Jane Austen Read online

  JANE AUSTEN

  Copyright © 2017 Fiona Stafford

  First published by Hesperus Press Ltd, 2008

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stafford, Fiona J., author.

  Title: Jane Austen : a brief life / Fiona Stafford.

  Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2017. | Includes

  bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017019450 | ISBN 9780300232219 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Austen, Jane, 1775-1817. | Novelists, English—19th

  century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PR4036 .S73 2017 | DDC 823/.7 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019450

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Childhood

  Early Writing

  The True Art of Letter-Writing

  Bath

  From Home to Home

  Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

  Mansfield Park and Emma

  Persuasion

  ‘Winchester Races’

  Remembering Jane

  Afterword

  Notes

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’ When Emma finally discovers Mr Knightley’s true feelings, after forty-eight chapters of misunderstanding, the relief is almost overwhelming. At last, perfect happiness is in prospect, and the joy that arises from the page is all-encompassing. Any sympathetic reader must share the pleasure of the moment when the barriers crash down and the truth is revealed at last, though there is still a sense, even then, of something withheld. Confusion may be gone, but control is not. The tact with which Jane Austen preserves her heroine’s privacy, while inviting readers to participate in her intense delight, is characteristic of her mature novels. Of all writers, she is the most adept at creating both characters who seem to possess an independent existence and a narrator to whom readers feel able to turn, as if to an intimate friend.

  Emma’s reply to Mr Knightley, which is ‘just enough’ to prompt him to say more himself, is typical of her creator’s method. Jane Austen frequently offers the kind of detail that encourages her readers to allow their imaginations free rein, without issuing a subsequent rebuke. Northanger Abbey more or less requires readers to imagine a suitable husband for Elinor Tilney, when the narrator, conscious of ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages’ that signals the story’s imminent ending, announces that any detailed delineation of Elinor’s husband is unnecessary because ‘the most charming young man in the world is instantly before the imagination of us all’. As so often, we are left knowing everything – and nothing. Austen’s narration is at once intimate and elusive, inviting and retreating. No wonder, then, that so many readers over the years, who have responded to the promise of her fiction with such gratitude, have also felt a certain curiosity about the woman behind the works.

  When it comes to Jane Austen’s own life, the same enticing balance between intimacy and distance is apparent. We know exactly where she lived and died, and when and where she wrote her great novels. She is surrounded by a virtual forest of family-trees, with the first-hand recollections of her various relations providing the starting point for any biographical research. We can identify her friends and the circles in which she moved, the homes she visited, the parties she attended. Letters survive from Austen herself, packed with details about bonnets and brooches, guests and gooseberries, donkeys and dinners, sewing, sicknesses, even something of her reading. Compared with many writers living two centuries ago, we know a great deal about Jane Austen. And yet, there is still an extraordinary elusiveness about her life. Even though the first biography was written by her brother within months of her death, our knowledge of Austen seems minimal in the areas that really matter – her methods of composition, literary opinions, political views, religious beliefs and, above all, emotional attachments. There is some evidence relating to each of these important areas, but, all too often, the surviving details seem to throw up as many puzzles as they solve. Like Mr Knightley in the shrubbery, Austen’s biographers seem to receive just enough from their object of fascination to make them want to say more.

  Every reader feels that, in some sense, he or she knows Jane Austen. The engaging tone of her narration, the quick truths and the deep understanding of human nature are all so distinctive that we seem to recognise her clear voice instantly. Hence the confidence with which so many have been quick to create their own images of the author. But, whether speculation about Jane Austen by her immediate and extended family, or by later enthusiasts, scholars or film-makers, comes close to the original truth is impossible to determine. ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.’ Jane Austen may have had Emma Woodhouse in mind when she wrote this, but it serves as a suitably witty warning to anyone attempting to narrate her own life. The kindness with which Emma’s misunderstandings are ultimately treated nevertheless suggests that Austen herself might have derived amusement rather than alarm from the efforts of her followers, appreciating that any biographical endeavour is always inspired by the intangible attractions of her novels. Her own practice as a writer was to set out situations or introduce characters with remarkable economy, leaving the task of drawing out the likely consequences to her readers. It is perhaps appropriate, then, to consider not only the known facts about her life, but also some of their implications.

