Isabella in Chapter Twelve. Jane was pleased, saying those were the very characters she had taken most pains with.

Jane’s triumph was qualified by disasters which had struck her brothers. Henry had gone bankrupt at the end of 1815. He had not been able to attend to business while Eliza was dying or during his own protracted illness. The Alton bank of Austen Gray and Vincent, like many small country banks in the difficult postwar period, collapsed first, dragging with it the London bank of Austen Maunde and Tilson. Government contracts dried up. Henry had borrowed £20,000 from Edward, lost at a bad time as Edward was involved in his lawsuit with the Hintons of Chawton and the Baverstocks of Alton over his inheritance from Thomas Brodnax-May-Knight. Jane had only £13 7s in her Henrietta Street account, which she lost, but the £600 profit on her novels was safely invested in navy stock at five per cent.

Henry returned to his original career plan and wrote to the Bishop of Winchester about becoming a clergyman. He polished up his Greek and was disappointed when the Bishop failed to be impressed by it. However, he was approved and was ordained deacon at Salisbury the next day. He was appointed curate of Chawton at the age of forty-five on a stipend of 52 guineas a year. He became a zealous preacher of Calvinistic doctrine in the Evangelical wing of the Church, later becoming perpetual curate of Bentley, Hampshire. London had become hateful to him but his residence there had been an invaluable asset to his sister.

On 21 February 1816 Charles was shipwrecked off the coast of Smyrna, where he was chasing pirates. His captain’s log reads: