Jane Austen (42 page)

And what is to be fancied next? Why, that Mr. H. dines here again tomorrow." Mr. H. was reading
Mansfield Park
for the first time and

"preferred it to P. and P." Henry continued to improve. Jane said:

"He is so well, I cannot think why he is not perfectly well."

"Perhaps," she added, "when Fanny is gone, he will be allowed to recover faster." Jane said that Fanny had heard everything she had written about her to Cassandra; the latter, said Jane, seemed to be under a mistake about Mr. Haden. "You call him an apothecary; he is no apothecary . . . he is a Haden, nothing but a Haden, a sort of wonderful nondescript creature on two legs, something between a man and an angel."

Henry was now able to get about; "he sets off this morning by the Chelsea Coach to sign bonds and visit Henrietta Street." Meantime Jane and Fanny did not want visitors; they liked the house to

themselves. Jane had caught a slight cold and they made that do yeoman service. Mr. Tilson called and so of course did Mr. Haden; but they saw nobody but Mr. Tilson and "our Precious."

By the end of December, Jane was at home again, and
Emma
was published. Jane had felt, owing to a connection with Lady Morley and some very warm appreciation of her previous novels expressed by her ladyship, that it would be suitable to send Lady Morley a copy of
Emma
. Lady Morley in acknowledgment said she had been anxiously waiting for an introduction to
Emma
, and was "infinitely obliged" for

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Jane Austen's "kind recollection" of her, "which will procure me the pleasure of her acquaintance some days sooner than I should

otherwise have had it." Her ladyship had begun the book

immediately. "I am already become intimate in the Woodhouse family, and feel that they will not amuse and interest me less than the Bennets, Bertrams, Norrises, and all their admirable predecessors--I can give them no higher praise."

Jane was pleased with Lady Morley's note. While the reception of the book was still uncertain she said such praise was the more acceptable; and by it, she said: "I am encouraged to believe that I have not yet--as almost every writer of fancy does sooner or later, overwritten myself."

Beside the presentation copy to Lady Morley, one more was sent out from Chawton.

"MY DEAR ANNA,

As I wish very much to see
your
Jemima, I am sure you will like to see
my
Emma
, and have therefore great pleasure in sending it for your perusal. Keep it as long as you choose. It has been read by all here."

The host of press cuttings received by a modern author makes him so conscious of the impression, whether good, bad or indifferent, that his work has made upon the public, that it would occur to few

writers of today to put down a list of the opinions of their

acquaintance, but with Jane Austen the reverse was the case. The few professional reviews of her work which have transpired are of exceptional interest, but novels upon the whole attracted much less attention in literary publications than histories and essays and books of travel, or even poetry; the outside comments upon her work were so few and far between that they did nothing to take off

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the keen edge of interest and pleasure she received from hearing the views of private people.

After the publication of
Emma
she made out a list of the comments that had come round to her. Captain Frank Austen "liked it extremely; observing that though there might be more wit in P. and P., and an higher morality in M.P., yet altogether, on account of its peculiar air of Nature throughout, he preferred it to either." The air of nature Captain Frank Austen had admired struck other people also, but in various manners. "Mrs. Guiton thought it too natural to be interesting," while Mrs. Cage wrote this to Fanny: ". . . I like it better than any . . . I am at Highbury all day, and I can't help feeling I have just got into a new set of acquaintance. No one," added Mrs.

Cage, "wrote such good sense; and so very comfortable." Cassandra liked it--"Better than P. and P. but not so well as M.P.," and we know so little from first-hand information of Cassandra, that it is very interesting to hear that she preferred the serious work to the brilliant one. Fanny Knight--"not so well as either P. and P. or M.P.

Could not bear Emma herself. Mr. Knightley delightful. Should like J.F. if she knew more of her." Fanny's father approved of the portrait of Mr. Knightley. "Mr. K. liked by everybody." Mrs. Austen herself

"thought it more entertaining than M.P. but not so interesting as P.

and P. No characters equal to Lady Catherine or Mr. Collins." The opinion ascribed to Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Perrot is one of the

pleasantest things we know about them. They "saw many beauties in it, but could not think it equal to P. and P. Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt them for anything else." "Mr. Haden--quite delighted with it.

