Jane Austen (12 page)

sister, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, and her husband, had a house, No. 1

Paragon, near the upper end of the town, and the family from

Steventon frequently stayed with them. Visits to Bath in these circumstances were not the unmixed delight they would otherwise have been to Cassandra and Jane. Jane Leigh Perrot and her husband were devoted to each other, and she was attached to her sister-in-law Austen and her family and meant to be kind to them all; but her manner was not prepossessing, and her temper was rather gloomy and uncertain. Her nieces, accustomed to the affectionate, gracious, unconstrained atmosphere of home, could not be happy with their aunt, though their natural sense of justice gave her credit for meaning to do well by them. Jane Austen suffered fools gladly, but she did find it hard to bear a harsh, uncompromising behavior, however it was supposed to conceal a heart of gold. Nevertheless

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she knew she owed a good deal to Mrs. Leigh Perrot's kindness. As an unmarried girl she could not go to stay at places by herself; she could not get to Bath except as somebody's guest, unless one of her relations wanted to take the waters and brought her with them, and Bath, for anyone to whom it did not spell rheumatism, gout or

gravel, was a terrestrial paradise of gaiety, with plays, concerts and balls far superior to anything a country town could produce; with crescents and a circus of houses more beautiful than anything in London, and without London's bewildering vastness, noise and dirt; and, above all, ample arrangements for loitering and lounging in public, for the convenience of invalids and the dissipation of everybody else--the Pump Room, the Abbey yard, the colonnaded

shop fronts, the public libraries, some displaying jewelry and toys among the latest novels, and others where people went to skim over the newspapers. That exciting contrast of town and country, lost now when towns straggle out in miles of suburbs which eat up the

intervening greenery, was particularly marked in Bath, where

Lansdowne Hill rises behind the highest crescent, and on the

opposite rim of the cup Beechen Cliff rears its bold masses of foliage, shivering and whispering when one stands beneath them, but sculptured by distance to immobility.

Jane chose a heroine for this novel with a healthy love of pleasure, an enthusiasm for dancing and novels and dearest friends and the society of young men, and with just that degree of naïveté that enhance the bustle and elegance of Bath into something absolutely glamorous. The exquisite naturalness of this story of a girl's holiday owes some of its convincingness at least to the manner in which, by touches so small and yet so sure, Jane Austen calls up around her walks and streets and buildings in so solid a form that when

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one visits those parts of Bath mentioned in
Northanger Abbey
after one had read the book, the experience strikes one as a confirmation.

Jane had been staying at No. 1 Paragon in the early part of 1798; in the early autumn she paid a visit of greater interest. Edward Austen's adopted father was dead, and Mrs. Knight now made over to Edward the great houses of Godmersham and Chawton. She wished the

property to be administered as well as it had been in her husband's time, and thought it better for the tenants and the neighborhood that Godmersham should be inhabited by Edward and his growing family rather than by the small establishment of a widow. In October Mr.

and Mrs. Austen with Cassandra and Jane paid their first visit to Edward as the master of Godmersham. The house, some eight miles from Canterbury, stands in a beautifully timbered park. The most striking feature of the wide-stretched, white, classical building is the central hall, paved with marble, into which open four great rooms, through lofty arched doorways, flanked by white, fluted columns supporting a pediment over each lintel. The drawing room has

windows down to the floor, which command a view of rising

ground, well wooded.

Edward and Elizabeth had four children at present: Fanny, aged five; Edward, four; George, three; and the baby William. Jane was fond of all the children, though she did not yet know how fond she was to be of Fanny; at the moment her special pet was Georgie, called Dordy by himself and her. So much of Elizabeth's time was taken up in lyingin, and in caring for the children, that Cassandra's presence in the household was most welcome as a companion to Edward and a

help to her mild and beautiful sister-in-law. On the occasion of this visit the party had to leave Cassandra behind them, and when they stopped at Dartford on the journey

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home Jane wrote her a note from the parlor of the "Bull and George." The weather had been pleasant, and she used a happy word to describe it. "We had one heavy shower on leaving Sittingbourne, but afterwards the clouds cleared away and we had a very bright chrystal afternoon." As she wrote, her mother was sitting by the fire, and the Rev. George Austen was reading
The Midnight Bell
. She said that she should have begun to write the letter before, but she had been detained by discovering that her writing and dressing boxes had been put by mistake into a chaise which was just packing up when their own arrived at the inn, "and were driven away towards Gravesend on their road to the West Indies." But a man on horseback was sent out after them, and "they were got about two or three miles off." She added in a postscript: "I flatter myself that itty Dordy will not forget me at least under a week. Kiss him for me."

The following Saturday she wrote in answer to a long letter from Cassandra. Mrs. Austen had not borne the journey well and had been obliged to send for Mr. Lyford, the apothecary, when they got home.

He prescribed laudanum as a composer, and Jane, in Cassandra's absence, had the dignity of dropping it out. She had bought some flannel--a stuff which, with her mania for elegance, she could not take much interest in. She said: "I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Cassandra's letter had mentioned George, and she said: "My dear itty Dordy's remembrance of me is very pleasing to me--foolishly pleasing

because I know it will be over so soon. My attachment to him will be more durable. I shall think with tenderness and delight on his beautiful and smiling countenance and interesting manners till a few years have turned him into an ungovernable, ungracious fellow."

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And then she made a remark which to those who do not like Jane Austen is better known than anything in
Pride and Prejudice
. "Mrs.

Hall of Sherborne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband." She was thinking, not of the dead baby, but of the father's ugliness. The very thoughtlessness of the thing is its excuse, but the sentence is an unfortunate one, and those who, at twenty-three, have never been guilty of an unfeeling remark about a stranger, do quite right to be very severe upon it.

