We
know, and if we don’t we have Virginia
Woolf to remind us, Austen is “of all great writers the most difficult
to catch in the act of greatness” (Chapman 171). But at Chawton, we can
catch Jane Austen in the act. Occasionally, she ventured into the bigger
worlds of London to visit her brother Henry, and Godmersham Park, brother
Edward’s estate near Canterbury. After the move to Chawton, she visited
London eight or possibly nine times, and spent one major period at Godmersham
in the fall of 1813. Being Jane Austen, she viewed whatever came her way
with relish, with “an usually quick sense of the ridiculous,” as niece
Anna recalled in later years (Le Faye, Jane Austen 76). Shortly
after publication of Sense
and Sensibility, she wrote Cassandra: “I can no more forget
it, than a mother can forget her sucking child” (25 April 1811).After
she received her published copy of Pride
and Prejudice, she sounds ecstatic: “I want to tell you that
I have got my own darling Child from London” (29 January 1813).Two
years later, after niece Anna had a daughter named Jemima, Austen wrote:
“As I wish very much to see your Jemima, I am sure you will like to see myEmma”
(? December 1815). Jane
was thirty-three when she and Mrs. Austen, older sister Cassandra, and
their friend Martha Lloyd, who had joined their household in 1805, moved
to Chawton.She was forty-one when
she left for Winchester, on the 24th of May, 1817, with perhaps some hope
of having a highly-praised doctor, Mr. Giles King Lyford, restore her health
(“to see what Mr. Lyford can do farther towards re-establishing me in tolerable
health”) (Letters22
May 1817). She died in Winchester on July 18th, five months before her
December 16th birthday. Talent
she always had.We know that from
her Juvenilia,
supreme “juvenile high jinks” (Bush 43).Who
can resist her burlesque on the sensibility cult from Love
and Friendship, written when she was fourteen?Two
men of feeling, Edward and Augustus meet, observed by their female counterparts,
Sophia and Laura, the narrator: “‘My
Life! My Soul!’ (exclaimed the former) ‘My
adorable angel!’ (replied the latter) as they flew into each other’s arms. ‘It
was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself—We
fainted Alternately on a Sofa’” (Minor
Works86). These early pieces are undeniably clever.But it is one thing to parody literary clichés. It is another to take ordinary life and write about it so that centuries later readers still laugh aloud, recognizing their world—and themselves.“She makes her people speak and act as they speak and act in everyday life, and she is the only artist who has done this with success and pleasant effect,” wrote G. H. Lewes of Austen in 1852 in an unsigned article on “Female Novelists” (Southam 133).Lewes, like Sir Walter Scott, identified her greatness, not the ability to produce “the bigBow-wow strain” which Scott felt he could do himself “like any now going” (Austen-Leigh 149), but her ability to“make accurate portraits of very tiresome and uninteresting people” (Southam 145). Lewes elaborates, “You have actually met all her heroes and heroines before—not in novels but in most unromantic and prosaic circumstances. . . . How could such folks find their way into a printed book?” (Southam 133).Some years earlier, in 1818, much the same critical perception appeared in an unsigned review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: “We think we are reading the history of people whom we have seen thousands of times” (Halperin 310). Before
they could find their way into print, Austen had to find her way—to determine
her style and to believe in it.Perhaps
she acted on this belief shortly before the Chawton move when, without
male intercession, she contacted her publisher. Yet as early as 1797, her
father indicated his faith in her. In November, he sent First
Impressions, which she had finished writing in August, to Thomas
Cadell. “‘Shall
be much obliged . . . if you will inform me whether you chuse to be concerned
in it; What will be the expence of publishing at the Author’s risk. . .
.’”Cadell
proved uninterested. He sent back both the manuscript and letter with a
note written across the top: “‘declined
by Return of Post’”(Le
Faye, JA95). In
1803, Jane’s brother Henry was more successful.He
sold Susan,
Austen’s spoof on Gothic novels, to London publisher Crosby & Son for
£10. Crosby presumably planned early publication. But the work remained
unpublished, possibly because Crosby was publishing the kind of Gothic
romances Austen satirized.Finally,
in April of 1809, Jane herself took action. Using the name “Mrs. Ashton
Dennis,” she wrote Crosby a curt reminder. She offered to provide another
manuscript if the first had been lost “by some carelessness.”And,
she warned, she might have the novel published elsewhere if she didn’t
hear from him (5 April 1809). Crosby
made sure she did hear from him, telling her that if she or anyone else
published the work, “we shall take proceedings to stop the sale” (8 April
1809).But he made no comment about
why he had not published the novel, nor did he supply a publication date.