  As soon as the novels are seen not as autonomous worlds, peopled by their own distinct cast of characters and internal rules, but rather as the compositions of a real woman in a particular place and time, questions spring up about the relationship between the life and the writing. Indeed, once it dawns on us that Jane Austen’s life spanned one of the most turbulent periods of world history – the American War of Independence broke out when she was six months old, the Bastille was stormed when she was thirteen, war between Britain and France went on almost uninterrupted throughout her adult life, and she died within two years of Waterloo – the silence of her novels on such matters comes as something of a surprise. She was a wartime novelist and yet her writing conjures up worlds in which all the important action takes place on the dance floor, in the drawing room or around the garden. During Austen’s lifetime, Britain experienced massive social and economic transformation, with new industrial and agricultural methods of production, urban growth and improved systems of communication developing under the rule of an unstable king and dissolute prince. Uprisings in Ireland, riots in England, victories and losses abroad, political union, the assassination of a prime minister – all took place while Austen was writing. None of these public events seem to make much impact on her apparently realistic novels. Why not?

  It is not just the absence of contemporary political references that proves a puzzle for readers, however. Once the focus shifts to Austen’s own immedi
ate experience, the gap between what is known of her life and what is apparent in her fiction is again clear. Apart from short visits to friends and family, thirty-four of her forty-one years were spent in the English county of Hampshire, yet none of her novels is set there. She grew up in a household of six boys and two girls, but she created families of daughters – the Dashwoods, the Bennets, the Woodhouses, the Elliots. Only two of her heroines have an elder brother, even though Jane Austen had five. Her father was rector of the parish where she was born, but her most memorable clergymen are absurdly vain, self-seeking figures. She lived with her mother until her own death, but her protagonists’ mothers are deceased, absent or distinctly unhelpful. The Austen family suffered its fair share of illness, death and difficulty, but none of those circumstances quite matches the problems depicted in her fiction. Jane Austen never married, and yet each of her novels adopts the traditional resolution of comedy and fairy tale, moving towards it with unswerving conviction.

  What are we to make of this? How can we make sense of Austen’s life and art? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Jane Austen come to write books that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were these the novels that Charles Darwin knew by heart, that Alfred, Lord Tennyson preferred over seventeenth-century political history, that Winston Churchill read during the Blitz? Such questions require more extensive answers than a short biography can hope to provide, but they are worth considering at the outset because so much of Austen’s public persona is still hidden under the modest exterior presented by her siblings and preserved by her Victorian nephews and nieces. This brief life has no interest in tearing down the images of Jane Austen that have been created by numerous earlier admirers and iconoclasts – images to which each new biographer is so greatly indebted. It is, however, propelled as much by the puzzles as by the biographical evidence, and is sustained throughout by an undiminishing sense of wonder at the fact of Austen’s fiction.

  A book of this kind incurs many debts. The first major critical assessment of Jane Austen’s work appeared during her own lifetime, shortly after the publication of Emma. It was written by a literary giant, Walter Scott, and published in a leading journal, the Quarterly Review. Scott’s encomium was followed all too soon by Henry Austen’s brief biographical notice of his much-lamented sister, which accompanied the posthumously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in December 1817. Jane Austen’s reputation then grew intermittently and, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was so well established that there was no danger of her novels receding into oblivion. The writer whose books were first attributed to an anonymous ‘Lady’ has gradually attracted an almost overwhelming share of the literary-critical limelight, and so this account of her life and work owes much to those who have contributed to the Austen illuminations. The main written sources are listed in the bibliography, but the book has also benefited from opportunities to spend time in the places Jane Austen lived, visited and set her stories, especially Bath, Box Hill, Chawton, Lyme Regis, Portsmouth, Steventon and Winchester. I am indebted to the generous curators of the Jane Austen’s House Museum, Louise West and Mary Guyatt, as well as to Gillian Dow and her colleagues at Chawton House. Vivian Branson’s kind invitation helped me to understand Jane Austen’s family connections in Kent, and I have been privileged enough to meet a number of contemporary descendants of the extended Austen family. The Jane Austen Society, including several regional branches, has always been very welcoming, and I have learnt a great deal from my many enjoyable interactions with its members. I am also glad to be able to discuss Austen with students and colleagues at Oxford, including Ros Ballaster, Paula Byrne, Sandie Byrne, Richard Jenkyns, Freya Johnston and Kathryn Sutherland. Once again, I have been very fortunate to work with the excellent editorial team at Yale University Press, and thanks are due especially to Melissa Bond and Julian Loose for their enthusiasm and expertise. I would also like to record a special debt of gratitude to Clare Alexander.

  As with so many real lives, Jane Austen’s did not conform perfectly to the narrative patterns that inform her novels. The reason that she is the subject of this and so many other biographies is that she wrote six fine books. Since they were all published in the space of six years, between 1811 and 1817, this brief life is shaped accordingly. If the number of words and the number of years represented do not seem to match, it is because Jane Austen’s greatest achievement was packed into less than a fifth of her life. Though rarely placed in the company of her brilliant contemporaries, Jane Austen was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Burns, Shelley or Byron – full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.

