Jane Austen (14 page)

Jane and Cassandra went occasionally to visit their maternal uncle James Leigh-Perrot and his wife in Bath. Jane wrote an early version of
Northanger Abbey
, set in that city, before she went to live there in 1801.

In May 1799 she and her mother, together with Edward and Elizabeth and two of their five children, went to Bath for four weeks and five days, three months before Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s unfortunate experience over the piece of lace. They travelled by sound roads and had good horses as far as Devizes, where at five o’clock they sat down to asparagus, lobster and cheesecakes. Jane took an endearing pleasure in her food. The rest of the journey was less comfortable. It was raining when they arrived and their first view of Bath was gloomy. They stayed at 13 Queen Square, which they were very happy with despite dirty quilts. There was a picturesque view of the left side of Brock Street, broken by three Lombardy poplars in the garden of the last house in Queen’s Parade. The landlady, Mrs Ann Bromley, was a fat woman in mourning black, and a little black kitten ran about the staircase.

On the way they called on the Leigh-Perrots, who lived at 1 Paragon, but Jane’s uncle was not well enough to see them. Jane found their own situation far more cheerful than Paragon. The new papers were full of arrivals, so Jane looked forward to socializing and to public breakfasts every morning in Sydney Gardens, large pleasure grounds which had been laid out four years earlier. Edward was at Bath for his health, drinking and bathing in the waters and trying a new treatment, ‘electricity’, which Jane said was not expected to be of much use. She was convinced however that the effect of the waters could not be negative. Nevertheless a month later Edward’s appetite had failed him and he felt nauseous and feverish. The family wondered whether these might be symptoms of gout, though the apothecary put them down to Edward’s having eaten something that disagreed with him. Gout must have been on the family’s minds; gouty Uncle James Leigh-Perrot had walked too far and could now only get about by sedan chair. Most of the time he sat at home with his swollen feet wrapped in flannel. Edward, though, was not too ill to have bought a pair of black coach horses for sixty guineas on the advice of his neighbour in Kent, Mr Evelyn.

The shops in Bath were tempting. Jane was delighted with a new lace-trimmed cloak and laid out money on Cassandra’s behalf for one like it. Flowers, she noted, were very much worn but fruit was better. Jane had seen grapes, cherries, plums and apricots on hats. Elizabeth had a bunch of artificial strawberries. At the most expensive shops a plum or greengage cost three shillings, cherries and grapes about five. Jane went looking for something cheaper, which she did not find, but was consoled by the gift of a pretty hat from Elizabeth, half straw, half narrow purple ribbon. She persuaded herself that it was more natural to have flowers growing out of the head than fruit, anyway. Three shillings could buy four or five sprigs of flowers, after all.

Rarely indeed could Jane afford to buy what she hankered for. Usually shortage of cash forced her into compromises and she persuaded herself she liked them. Sometimes penny-pinching led her into making mistakes. Cassandra and Jane had intended buying a veil for their sister-in-law Mary as a joint gift and Jane found one for half a guinea but she made a bad bargain, for the muslin on closer inspection was thick, dirty and ragged. Hoping Cassandra would approve, she changed it for a black lace one that cost sixteen shillings, more than half as much again.

The letters from this trip tell of various trivial but entertaining incidents. She met a young bespectacled Mr Gould who had just gone to Oxford University, and was diverted to learn that he was under the impression that Fanny Burney’s novel
Evelina
had been written by Dr Johnson.

Edward, Elizabeth, Jane and the children all went to a grand gala concert with fireworks, which surpassed Jane’s expectations, and to the theatre to see
Bluebeard
and
The Birthday Day
by Kotzebue, German author
of Lovers’ Vows
, the play rehearsed in
Mansfield Park
.

Edward’s children dictated letters to their Aunt Cassandra, written out by Jane. Fanny, aged six, said she was very happy at Bath but would be glad to get home and see her three younger brothers, George, Henry and William. Had the chaffinch’s nest in the garden hatched? She was afraid her papa was not much better for drinking the waters. Little Edward, a year younger, relayed a message from his grandmama, hoping that the white turkey was laying and that the black one had been eaten. He liked gooseberry pie and gooseberry pudding very much. Was it the same chaffinch’s nest as the one they had seen before they came away? ‘And pray will you send me another printed letter when you write to Aunt Jane again, if you like it,’ he added.