Admired the character of Emma." Miss Isabella Herries was one of a well-known order of novel readers: "Convinced that I had meant Mrs. and Miss Bates for some acquaintance of theirs. People whom I

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had never heard of before." So was Mrs. Dixon, who "liked it the less for there being a Mr. and Mrs. Dixon in it." Anna Lefroy

"thought that if there had been more incident, it would be equal to any of the others. . . . Did not like the heroine so well as any of the others. Miss Bates excellent, but rather too much of her. Mr. and Mrs. Elton admirable, and John Knightley a sensible man." "Mr.

Jeffreys of the Edinburgh Review was kept up by it three nights."

While "Mr. Fowle read only the first and last chapters, because he had heard it was not interesting." Captain Charles Austen, who was on board and had had a set of the volumes sent to him, wrote:

"
Emma
arrived in time to a moment. I am delighted with her, more so, I think, than even with my favorite,
Pride and Prejudice
, and have read it three times in the passage."

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IN 1815 Jane Austen had begun her sixth novel, but it did not

proceed very fast in that year; not only was the proofcorrecting of
Emma
on her mind, and the distracting circumstances of its publication, but she had had the severe strain of Henry's illness to bear. It would scarcely be too much to say that he recovered from it, but she did not.

Jane was not robust, but she had always given the impression of being healthy; her clear complexion and brilliant eyes, her slender, graceful, light-moving figure, her cheerfulness and serenity all suggested vitality and health; but she had within her the seeds of a weakness which it required only a general degree of ill health and prolonged nervous strain to develop into dangerous activity. The symptoms of which she gave her own account in letters, and the course the illness took, suggest a malignant affection of one of the internal organs. The doctor, who was consulted at Winchester, knew that she was dying the moment he looked at her. The ravages of the disease might have been indefinitely delayed if nothing had

happened to create the general weakness which it immediately

attacked; but Jane Austen had not only suffered acutely from distress and fatigue in nursing Henry; for the past three years her mind had been

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continually on the stretch; to what extent is revealed if we consider the energy and conviction, as well as the meticulous care with which her work was performed, and remember that
Pride and Prejudice
had been revised, and
Mansfield Park
and
Emma
actually written, since the year 1812.

At the beginning of 1816 she was forty years of age; whatever

strength she now had, physical or intellectual, she had not the resilience of youth; she took things to heart more than she had done, could throw them off less easily, and there were family troubles which all played their part in disquieting the atmosphere. Two years after he had received the legacy and adopted the name of Knight, Edward became involved in a lawsuit. The estate of Godmersham

carried an annual income of £5000, but that of Chawton was nearly twice as valuable, and the Chawton property was now claimed by a member of the Knight family. There had been a technical error in the instrument that made over the property to Edward Knight, and it now looked as if he might be obliged to relinquish it altogether. If he were to do so, he would not, while he possessed the Godmersham estate, be reduced to beggary, but to a man with eleven children, seven of whom were sons to be put out into the world, the loss of two-thirds even of a large income was an alarming prospect. But there was worse than this. The beloved Henry, whose fortune was so much smaller and therefore more vulnerable, met with a sudden tide of ill luck; the bank at Alton which had been backed by the house of Austen, Maunde and Tilson, failed, and involved the latter in its own destruction. In March 1816 Henry was declared a bankrupt.

He was not only professionally ruined; besides losing other people's money he had lost a good deal belonging to his own family. Mr.

Leigh Perrot lost £10,000; Edward Knight lost a considerable sum, though Jane Austen herself

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came off comparatively lightly with the loss of £13 which had been some of the profits of
Mansfield Park
; but there is reason to believe that poor Madame Bigeon's savings had been swallowed up.

