Jane Austen (19 page)

Hampshire, could conceal her sufficiently from the neighborhood where she had been through such painful turmoil, and Cassandra could only second her entreaties and commands to be taken to Bath as quickly as possible.

Caroline Austen said of her aunt long afterwards: "To be

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sure she should not have said 'Yes' overnight, but I have always respected her for cancelling that 'Yes' the next morning."

The following year,
Northanger Abbey
being now finished and entitled
Susan
, Jane took the manuscript with her on a visit to Henry and Eliza at Brompton. She had decided upon a second attempt at publication. Her father, old and infirm, was naturally superseded in the matter by Henry, and Henry, from his living in London, his experience of the world and his eager interest in Jane's work, was the very one to assist her. He gave the manuscript to his man of

business, Mr. Seymour, and Mr. Seymour took it to Messrs. Crosby and Sons, of London, who, in accepting it, promised to publish it at an early date and gave him £10 on behalf of the author, but having paid £10 for it, they did not, upon consideration, think it worthwhile to risk more in publishing it, and after the first pleasure, excitement and expectation, the image of it in published form faded from the mind of its modest and uncomplaining author, and she turned her imagination to a new enterprise.

It has often been said that Jane Austen's career as a novelist shows two periods of great fertility--in the first of which she produced
First
Impressions, Sense and Sensibility
and
Northanger Abbey
, and in the second re-wrote
Sense and
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice
and composed
Mansfield Park, Emma
and
Persuasion
--and that the two periods are divided by a mysterious gap of eight years, namely from 1803 to 1811, in which she produced nothing. There are writers who have not scrupled to erect upon this lacuna the hopefullest of mare's nest. They are stimulated to an unparalleled degree by the discovery that Jane Austen had "an eight years' silence" in her life, and that eight years was the time that elapsed between the parting of Anne Elliot and

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Captain Wentworth and their reconciliation. Surely, they say, this is of deep significance?

The fact that there was actually no eight years' mysterious silence at all will not, however plainly demonstrated, affect these theorists.

Abraham in the parable said that there are people who would not hear, though one rose from the dead, and those who must have what the newspapers call the "human story" are, one feels, among them.

But to the more temperately minded very great interest attaches not only to the publication of the two fragments,
The Watsons
and
Lady
Susan
, but to the detecting of the watermarks upon the paper of the manuscripts.
The Watsons
is written on quires bearing the watermark

"1803" and "1804," and
Lady Susan
on those bearing that of "1805."

The manuscript of the former contains so many erasures and

alterations that the dates of the watermarks can hardly be taken as anything but the dates, roughly speaking, of the story's composition.

That of
Lady Susan
is a fair copy, beautifully written out with scarcely a correction; and of this work it might therefore be urged that the date of its being copied out is no indication of the date of its composition. Arguments for its being composed not before 1805 are, first that as the fragment is ended off, in however summary a

fashion, it was clear to the authoress that she was not going to make it part of a long novel, and therefore there could scarcely have been a reason for copying it out a long while after its composition; and secondly it is in itself a piece of character-drawing maturer and more subtle than anything to be found in
Northanger Abbey
.

We have therefore, as many people would agree, evidence of Jane Austen's literary activity in 1804 and 1805, and we have also the evidence of something which, by causing her a painful shock and disturbance of mind, obliged her either

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to relinquish them when carried out to a certain length, or made her realize that her mind was too shaken and disturbed to do more than sketch out the plan that had suggested itself. In December 1804 Mrs.

Lefroy was killed by a fall from her horse; in January 1805 the Rev.

George Austen died at Bath.

To anticipate for a moment the remaining six years of the famous and controversial eight; in 1806 the family, Mrs. Austen, Cassandra and Jane, moved to Southampton, in 1809 they returned to

Hampshire; when, the family record says, Jane Austen's authorship, the revising of
Sense and Sensibility
and what one may perhaps be allowed to call the re-creation of
Pride and Prejudice
were resumed; thus we account for the last two years before the publication of
Sense
and Sensibility
in 1811. How much, apart from the losses of 1804

and 1805, she was affected by the business of removing from one home to another we may gauge from something she said to

Cassandra
apropos
of the simple business of keeping house in her sister's absence: "I find composition impossible with my head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb." An upheaval that began with her father's death and ended in their leaving Bath seems ample reason for her to have abandoned further work on
Lady Susan
or any other project for the year 1806. If we adopt this mode of reckoning, the eight years' mysterious silence resolve themselves into three, from 1806 to 1809; and those who admire the exquisite solidity of Jane Austen's works of art will not feel that three years in which she apparently did nothing require a dramatic explanation.

In the late summer of 1804 Mr. and Mrs. Austen with Cassandra and Jane went to Lyme Regis. Henry and Eliza joined them, and the four younger people took long walks in the environs of Lyme. When the Henry Austens left the party they took Cassandra with them and went on to Weymouth.

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Jane delighted in Lyme, and when she wrote
Persuasion
at the end of her life the place was fresh and lovely in her recollection. She speaks in it of the principal street almost hurrying into the water; the view on either side of the bay of Lyme--Pinney, with "its green chasms between romantic rocks," and Charmouth, with "its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation" and describes a before-breakfast walk, in which Anne Elliot and Henrietta Musgrove

"went to the sands to watch the flowing of the tide, which a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted."