Jane added a postscript of her own saying they would be back at Steventon the following Thursday for a very late dinner, later than her father would like but she wouldn’t mind if he ate earlier. ‘You must give us something very nice, for we are used to live well,’ she wrote, for food was as absorbing an interest as were clothes.

In October 1800 Jane was writing from home to Cassandra at Godmersham. The weather was fine and warm for the time of year and Jane had been walking to visit relatives and friends. At Oakley Hall, seat of the neighbouring Bramston family, they ate sandwiches ‘all over mustard’ and admired Mr Bramston’s porter [beer] and Mrs Bramston’s transparencies. Mrs Augusta Bramston was in fact Mr Bramston’s sister, unmarried, but dignified with the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’ in the eighteenth-century way. Jane was promised two roots of heartsease pansies, one purple and one yellow. Edward had given Jane some money for charitable spending. In the village they bought ten pairs of stockings and a shift for Betty Dawkins, one of Jane’s poor. Betty wanted this undergarment more than the rug first thought of. Betty was duly grateful, sending Edward ‘a sight of thanks’ for his generosity.

In November 1800, Jane heard from Frank, who had written from the
Peterel
off Cyprus, having provisioned at Jaffa in Palestine, on 8 July 1800. He was off to Alexandria. Frank’s career was advancing well. He had been made Commander of the
Peterel
in 1798. Jane had heard from Charles and was to send the shirts his sisters were sewing for him six at a time as they were finished. His ship, the
Endymion
, was waiting for orders. Mrs Austen was happily dressing a doll for Anna. James’s wife Mary was delighted with a mangle, a gift from Edward, though the new maid had ‘jilted’ her and gone elsewhere. Mangles were new technology and a boon to women, who until then had to wring water by hand out of wet clothes and household linens. The mangle, which consists of rollers for squeezing water out of wet washing before it is hung out to dry, was invented the year Jane Austen was born.

Later that month Jane went to Lord Portsmouth’s ball at Hurstbourne Park in a gown she had borrowed from her aunt Mrs Leigh-Perrot. The morning after, her hand shook from drinking too much wine. Jane danced only nine dances out of twelve and was prevented from dancing the rest purely for want of a partner. This neglect riled her. Her tone about the evening and the other women is bitchy.

‘ One girl was ‘vulgar, broad-featured’; the Misses Maitland, nieces of her late sister-in-law, Anne Mathew, were only ‘prettyish’, resembling poor dead Anne in having ‘a good deal of nose’. ‘There were very few beauties, and such as there were, were not very handsome … Mrs Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband and fat neck.’ A pregnant-girl had danced away with great activity, having somehow got rid of a good part of her child and looking by no means very large’. Her husband, however, was ugly, ‘uglier even than his cousin John’ (the pleasant but plain John Warren). Jane reported that General Mathew, James’s first father-in-law, had the gout and his daughter Mrs Maitland the jaundice. ‘I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me,' writes Jane with a shudder of the three Debary sisters, whom she did not care for at all.

Charles was home, looking well and handsome. Jane had a new dress which she was more and more pleased with. Charles did not like it but Mr Austen and Mary did and Mrs Austen had come round to admitting it wasn’t so ugly after all. So eventually did Charles. James liked it so much that if Cassandra was willing to sell hers in the same pattern Mary would buy it. Jane spent a pleasant day with the Lefroys at Ashe, where fourteen sat down to dinner in the study because the dining-room chimney had been damaged in a storm. There were whist and casino games. James and Mrs Bramston took turns at reading Dr Edward Jenner’s pamphlet on the cowpox, while the Revd Henry Rice and Miss Lucy Lefroy, who were engaged to be married, ‘made love’.

The celebrated Dr Jenner of Awre in Gloucestershire promoted vaccination with cowpox vaccine against the then scourge of smallpox. He was to meet Jane’s niece Caroline in November 1813 at Cheltenham, then a spa (or as it was then called, a ‘spaw’) town where invalids went to drink mineral waters. Having some doubts that Caroline’s previous vaccination was effective, he revaccinated her himself. ‘I had therefore the honour,’ wrote Caroline, ‘of a second operation from the hands of the great discoverer himself; and at the end of the whole process, he pronounced it had been all right before.’