No personal blame attached to Henry Austen, nor was there the least coldness between him and the relations who had been the victims of his misfortune; at the same time, many men would have been

crushed by such a reverse, and for a time at least, not known what to turn to. But the buoyancy of Henry's disposition stood him in good stead. With perfect cheerfulness, with perfect sincerity, with perfect conviction, he decided upon the Church, and set about getting

himself ordained immediately; he began to revise his knowledge of the Greek testament, and by the time he was ordained he surprised the bishop with his erudition.

But however he was able to surmount these vicissitudes, they did not do Jane any good; sometimes she felt languid and ill at ease, and sometimes positively ill; but her natural cheerfulness and her standard of what was due by the people she lived with, though it was in a cottage and they her nearest relations, disguised from most people the fact that she was not quite well. She wrote, though it was sometimes an effort, as it had never been before; yet her style, so far from showing signs of ill health, was more silvery and soft, more harmoniously simple than it had ever been, her creation of character as magical as before, and the whole work a structure on an

underlying plan, less complicated but more subtle than in any of its predecessors.

Persuasion
is a very short novel; as the reader is surprised on turning again to
Pride and Prejudice
, to realize in how few words the personalities of the novel have been created: so he returns to those spheres of Kellynch, Uppercross, Lyme Regis and Bath, present to his mind with a fullness of

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reality which it must, he feels, require a novel on the scale of
War
and Peace
to have built up; only to find that the work which contains them all is little longer than a longshort story. The rapidity and sureness with which Jane Austen evolves the scene are centered of course in her creation of character; the opening chapters of

Persuasion
do not differ markedly in this respect from those of any of its predecessors; in each the materials for her characters are quickly assembled, she breathes the breath of life between their lips, and there they stand for ever. The technical process is in each case the same, at once visible but incommunicable.

Nevertheless there is something about
Persuasion
very different from anything in her other five novels.

Professor Bradley discussed the rival merits of
Pride and Prejudice
and
Mansfield Park
, as the two leading candidates for the distinction of Jane Austen's best-loved novel; one believes that there would be a party, albeit a smaller one than either of the other two, to urge the claims of
Persuasion
; and that this party would make up for its lack of members by the almost religious character of its enthusiasm.

Anne Elliot is the maturest of all the heroines; not only is she older than any of them (she is twenty-seven), but whereas they all make some error of greater or less importance which it is the story's province to correct, her mistake has been made eight years before the story opens; and having made the initial blunder of allowing herself to be overpowered by Lady Russell's judgment into breaking off an engagement with the man she truly loved, she never afterwards

makes a single error in morality, judgment or taste. It is not the least remarkable achievement of the work that with so much perfection her character is neither priggish nor unreal. Her involuntarily clear-sighted perception of the faults of her father and sister and the enigmatic Mr. Elliot,

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and her humbleness, which through the changes of hopeless

resignation, trembling hope, and "senseless joy" becomes a triumphant certainty of happiness, keep her altogether vulnerable and human.

The atmosphere of each of Jane Austen's novels is determined by the character of its heroine, but nowhere is this harmony so striking as in
Persuasion
. Anne Elliot believes herself to be looking back to a bright, irrecoverable past, from a present that is like a landscape from which the light has been withdrawn. The preliminary stages of the story occupy the months of late summer, but its first important event, the removal of Sir Walter Elliot to Bath, is accomplished in September, to leave Kellynch Hall free for the reception of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, whom his extravagances have obliged him to accept as tenants in October. Anne does not wish to accompany her

unsympathetic father and sister; she dreads "the possible heats of September in all the white glare of Bath" and grieves to forego "all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country." But it so happens that her married sister Mary insists on her coming to make herself useful at the neighboring village of Uppercross. She is thus settled there for the autumn months when the completely estranged Captain Wentworth comes to spend his shore leave at Kellynch Hall, and consequently she is a spectator of his flirtatious friendship with the two Musgrove girls, who, young, energetic and untried by care, have the very attractions she cannot hope to possess. The walk the whole party takes from Uppercross to Winthrop, where lives the young cousin to whom Henrietta