Instead, he offered to sell back the manuscript for “the same as we paid
for it.”(Could he have had misgivings
about the way she signed her letter using the initials “MAD.”—Mrs. Ashton
Dennis?) To
catch Jane Austen in her greatness, then, one must consider Chawton Cottage
(writing desk and all), the life she led there, and her views on writing.
If only she had left more evidence—frenzied discussions, prolix journal
entries, tedious notes, sensational salon appearances, and drafts and manuscripts,
especially of the two major revisions (S&S,
P&P).Little
material exists—family memories, hints in letters, her Plan
of a Novel, and a draft and revision of the last chapters of Persuasion. Speculation
aside, what we do know is that Austen rejected the style of popular novelists.
She developed a technique she perfected with each novel.She
learned to minimalize narrative passages, descriptions, and author intrusions,
to emphasize dialogue, and to suggest thinking patterns of characters.By
the time of Emma,
she writes a very modern novel indeed, presenting a situation from Emma’s
viewpoint, employing stream of consciousness well before its time. In his
brief biography of Jane, written shortly after her death, her brother Henry
observes that she rejected the style of Samuel Richardson, a favorite writer
of hers. The “consistency” of Richardson’s characters, Henry explains,
“gratified the natural discrimination of her mind,” but “her taste secured
her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative” (NA,P
7). Chawton Cottage has a simple history. By 1809, Jane’s brother Edward, who had been adopted in 1783 by the Knights, wealthy distant cousins, was able to offer the Austens this permanent home. (In 1812, he and his children officially took the name of Knight.)A few hundred yards down the road from the cottage is Edward’s Manor House, or The Great House, now being restored as the Centre for the Study of Early English Women’s Writings. A mile or so away is Alton, the village to which Jane and Cassandra often walked. Not
particularly attractive—Nigel Nicholson calls it “just plain ugly” (89)—Chawton
Cottage is a late 17th century L-shaped brick house with tiled roof, six
small bedrooms, and some garrets. A vestibule connects the drawing room
with the dining parlour, “used for general living as well as eating” (Watkins
76). On the main route between Winchester and London, coaches passed closely
by, so close, in fact, passengers could sometimes see in the windows.A
gentleman reported to Edward’s adopted mother, Mrs. Knight, that as he
rode by in a post-chaise, he had seen “‘the
Chawton party looking very comfortable at breakfast’”(Howard
60). Nicholson thinks the Cottage “must have echoed like a tambourine to
the noise of passing carriages” (90). A few Chawtonians dropped by. Miss Benn seems to have been a frequent visitor. Present one evening during a reading of Pride and Prejudice, shortly after its publication in January, perhaps she did not understand it as well as she should, Jane writes to Cassandra, because Mrs. Austen didn’t “speak” as the characters should, though she understood them well enough (4 February 1813).Of course, Miss Benn had no idea she was sitting with the author herself, someone who could “speak” very well, as her family knew. In his biographical note, Henry explains that Jane “delivered herself with fluency and precision” (NA, P 5). “She read aloud with very great taste and effect. Her own works, probably were never heard to so much advantage as from her own mouth” (7). During these years Jane’s most frequent travels were to London, fifty miles away, to visit Henry and his wife Eliza. She shared in their social life, shopped, attended plays, visited art exhibitions, and dealt with proofs and publishers. At one exhibit, she wrote Cassandra, she saw “a small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her” (24 May 1813). (This is the former Jane Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, published in January of that year.) In this portrait, Mrs. Bingley “is exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness.She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her” (24 May 1813). Jane thinks Mrs. Darcy (Elizabeth) will be in yellow.But she had to suffer disappointment, she writes later that evening.Even though she and Henry attended another exhibit, she found no portrait of Mrs. Darcy. She concludes, “I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye” (24 May 1813). Austen’s darling children, it seems, were always with her. Henry, for the most part, worked out Jane’s arrangements with publishers. Thomas Egerton published Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and the first edition of Mansfield Park.The second edition of Mansfield Parkand Emma were published by John Murray, who also bought the copyrights of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, allon such lucrative terms for himself that Austen wrote to Cassandra calling him “a Rogue of course, but a civil one.He offers £450—but wants to have the Copyright of MP & S&S included. It will end in my publishing for myself I dare say” (17 October 1815). By arrangement with Henry, Murray also published an edition containing Persuasionand Northanger Abbey(originally called Susan) after Jane’s death. In this volume Henry included a brief biography of Jane, the first to be written. Today’s biographers question his idealized picture of her as the perfect woman, talented but not ambitious:“She became an author entirely from taste and inclination.Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives” (NA, P6). Perhaps Samuel Johnson, an Austen favorite, offers a more realistic view in his observation that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”And Jane admitted to enjoying her earnings, for as she explained to niece Fanny Knight, “tho I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewtertoo ” (30 November 1814). Jane