  CHILDHOOD

  1775–87

  There are not many babies in Austen’s novels. Late in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Collins brings news of a ‘young olive-branch’ that will make the Bennet family’s eventual loss of Longbourn complete, while in Emma, the child to be born at Randalls is perceived by the heroine as the final stage of Mrs Weston’s removal. Young mothers tend to be kept largely at a distance from the action or used for purely narrative purposes, as when the news of Mrs Price’s desperation over ‘her ninth lying-in’ sparks the storyline of Mansfield Park. Although we have glimpses of a more kindly attitude in Emma’s drawings of her baby nephew, or in Mr Palmer’s secret fondness for his son and heir in Sense and Sensibility, no young child emerges as a fully rounded character in any of Austen’s novels. Judging from comments in her own letters, Austen’s views on birth were decidedly mixed. Though a much-loved aunt, her private opinion of the frequent pregnancies of her own niece Anna Lefroy suggests that successive children were not always greeted with delight: ‘Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty. I am very sorry for her.’1

  Austen herself had no children, and nor did her sister Cassandra. Neither did she have much opportunity to play with baby siblings from an early age, unlike so many children of her time. Her eldest brother, James, for example, had the experience of seeing five young baby boys and two little girls appear in his mother’s arms by the time he was fourteen years old. For Jane, however, the only younger brother was Charles, who arrived when she was three. Mrs Austen’s practice was to send her babies to be nursed in the village after their first few weeks at home, and so, among young Jane’s earliest memories might have been the arrival and subsequent departure of little Charles. By the time she was ten, her glamorous cousin Eliza de Feuillide and her baby son Hastings were frequent visitors at the Austen family home, but the little boy’s serious health problems meant that he was always a focus of protective anxiety rather than a spring of pure delight. It was not until the next generation of Austen children began to arrive, with the birth of her nieces Fanny and Anna in 1793, that Jane had much close contact with babies – by which time she was seventeen and more preoccupied with other plans of her own.

  Jane Austen grew up surrounded by big boys. Born at Steventon parsonage in Hampshire in December 1775, she was the seventh child of the local rector, George Austen, and his wife Cassandra. When Jane arrived a month late, during one of the hardest winters of the century, Reverend and Mrs Austen were already the parents of James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra and Francis. The arrival of another child was therefore not as momentous as births often seem, even though this baby would eventually become one of the most remarkable writers in the English language, the popularity of her work ensuring lasting fame for the entire family. As the youngest girl, Jane inevitably developed a sense of herself in relation to her elder brothers, to whom she turned at different times for advice, amusement, company and comfort. The boisterous household meant that her early life was never quiet, dull or lonely, but it must have provoked the occasional disappointment, frustration and feeling of inadequacy, as large families invariably do. Among siblings, deep affection and aggravation generally go hand in
hand. The reassuring closeness may also have brought dim fears of insignificance – little Jane mattered very much, but still she was only one of eight. As a child, Jane Austen must always have felt that there was someone a bit older and wiser than her, both providing a model and also, no doubt, piquing her into proving her own ability.

  When it came to talents, after all, her family was not underendowed. Her eldest brother, James, born in 1765, was bright, energetic and widely read. He hunted and wrote poetry with equal enthusiasm, a combination of interests less surprising then than now. Edward, three years younger than James, was good-looking and good-humoured, with a steady head and a talent for telling amusing stories. His younger brother Henry, handsome, clever and rich in optimism, livened up every gathering with his effervescent humour and sparkling conversation. Cassandra, the first daughter, born in 1773, was eighteen months younger than Henry, but more like Edward with her dark beauty, kind nature and quiet intelligence. Francis, who arrived a year later, was active and determined from the start, as is evident in the story of him buying a pony at the age of seven to enable him to go hunting with his older brothers. Francis was the first Austen to go to sea, and ended up as Admiral of the Fleet, the highest-ranking officer in the entire British navy. Charles, the baby of the family, born in 1779 and growing up to be just as intelligent, good-tempered and courageous as the rest, followed Francis into the navy in 1791, just before France declared war on Britain. Only George seems to have missed out. The second son, born just a year after James, was destined to become something of an exile from the family hearth. From childhood, he suffered from fits, speech difficulties and an unspecified mental disability, which led to him being fostered by a nearby family and largely edited out of the Austen family narrative.2