Meantime, James and Mary were expecting a baby. In November

Cassandra was still at Godmersham, and Jane wrote to say that she and her father had been over to see Mary, "who is still plagued with rheumatism, which she would be very glad to get rid of, and still more glad to get rid of her child, of whom she is heartily tired." The high maternal mortality of the time made the birth of the first child a matter of grave anxiety. Jane went on: "I believe I never told you that Mrs. Coulthard and Ann, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in child-bed. We have not regaled Mary with this news."

Happily, before the letter was sent off she was able to add a few lines saying that James had just sent a note to say that Mary had had a fine little boy at eleven the night before, and both were going on very well. Mrs. Austen had sensibly declared that she wished to know nothing about it till it was over, and Jane had managed to keep the news from getting to her although it was known in the house that Mary had been taken ill. Cassandra wrote to Deane at once, and Jane's next letter to her began: "I expected to have heard from you this morning, but no letter is come. I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary's children, if instead of

thanking me for

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the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James." She had been over to Deane, and had a glimpse of the baby; he was asleep, but the nurse told her that "his eyes were large, dark and handsome."

Mary was getting on wonderfully well, but Jane said she "does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself."

Mary was not tidy or elegant, very different from Elizabeth in the luxurious surroundings of Godmersham, who had looked so pretty in her draperies of immaculate white.

Jane had made some drawings for Georgie, which had been sent

under cover to his Aunt Cassandra. She thought that really they would have answered George's purpose as well if they had been less carefully finished, but, she said, "an artist cannot do anything slovenly."

The letters are filled with domestic news. The Rev. George Austen and Edward used the correspondence of the girls to exchange news about their livestock. Jane said: "You must tell Edward that my father gives 25s. a piece to Seward for his last lot of sheep: and in return for this news, my father wishes to receive some of Edward's pigs." The reply was satisfactory. "My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward's pigs and desires he may be told, as

encouragement to his taste for them, that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in his pigs, has had pig-stys of a most elegant construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises."

As the daughters of the Rectory, they visited the cottagers in Steventon, and with Cassandra away, the whole of this duty

devolved on Jane. "I called yesterday on Betty Londe, who enquired particularly after you, and said she seemed to miss you very much, because you used to call in upon her so very often. This was an oblique reproach at me, from which I will profit. I will send George another picture when

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I write next." She and Cassandra had each a stock of clothes, which they were continually making or collecting to give away; she asked Cassandra on one occasion whether she should give one of the

village women something from Cassandra's store. On Christmas Eve she wrote: "I have given a pair of worsted stockings to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens, and Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, and a shawl to Betty Dawkins."

Mrs. Austen's health was still unsettled, and earlier in the month Mr.

Lyford had been with her again; he did not seem quite to know what to make of Mrs. Austen's symptoms. Jane said: "He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither."

Mrs. Lefroy had been to see them, and Jane had managed to secure her to herself for some part of the visit. Mrs. Lefroy did not mention Tom, and Jane was too proud to ask after him, but presently Mr.

Austen inquired for him, and then she heard that he had gone back to Ireland, where he had been called to the Bar and meant to practice.

But Mrs. Lefroy did mention someone whom she thought Jane

would hear of without even a momentary agitation; she had with her a letter from a young Mr. Blackall, a Fellow of Emmanuel, who had been staying with her husband, and who had shown a good deal of pleasure in Jane's society. Jane had quite liked Mr. Blackall, but he was, albeit, goodnatured, noisy and self-assertive, and a little too fond of instructing the ladies. That her simple, gay and friendly manner gave him no suspicion of her opinion is seen by the fact that Mr. Blackall would have liked, if his circumstances had allowed it, to have prosecuted his acquaintance with the Austen family, as he said in the letter, "with a hope of creating to myself a nearer interest." But, he said, he could at present see no prospect of being able to do so. Mrs. Lefroy

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said nothing about Mr. Blackall's admiration, only handed Jane the letter to read. Jane continued her account to Cassandra: "There is less love and more sense in it than has sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner."

She had the healthy person's delight in any kind of good weather, but, as she loved to walk, she naturally preferred cold weather to hot.

In the previous September she had exclaimed at the heat: "It keeps one in a state of perpetual in elegance"; but now she said: "I enjoyed the hard black Frosts of last week very much, and one day while they lasted walked to Deane by myself.--I do not know that I ever did such a thing in my life before." The unusualness of a girl's taking a solitary walk is an indication of the roughness of the time; no one nowadays would be afraid to pass a gypsy encampment; but in

Emma, when Harriet Smith, helpless and foolish, met gypsies on her way to Hatfield, she was harried by them as a matter of course; but Jane, fond of walking and knowing the neighborhood like the palm of her hand, no doubt walked by herself to the extreme limit of what was thought possible, and in saying that she did not remember

having walked alone to Deane before, she may very well have meant that the natural way of getting there was to be driven over by her father or by James.

She took considerable interest in her own dress and in Cassandra's; more in Cassandra's than the latter was disposed to take herself.

Cassandra had thought that she ought to have a new dress at

Godmersham but had apparently said something doubtful about the expense. Jane said she must certainly have it, and that she could perfectly well afford it, but if she supposed that she could not, Jane herself would give her the lining for it. They each had a stuff gown; when

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Jane said, writing in December: "I find great comfort in my stuff gown," one can appreciate her feelings only in remembering that the wear for elegant young women, though it had not yet reached the period of misty impalpability that was to usher in the nineteenth century, was already sufficiently fine and light to need some