was in London during Eliza’s final illness in April 1813, and later in
1815, when Henry became seriously ill. During his recovery, he revealed
to his doctor that Jane was the author of Sense
and Sensibility and Pride
and Prejudice.The physician,
who attended the Prince Regent or had connections with those who did, arranged
for the news to reach His Royal Highness. Thus Jane Austen became recognized
by the Prince Regent. She was told he so admired her work he kept copies
in each of his residences. While they never met, at his invitation on 13
November 1815, she was given a tour of the London residence, Carlton House,
by his librarian James Stanier Clarke. On occasion, Edward visited in London when Jane was there, and Jane visited Edward and his large family in Godmersham in Kent.Cassandra, however, was the more frequent visitor, helping sister-in-law Elizabeth with frequent confinements, consoling Edward and his eleven children after Elizabeth’s death on 10 October 1808, a few weeks after the birth of a son. Presumably her family spared Jane these traditional tasks of single women in order to facilitate her writing—“the Austens always seem to have accepted that her peculiar gifts lay in literary composition, and allowed her to spend a great deal of her time in writing her novels” (Le Faye, “Jane Austen’s Letters” 86). Jane also visited cousins, the Cookes, in Great Bookham (where she may have “explored” Box Hill) and James and Mary, who lived in the rectory in Steventon where Jane had been born. In 1816, on May 22, she and Cassandra left from Steventon to go to the spa in Cheltenham.By now, Austen was seriously ill. But
most of Jane Austen’s best writing days were spent in the Chawton cottage
where she followed an easy routine with “everything she valued about her:
family, garden, the Hampshire countryside—and the products of her imagination”
(Lane 159). Although very possibly “Jane could write anywhere” and“her
works owed nothing to the circumstances of their composition, for Chawton
was small, ungainly” (Nicholson 90), something about her life there contributed
to her success, to her decision that she could, should—and would—be a writer. In A
Family Record, Caroline remembers her aunt’s lifestyle:
When
Cassandra was away, Jane had less time to write since she had to assume
more domestic chores, especially if Martha Lloyd were also away. Letters
to Cassandra boast of domestic success or occasionally note that composition
“seems to me impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses
of rhubarb” (8 September 1816). But mostly she enjoyed, as was her wont,
the small life: “The Chicken are all alive, & fit for the Table—but
we save them for something grand” (29 May 1811).The
columbines “are already in bloom,” she notes in a typical comment, and
“the Syringas are coming out” (29 May 1811). And a few days later she tells
Cassandra that the row of beech “look very well indeed” and “I hear today
that an Apricot has been detected on one of the Trees” (31 May 1811).
How
did Austenwrite?Very
secretly, it seems.James-Edward
remembers how careful Jane was not to reveal to others outside the family
that she was writing. And they honored her wish for privacy, all except
Henry.
Caroline
adds: “My Aunt must have spent much time in writing—her desk lived in the
drawing room. I often saw her writing letters on it, and I beleive [sic
] she wrote much of her Novels in the same way—sitting with her family,
when they were quite alone” (187-188).
One
suspects Austen was always composing.Playing
her pianoforte, tending to joints of mutton, admiring syringas, walking
to Alton, teaching some fortunate child to read and write, she also was
discovering the perfect word, the exact phrase, the significant detail.
She must have spent happy hours turning airy nothings into those local
habitations and names, limitations, and virtues we now cherish—Lucy Steele’s
bad grammar; Mrs. Allen’s concern with dress; Mrs. Bennet and her nerves
(Mr. Bennet’s old friends “‘these twenty
years at least’”); Mr. Woodhouse and
“poor Miss Taylor” and “the sad business” of her wedding, which he tried
to put off because “‘it rained dreadfully hard for half an hour’” at breakfast
(Emma10); Sir Walter
Elliot’s penchant for mirrors; Mrs. Croft’s joy at being at sea with her
husband the Admiral: “‘[A]s long as
we could be together, nothing ever ailed me’”(P71).
Working
on her “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory with so fine a Brush” (Letters
16 December 1816), drawing to perfection “pictures of domestic Life in
Country Villages,” (1 April 1816) she wrote carefully, building up the
language of a character, paring down descriptions, (Litz 92) revising and
polishing.She avoided the clichés
and jargon of the land of fiction—“the common novel style,” she called
it—fancy phrases, for example, like “vortex of Dissipation,” a favorite
of niece Anna.“I
do not object to the Thing,” Austen explained, “but I cannot bear the expression:
—it is such thorough novel slang—and so old, that I dare say Adam met with
it in the first novel he opened” (28 September 1814).
