Part 2

Jane Austen was not without suitors, whom her independent spirit, absorption in her family, and quiet reserve could not repel. Her descendants were aware of addresses paid to her by one gentleman who had every recommendation of character, connections, and position, to whom nothing was wanting save the lady’s favour. There is also the lingering recollection of a sorrowful little romance, bearing a resemblance to that of her sister Cassandra, in connection with the brilliant, witty, successful author. It was told by Cassandra Austen to her young relatives long after Jane’s death. The two girls, while spending some weeks during their youth at a seaside place, became acquainted with a gentleman whose attractions of person, mind, and manners made even Cassandra think him worthy of Jane, and likely to win her. When the young people parted, the new friend expressed his intention of soon seeing the sisters again, and Cassandra at least had no doubt of his motives; but the second meeting never took place. The sisters heard, not long afterwards, of the gentleman’s sudden death, and with him perished, in Cassandra Austen’s opinion, her sister Jane’s solitary, short love-dream.

III.

Jane Austen wrote stories, in addition to all manner of quips and cranks, impromptu verses, and mocking stanzas, from her childhood upwards. In admitting the childish practice, after she was a middle-aged woman, she called it an innocent amusement, but a waste of time which, as she had found to her regret, might have been more profitably employed. She had accumulated numerous copies, full of such stories--for the most part burlesques of the melodramatic extravagances of other writers--by the time she was sixteen. The published story which is nearest to this style is “Northanger Abbey.” She seems to have completed two stories, which were not parodies, between the age of sixteen and twenty. Both of these were in the old-fashioned form of letters. One of them she re-wrote, in another shape, and it was ultimately published under the title of “Sense and Sensibility.” The other, “Lady Susan,” was only published along with the little memoir of the author, nine years ago.

Two among her masterpieces were written between her twenty-first and twenty-third years. “Pride and Prejudice,” named originally “First Impressions,” was written in ten months, between 1796 and 1797; “Sense and Sensibility,” the reproduction from the earlier story, in letters, called “Ellinor and Marianne,” occupied the author between 1797 and 1798; but “Northanger Abbey,” which holds a place beside “Pride and Prejudice,” was written also in 1798.

Jane Austen wrote with the knowledge and approval of her father and mother and the rest of her family. There is still in existence a letter written by Mr. Austen and addressed to Mr. Cadell, in November, 1797, immediately after the completion of “Pride and Prejudice.” The father simply states that he has in his possession a MS. novel in three volumes, about the length of Miss Burney’s “Evelina.” He asks whether Mr. Cadell would choose to be concerned in bringing it out, what would be the expense of publishing if at the author’s risk, and what the publisher would venture to advance for the copyright if, on perusal, it was approved of.

The proposal was declined by return of post, more from excess of caution than from erring criticism, since the MS. was never in the publisher’s hands. It is almost needless to say that the rejected novel has been considered the best, as it is unquestionably among the best, of English novels.

“Pride and Prejudice” was not published till sixteen years after it had been composed; “Sense and Sensibility,” the first published of Jane Austen’s novels, not for thirteen years after the first time it was re-written. “Northanger Abbey” was the first sold of these earlier novels, but it cannot be considered more lucky than its predecessors. Its fate was, if possible, still more mortifying. It was disposed of to a publisher in Bath for the modest sum of ten pounds, five years after it was written, and two years before the death of Jane Austen’s father. It lay ignominiously in a drawer in the shop of its purchaser for many years. At last it was bought back for the sum originally given, by one of the author’s brothers, who, when the transaction was finished, triumphantly informed the dilatory publisher that he had just re-sold a work by the well-known author of “Pride and Prejudice.” “Northanger Abbey,” on which Lord Macaulay set such store, was not brought out till 1818, after Jane Austen’s death, when it appeared together with her last story, “Persuasion,” just twenty years from the date at which the former novel was written. Surely, few young authors have had to suffer greater and more prolonged disappointment in finding a publisher and a public. The experience may serve as a consolation to all struggling literary aspirants. On the other hand we may seek generation after generation of authors doomed to obscurity, temporary or permanent, before we find another Jane Austen. Of a nephew and a niece of the author’s who took to youthful novel-writing in their aunt’s lifetime, and received all indulgence and encouragement from their kinswoman, it is recorded that neither of their novels ever saw the light; yet we might have said of them that they had novel-writing in the blood. One of them wrote with the inspiring association of dwelling in Steventon Parsonage, the other received invaluable hints and suggestions from a mistress of her art; but it was all of no avail.