On Cassandra's leaving them they had moved into lodgings in a

small brown-painted house on the Cobb's side of the bay, almost on the level of the shore. Jane told Cassandra: "The servants behave very well and make no difficulties, tho' certainly nothing can exceed the inconvenience of the offices, except the general dirtiness of the house and furniture and all its inhabitants. . . . I endeavor as far as I can to supply your place and be useful, and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters as fast as I can." They had a servant called James, who blacked Mrs. Austen's shoes as they had never been blacked before, waited excellently at table, was attentive, quick and quiet, and, to add to his perfections, wanted to return to Bath with them. Jane promoted his taking an afternoon walk to

Charmouth with their maid Jenny. She said: "I am glad to have such an amusement for him as I am very anxious for his being at once quiet and happy." As he could read, she was anxious also to find some books for him; unfortunately he had read the first volume of
Robinson Crusoe
, but the Austens shared a newspaper with another family, and that, she said, she should take care to

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lend him. Although it was the 14th of September, it was still warm enough to bathe. "The bathing was so delightful this morning . . .

that I believe I staid in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, and shall not bathe tomorrow as I had before intended." Perhaps one of the reasons for her fatigue was that she had been to a dance at the Assembly Rooms the night before. The era and those preceding it could show innumerable fascinating contrasts of sophisticated

elegance deposited in surroundings altogether rural and remote--a theatre in a park, a marble boathouse with Latin inscriptions among the reeds and flags of a wasteland mere--and none of them perhaps more strangely charming than the Assembly Rooms of Lyme Regis, built on a projection of the seafront at the left-hand side of the bay, with its glass chandelier and painted panels, and its windows from which the dancers could see nothing but sky and sea. Jane said the ball had been pleasant, though not full for Thursday. Mr. Austen had left at half-past nine and "walked home with James and a lanthorn,"

though the lantern was not necessary, as the moon was up. Mrs.

Austen had sat till Jane came away. The latter did not dance the first two dances, but she danced the next two, and might have danced more if she had allowed a friend to introduce to her a Mr. Granville, which offer she declined, and if she had encouraged the advances of

"a new, odd-looking man" who had been eyeing her for some time and at last, without any introduction, asked her if she meant to dance again. Jane thought from his free behavior that he must be Irish; she thought he belonged to some Honorable Barnwells, who were, she said, "the son and son's wife of an Irish viscount, bold, queer-looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme."

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The girl who had asked to introduce Mr. Granville to Jane was a Miss Armstrong, whose acquaintance they had made at Lyme. Jane told Cassandra that Miss Armstrong, like many young ladies, was considerably genteeler than her parents. She had called on the family and been introduced to them, and Mrs. Armstrong had sat darning a pair of stockings the whole of Jane's visit. With a recollection of her own mother's practical habits, Jane added: "But do not mention this at home lest a warning should act as an example." Miss Armstrong had taken her for a walk on the Cobb afterwards; Jane said she was really very pleasant, but--"she seems to like people rather too easily."

Cassandra had gone to Ibthrop on leaving Henry and Eliza, but they were all back in Bath for the winter, and Jane had written the opening chapters of the story to which she had given no name, and which was to be published long after her death with the title of
The
Watsons
. With her first novel declined before it had been read, and her second languishing in Mr. Crosby's office, whatever just

confidence she may have felt in her powers, she would have been surprised to know that the fragment she herself was soon to lay aside would one day be eagerly sought out, published with an
apparatus
criticus
, studied with passionate earnestness and deplored only on account of being far too short. She talked to Cassandra about the story while she was still at work on it, and told her what were to be the ultimate fortunes of the characters, so that she had the completed scheme of the story in her mind and was at work on the first stages of filling it out. On December 16th she had her twenty-ninth

birthday, and on that day, although unknown to her at the time, she suffered the second serious loss of her existence. The carnage of the modern roads is so shocking that on looking back to an age less congested and without the menace of motor

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traffic, we are apt to overlook the tact that a vicious or frightened horse could sometimes prove as fatal as a weighty mass of

machinery that has escaped control. There had already been one tragedy in the Austen family circle from such a cause; six years before, in 1798, Jane Williams, less than two years after her

husband's triumphant capture of the Tribune, had been driving

herself in a one-horse chaise, when a startled dray-horse rushed violently into the road and collided with her carriage; she was thrown out, and picked up dead. On December 16th, 1804, Mrs.

Lefroy was out riding when her horse threw and killed her. There is no letter to show how deeply Jane felt the sudden horror of her loss; but four years later, on the anniversary of her birth and Mrs. Lefroy's death, she wrote some verses which showed that when she overcame grief she did not do it by oblivion. For the last three years of her life she had gone through much sorrow and distress, and her writing had taken the form of revising and finishing a work whose spring of inspiration had started in an earlier and happier time. The new novel she began did not carry itself far; she gave it up now. But she did not destroy the manuscript of
The Watsons
, and though one is conscious of acute disappointment as one becomes more and more interested in the characters and aware at the same time of the dwindling number of pages ahead, yet since we cannot have the story as a novel, we make a virtue of necessity and admit that as one of Jane Austen's fragments its value is great.

In
The Watsons
the characters are so completely realized that the expansion of the story through volumes could not add to our

knowledge of them; yet the necessary information as to their

circumstances and their past is conveyed in a manner more summary than was usual even with Jane Austen's economy. To say that we have an outline would be

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incorrect; we have, on the contrary, the solid figures of Emma Watson, her sisters Elizabeth, Penelope and Margaret, her brother Robert and her sister-in-law Jane, her invalid father; and we have not only the characters themselves, of whom we are conscious almost as if they were living beings, but we have that truest interest and delight among those a novel can furnish, the relation of these characters to each other and the variety of discord and harmony produced by the note which is struck by each mingling with those given off by the rest.