And
there lies the answer to G. H. Lewes’s question on “how these folks found
their way into a printed book.”Understanding
the method, however, does not diminish the miracle—characters like Fanny
Dashwood, convincing her husband he need not fulfill his promise to his
dying father to provide for Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters. After
all, Fanny counsels him, “‘I would not bind myself to allow them any thing
yearly. It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a hundred, or even
fifty pounds from our own expenses’”(S&S11);Mr.
Collins, whose “deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education
or society” (P&P
70);Lady Catherine, gathering her
party around the fire to “determine what weather they were to have on the
morrow ” (P&P 166); gourmand cleric Mr. Grant, whose death was
brought on by “three great institutionary dinners in one week” (MP
469); dear Miss Bates, with her “amorphous syntax” (Phillips 12), out of
breath, never finishing a sentence, never waiting for an answer to her
questions, repeating verbatim what was said to her, all minutiae—Jane eats
so very little:
And
Sir Walter Elliot, vaunting his aesthetics: “He did not mean to say,” he
explains, “that there were no pretty women”:
One marvels at the paradox—greatness in a small “just plain ugly” place. Behind the creaking door to the dining parlor, as she sat at work on the little table, the little mahogany desk, few people were present.James-Edward learned about his aunt’s writing only in the summer of 1813, after publication of Sense and Sensibility andPride and Prejudice.He wrote her a charming piece of light verse: “Oh dear! just to think (and the thought drives me mad)/ That dear Mrs. Jennings’s good-natured strain/ Was really the produce of your witty brain” (Le Faye, JA 180). Niece
Anna and Aunts Jane and Cassandra, Anna’s daughter later remembered, one
summer’s day visited the circulating library at Alton.“It
was in searching this Library that my mother came across a copy of Sense
& Sensibility which she threw aside with careless contempt,
little imagining who had written it, exclaiming to the great amusement
of her Aunts who stood by ‘Oh that must be rubbish I am sure from the title’”(Le
Faye, JA
170-171). What could Aunt Jane have been writing?By the autumn of 1813, she had most likely finished Mansfield Park, probably accepted for publication in November of that year. And she didn’t begin Emma until January of 1814. Perhaps she was “polishing and polishing”—Mrs. Norris making off with the curtain from that disastrous drama production, her cottage “happened to be particularly in want of green baize” (MP 195); adding to the characterization of Henry Crawford, so bent on “improving” Edmund’s rectory in Thornton Lacey (“‘Then the stream—something must be done with the stream’”) (242). Or was she perfecting these lines describing Maria’s wedding? “It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed—the two bridesmaids were duly inferior—her father gave her away—her mother stood with salts in her hands, expecting to be agitated—her aunt tried to cry” (203). In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland, in all innocence, hits upon truth. Henry Tilney has just told her he understands her very well. She replies: “‘Me?—yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible’” (133). In Sanditon, Sir Edward Denham illustrates Catherine’s comment. Speaking of Robert Burns, he loads his talk with jargon, something he considers speaking well: “‘It were Hyper-criticism, it were Pseudo-philosophy to expect from the soul of high tone Genius, the grovellings of a common mind.—The Corruscations of Talent, elicited by impassioned feeling in the breast of Man, are perhaps incompatible with some of the prosaic Decencies of Life . . . ’”(Minor Works 398). Busy
with such writing, Austen found the Chawton years happy ones. Yet they
were not without sorrows and difficulties aside from her final illness.Deaths
occurred—the deaths of two sisters-in law:Eliza
in 1813, and Charles’s wife Fanny, of childbirth, in 1814. Mrs. Austen’s
brother James Leigh-Perrot died in 1817. This was not unexpected, but the
resultant will was.He left everything
to his wife for her lifetime. To his sister, who was not wealthy, he left
nothing although after his wife’s death, the Austen family would inherit
property and money, especially James, the principal heir. This situation
disturbed Jane, perhaps because by now she was seriously ill and perhaps
also because Edward’s estate was being threatened. She wrote Charles that
the shock of her uncle’s will brought about a relapse (Le Faye, JA
222). In 1816, Henry Austen’s banks failed, first the branch in Alton, and then the main London bank. His brothers who had invested in them also lost money and were no longer able to contribute to Mrs. Austen’s income. From March of 1814 to April of 1818, Edward was involved in a lawsuit that questioned his right to the Knight estates and wealth. He had “to cut a great swathe through Chawton Park Wood in order to raise £15,000 to buy off his opponents” (Le Faye, JA195). He ended up paying £30,000, much of it for legal costs (Myer 181). In
the winter of 1816, while Charles’s ship was chasing pirates off the coast
of Smyrna, it struck some rocks on the shore. He was shipwrecked, but was
cleared of all blame (Myer 223-24). His court martial resulted in an acquittal