It is said that Jane Austen bore her early literary disappointments very philosophically. She did not write for money; her father was in easy circumstances. She might not then anticipate fame--though she was far from undervaluing her powers--and she did not over-rate the worth of a literary reputation; still I can scarcely comprehend the equanimity of a very young woman remaining entirely unshaken by the unbroken train of undeserved failures and rebuffs. There is one thing that I feel sure Jane Austen must have grieved for:--her father, who had superintended her education, and taken a fatherly interest in her first attempts at authorship, did not live to see the faint dawn of the success which, though it came late, has proved ample.

Before quitting the subject of the novelist’s youth at Steventon, I should like to say a word on the influences already referred to, which I believe affected her as a woman and an author. During her whole life she remained to a great extent engrossed by the interests of her family and their limited circle of old and intimate friends. This was as it should be--so far, but there may be too much of a good thing. The tendency of strictly restricted family parties and sets--when their members are above small bickerings and squabblings--when they are really superior people in every sense, is to form “mutual admiration” societies, and neither does this more respectable and amiable weakness act beneficially upon its victims. In the incessant intercourse between the Great House and Upper Cross Cottage in “Persuasion,” we have an example, under Jane Austen’s own hand, of the evils of such constant communication among people of inferior understanding and intelligence. If we look nearer home, we may have a glimpse of disadvantages of a different sort, attendant on what Scotch people call “clannishness” in a higher region. Good as Jane Austen was, there is a certain spirit of exclusiveness, intolerance, condescension, and what may be classed as refined family selfishness, in the attitude which she, the happy member of a large and united family, distinguished by many estimable qualities, assumed to the world without. She was independent of it to a large extent for social intercourse; and so she told it candidly, and just a little haughtily--forgetting, for the most part, the wants of less favoured individuals--that she needed nothing from it.

Fondly loved and remembered as Jane Austen has been, with much reason, among her own people, in their considerable ramifications, I cannot imagine her as greatly liked, or even regarded with anything save some amount of prejudice, out of the immediate circle of her friends, and in general society. I hope I may not be misunderstood. I do not mean that the novelist was other than an excellent woman, pre-eminently a gentlewoman. What I mean is, that she allowed her interests and sympathies to become narrow, even for her day, and that her tender charity not only began, but ended, in a large measure, at home. No doubt I am alluding to the characteristics of a generation and class, which showed themselves, in a marked manner, in the repugnance with which other intellectual gentlewomen shrank from acknowledging the profession of authorship, with its obligations, no less than its privileges, as if it involved a degradation--something distinctly injurious to them, both as women and gentlewomen. Fanny Burney, on the other hand, was brought up among artists of every description, which, perhaps, accounts for the transparent literary vanity which forms so broad a contrast to the shyness--often equally self-conscious--of her sister-authors. But the whole bent of Jane Austen’s disposition and rearing seem to point in the contrary direction.

Jane Austen was the clear-sighted girl with the sharp pen, if not the sharp tongue, who found in the Steventon visiting-list materials for the _dramatis personæ_ of “Pride and Prejudice.” It would have been little short of a miracle if she could have conducted herself with such meekness, in her remote rural world, or during the visits she paid to the great English watering-place--while she was all the time laughing in her sleeve--so as not to provoke any suspicion of her satire, or any resentment at what might easily be held her presumption.

We may grant fully that Jane Austen was far too good an artist to make absolute copies from real persons to figure in the pages of her books, and too good a woman not to regard such a practice as a breach of social honour and propriety. But we all know how human beings--especially the duller among us, distrust and dislike being turned into ridicule. “A chiel amang us takin’ notes” is not half so offensive as an audacious boy or girl convicted of taking us off, whether behind our backs or to our faces. I do not mean to infer that Miss Austen at any age was guilty of the mean and disloyal practice called “drawing out people” until they expose their weakness, and then making game of the weaknesses, whether in the victim’s company or out of it. I have it on excellent authority that, however thoroughly she was able to sympathise with the witty repartees of two of her favourite heroines, in general company she herself was shy and silent; even in more familiar circles she was innocent of speaking sharp words, and was rather distinguished for her tolerant indulgence to her fellow-creatures, than for her hard judgments on them. The tolerance belonged, by right, to her breadth of comprehension, and to the humour which still more than wit characterised her genius. The suggestion I make is that, seeing her neighbours’ foibles, as she certainly did see them, she could not, however generously she might use her superior knowledge, conceal it altogether from her neighbours, and this was less likely to be the case when she was a young girl with some share, presumably, of the thoughtlessness and rashness of other girls, than when she was a mature woman, with the wisdom and gentleness of experience. I have pointed out the softened as well as the more serious tone of her later novels, the difference, for instance, between “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion.” But who is to guess that the boy or the girl is to turn out a great novelist and humourist, whose genius is a fire in the bones, and an excuse for a hundred liberties?

As an author, in the few letters that have been preserved in which we have Jane Austen’s private feelings on the subject of her novels frankly written to her family and friends, she gives one the impression of having always found herself the queen of her company: never in an arrogant, vulgar way; on the contrary, with a sweet playfulness and gracious kindness to those who were closely allied to her by kindred, blood, and the ties of friendship; but all the same she reigned queen. She might come down from her throne and defer to her elder sister Cassandra, or to any other relative, but her sceptre was still in her hand. I do not draw inferences merely from Jane Austen’s hearty, undissembled appreciation of her own work, and her distinct perception, freely announced, of its superior claims; doubtless that was inevitable to such a woman as she was, in the circumstances in which she found herself. It is in the whole assured tone of the half-jesting criticism; the half-pretended impatience that any new great novelist should enter the lists; the total absence--as in the case of Mrs. Radcliffe--of any natural desire to know and be known by her fellow-writers, to measure herself in familiar intercourse with them, above all, to give and receive sympathy.

Of course these peculiarities in the individual woman were not enough to hinder her from admiring at a distance, and occasionally generously proclaiming the admiration for, some of her contemporaries. I am bound also, in fairness, to add to my own impressions that it remained the firm persuasion of Jane Austen’s biographer that she was as far as possible from being censorious and satirical. With regard to the censoriousness, I agree perfectly with this witness; but as to the satire, I must bring forward the opposite and impartial testimony of her own writings. Jane Austen was on the whole more humorous than satirical, yet in the earlier novels the satire is prominent. I can give far more unqualified credence to the statement that, while her unusually quick sense of the ridiculous led her to play with all the common-places of every-day life--whether as regarded persons or things--she never played with its serious duties or responsibilities.

With all her neighbours in the village--her humbler neighbours, I suppose--Mr. Austen Leigh says she was on friendly though not on intimate terms, “She took a kindly interest in all their proceedings, and liked to hear about them. They often served for her amusement, but it was her own nonsense that gave zest to the gossip.” The last is a nice distinction, hardly likely to be understood by the neighbours over whose affairs she laughed.

That Jane Austen, with her singular Shakespeare-like sympathy in little, her power of putting herself in another’s place, could not help feeling both interested and entertained by the proceedings of the fellow-creatures around her, I can easily believe. What I doubt is that she who turned those simple souls, and the incidents of their lives, inside out, for her mingled instruction and diversion, could altogether conceal the process, or render it palatable to the subjects of the operation.

It was the conviction of the Austen family that Jane’s occupation as a novel writer continued long unsuspected by her ordinary acquaintances and neighbours. That may have been, but we cannot imagine that her close study of the characters around her, with her shrewd, humorous conclusions--so extraordinary at the age at which she began to make them--could have been either quite unperceived or wholly approved of by her associates.

There are one or two of Jane Austen’s letters from Steventon published in her memoir. They are bright, chatty letters, not far removed from those which any merry-hearted, clever girl might have written. They deal entirely with domestic and local details. The arrival of a set of tables, with which everybody, for a wonder, was pleased; a great November storm, that made havoc among the Parsonage trees; an accident to a neighbour’s son; an anticipated ball; the fact that Jane was then reading Hume’s “History of England,” form the topics. As there is no continuity, either in the letters or the narrative, of which such incidents might supply a part, they fall vaguely and flatly on the reader. The most interesting paragraphs are those which refer to the absent sailor brothers, and the eagerness of the mother and sisters to hear stray news of them, or to forward letters to them, and procure answering letters by the chances of coming and going ships. There is one passage which tallies with the details of a gift made in “Mansfield Park”:--“Charles has received thirty pounds for his share of the privateer, and expects ten pounds more; but of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents to his sisters? He has been buying gold chains and topaz crosses for us. He must be well scolded.... I shall write again by this post to thank and reproach him. We shall be unbearably fine.”

IV.

During an absence from home on Jane Austen’s part, it was settled, before she knew, that her father, who at the age of seventy had resigned his living of Steventon to his son James, should remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. However much Jane may have felt the fascination of her girlish visits to Bath, she did not approve of it as a place of residence in her more mature womanhood. We are reminded of a sentence in “Persuasion” where the author remarks drily Anne Elliot did not like Bath; fancied it disagreed with her; would have preferred any other place; therefore, to Bath, as a matter of course, the family went. So much for the unpropitiousness of events.