because “the shipwreck had been due to the incompetence of the local pilot”
(Le Faye, Letters
458). Charles did not receive another command, however, for ten years (Tyler
215). And
one must consider events of the outer world, though Austen, as society’s
rules for ladies dictated, makes little reference to them in her fiction
or letters. From 1810-1812, England underwent a second Regency Crisis.King
George III suffered another bout of madness. Parliament, concerned about
debts, debated the role of the Prince Regent, notorious for his “conspicuous
pursuit of pleasure” (Sales 68). Then, there was the French trouble, England’s
twenty-five years of intermittent wars with France.In
1814, these abated, of course, when Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to
the Isle of Elba. But in March of 1815, he escaped.Finally,
in June of that year, he met his Waterloo. But
why deal with such “odious” matters?“Let
other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon
as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves,
to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest” (MP
461).So on to pleasanter matters:
Jane Austen’s views on writing, which she suggests in several letters and
in her Plan of a Novel.In
two letters, Austen reveals that she had made conscious decisions to write
in her own way, her own style. On 11 December 1815, she answered the request
of James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, who had suggested
she write the life of a naval clergyman, someone like himself, in fact.“I
am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman,”
she explains, “but I am not.” She then notes that, knowing nothing of science
and philosophy, she could not deal with such a man’s conversation, especially
in those areas.After all, she assures
him, “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most
unlearned, &uninformed Female
who ever dared to be an Authoress.” (In her own novels, she never allows
two gentlemen to converse alone.) In April of the next year, she responds to another request from Clarke, that she write a historical romance on the house of Saxe-Cobourg. She couldn’t do it unless she had to save her life, she notes, and even then “I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.” And, she concludes, emphasizing that she knew where her greatness lay: “I must keep to my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other” (1 April 1816). In February, she indirectly criticizes other less effectively “lop’t and crop’t” writings. Referring to Pride and Prejudice, she explains:
Several comments in a
series of letters (five in all) to twenty-one-year-old niece Anna about
Anna’s novel (which she later burned) reveal much the same critical awareness.Commenting
on the manuscript, Aunt Jane affirms conciseness, accuracy, and attention
to detail, preaching, as it were, what she herself practiced:“—here
& there, we [referring to Cassandra and herself] have thought the sense
might be expressed in fewer words—and I have scratched outSir Tho: from walking with the other Men to the Stables etc. the very day after
his breaking his arm” (10-18 August 1814).In
the same letter, she continues with this good advice: “And we think you
had better not leave England.Let
the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there,
you had better not go with them.You
will be in danger of giving false representations.”(She
followed such advice herself in Emma,
remaining in Highbury, never going with the Dixons to Ireland.)
Not
only does Austen give advice, she quickly enters into Anna’s situations
and suggests ways to manipulate plot and character. Anna needs to “increase
the interest” for someone named Egerton to reveal his good qualities.Can
she create “distress among Brothers or Sisters” or take him mysteriously
away and have him reappear in Edinburgh or York “in an old great Coat”
(28 September 1814). These
letters advise Anna to rely on a tight, credible style.But
a good writing teacher, she also finds something to praise:
A
last reference to Austen’s writing relates to her revision of the final
chapters of Persuasion Dissatisfied
with this version, Jane “‘thought
it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better.This
weighted upon her mind, the more so probably on account of the weak state
of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low spirits.
. . . The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views’” (Le Faye, JA214).
She must have reached a decision:to
reject Chapter 10, to create two new chapters (the present Chapters 10
and 11), to let the original Chapter 11 become Chapter 12. Instead
of Admiral Croft bringing the lovers together, the final version allows
the lovers themselves to effect their reunion. How easily Austen creates
new details, changing scenes, manipulating characters. She uses a different
setting, an apartment for theMusgrove
party in the White Hart. Now Mrs. Musgrove, Henrietta, Charles and Mary,
and Captain Harville have come to Bath and ask Anne to help Henrietta shop
for wedding clothes. When Anne, delayed because of rain, arrives at the
White Hart, Henrietta and Mary have gone but indicate she is to wait till
they return. She is startled to see Captain Wentworth there writing a letter
for Captain Harville, all plausible in the context, as is the rest of the
scene. Works Cited
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