The Austens went to Bath in 1801, when Jane was twenty-six years of age. The family resided first at No. 4, Sydney Terrace, and later at Green Park Buildings. An attraction to Bath, suggested by Mr. Austen Leigh, is that Mrs. Austen’s only brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot,[3] with his wife, was in the habit of spending his time between Bath and his place of Scarletts. Like his uncle, the Master of Balliol, Mr. Leigh Perrot was a witty man, and some of his epigrams and riddles, in which he must have far outshone Mr. Woodhouse, found their way, among other morsels, into print. The Austens, with their strong family proclivities, were much with the Leigh Perrots.

Jane was still young, pretty, and cheerful enough to enter with a fair proportion of enjoyment into the gaieties of the place. She had given up writing, in a great measure, since she was three or four and twenty, whether chilled by her lack of success or distracted by other engagements and amusements. However, it is thought that it was during her stay in Bath she wrote several chapters of an unfinished novel called “The Watsons,” which, unlike the youthful performance, “Lady Susan,” published along with these chapters in the same volume with the memoir, bear a strong flavour of Jane Austen in her sagacity and banter.

She may have been inspirited to the effort by the sale, though for so small a sum, of the MS. of “Northanger Abbey,” which happened two years after she came to Bath, when she was twenty-eight years of age. We know the sale proved fruitless, so far as speedy publication was concerned, but the mortifying conclusion could not have been foreseen, and the sale of one of her novels for ten pounds was Jane Austen’s first faint gleam of good fortune in authorship, the only one which visited her during her father’s lifetime.

The Austens remained at Bath about four years. In their last autumn there, the autumn of 1804, Jane, with her father and mother, spent some weeks at the lovely sea-bathing place of Lyme, which she admired so much, and has immortalised in “Persuasion.” We cannot avoid being struck by the small number of the opportunities which Jane Austen had of seeing the world, and by the great use she made of them. Her journeyings were not so very much more extensive than those of the Vicar of Wakefield and his wife in the days of their prosperity, but they were sufficient for her to avail herself of them for the information and delight of her fellow-creatures. It is not the amount of what we see, but the eyes with which we see it, that signifies.

In the following spring, that of 1805, the Rev. George Austen died at Bath. His widow and daughters then removed to Southampton--drawn to its society very likely by the sailor Austens--and there they stayed for four more years. Mrs. Austen occupied a large old-fashioned house in a corner of Castle Square. The house had a pleasant garden, bounded on one side by the old city wall. A flight of steps led to the top of the wall, which formed a walk with an extensive view of sea and land.

V.

In 1809 the Austens made their last removal. It was back to the country--of which Jane always makes her heroines fond--back to the old neighbourhood of Steventon, her birth-place. Edward Knight offered his mother a choice of two houses--the one on his estate in Kent, the other on his estate in Hampshire. She selected the house in Hampshire, Chawton Cottage, near the squire’s occasional home, Chawton House.

Chawton Cottage, in the village of the same name, was not originally a farm house, like Upper Cross Cottage, in “Persuasion;” it had been intended for an inn. Indeed, it stood so close to the high road on which the front door opened, that a very narrow enclosure “paled” in on each side had been necessary to protect the building from the danger of collision with runaway vehicles. In addition to the Gosport Road in front, the Winchester Road skirted the house on one side, so that it could not be regarded as a secluded habitation, but in those days cheerfulness was more prized than seclusion. There was a large pond close to Chawton Cottage, at the junction of the two public roads. Happily the theory which connects insalubrity with such ponds had not yet been aired, so that to the Austens, no doubt, Chawton pond was a very desirable sheet of water, tending still more to enhance the attractions of the scene. They would not much mind the duckweed and other slimy vegetation. Horses and donkeys, ducks and geese, would disport themselves there in summer. In winter village sliders would bestow animation on the ice.

The squire added to the house, and contrived some judicious planting and screening. A good-sized entrance and two sitting-rooms were managed. In the drawing-room a window which looked to the Gosport Road was blocked up and turned into a bookcase, and another window was opened out and made to command only turf and trees, for a high wooden fence and a hornbeam hedge shut out the Winchester Road. Here was a little bit of genteel privacy. A shrubbery was carried round the enclosure, which Mr. Austen Leigh tells us gave a sufficient space for “ladies’ exercise,” though we cannot help thinking the exercise-ground must have been rather limited for the middle-aged women.

However, there was a pleasant irregular mixture of hedgerow, gravel-walk, and orchard, with grass for mowing, made by two or three little enclosures having been thrown together. As it happened, walking had to be relinquished before many years by the younger sister, and Jane Austen, as well as her mother, had to resort to a donkey-carriage for exercise.