On 21 November another letter from Frank arrived dated 2 October. He wrote from Larnica in Cyprus after leaving Alexandria and was ignorant, as far as his sisters could tell, of his recent promotion to the rank of post-captain.

Around that time Cassandra went with Edward and Elizabeth to stay with Lewis and Fanny Cage of Milgate in Kent. Fanny was Elizabeth’s sister. On the way home Cassandra spent three weeks with Henry and Eliza in London. Jane went to stay with Martha Lloyd at Ibthorpe. Martha had asked her to bring books. Jane replied sharply that she was coming to talk, not to read. She could do that at home. She was reading Robert Henry’s
History of Great Britain
. A week later Cassandra was at Godmersham and Jane still at Ibthorpe.

At home, Steventon Rectory garden was being replanted with beech, ash and larch. The bank along the elm walk was sloped down to receive thorns and lilacs. There was a new suggestion for planting that part of the garden: should it be a little orchard, with apples, pears and cherries, or would larch, mountain ash and acacia be better? If Jane was bored with her life, she at least expected her home to be permanent until she should leave it for a home of her own. The weather was bad so even such ‘desperate walkers’ as Jane and Martha could not go for their usual promenades. They were cooped up all day from morning till night, literally as well as metaphorically. Life crawled on from day to day with little thought of change. The blow was yet to fall.

L
ATE IN THE
year 1800 George Austen decided to retire, leaving James to take care of the combined parishes of Steventon and Deane. Like Sir Walter Elliot in
Persuation
 but in circumstances even less favourable, he removed to Bath. Jane was shattered at the loss of her beloved childhood home which, like the farm labourer’s tied cottage, merely went with the job. Jane never lived in a secure home of her own. She had been away on the visit to Martha Lloyd and her mother at Ibthorpe, eighteen miles away, when the decision was arrived at but the information was delayed.

One day as Jane and Cassandra came in from a walk their mother announced with her usual briskness, ‘Well, girls, it is all settled. We have decided to leave Steventon and go to Bath.’ Jane was almost twenty-five; Cassandra, nearly three years older, had hoped to leave home as a bride. But as dependent daughters they had no choice other than to move with their parents. Their father always spoke of his grown daughters as ‘the girls’: ‘Have the girls gone out?’ he would say.

Mary Austen was waiting to greet Cassandra and Jane after their walk. When Jane received the edict she is said to have fainted. She resented having decisions affecting her future made above her head and behind her back. Mary was shocked to see such distress, though Jane was unaware of Mary’s sympathy for her and suspected Mary of having an eye to the main chance, elbowing Jane’s father out of his own rectory to make way for James. Jane complained to Cassandra that James and Mary could not wait for his parents to go and were seizing everything by degrees. She refused an invitation to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary at Ibthorpe. Any stick would do to beat Mary with: Mary was to take Jane’s mother’s place at Steventon and enjoy its spacious garden while the Austens went into exile in one of Bath’s narrow town houses. Jane’s forebodings were perhaps justified. James did up the rectory endlessly with what Henry’s wife, Eliza, called ‘alterations and embellishments’ but when, years later, Edward became its owner and wanted to install his own son as rector, he decided it was fit only to be demolished and a new rectory built elsewhere. So much for the novelist’s birthplace.

Jane loved the countryside and said she was convinced that beauty of landscape must be one of the joys of heaven. The removal from the old house, spacious now her brothers had all left home, the garden, the wood walk and the fields, together with increased and not easily negotiable distance from friends, was horribly painful to hen She felt uprooted. The gipsyish life which she was to lead with her mother and sister for nearly a decade afterwards did not suit her at all and stopped her writing.

However close and affectionate the family, it is natural for adults to seek independence. Jane Austen was no worse off than other women of her generation and class, but she was trapped and she knew it. Again and again she writes of women with no money who can escape their cramped lives only by a good marriage: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility
, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in
Pride and Prejudice
, Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
. Emma Woodhouse in
Emma
is a spoiled provincial princess with an independent fortune but in the background there is the danger of governessing hanging over Jane Fairfax. It was said that portionless girls became governesses if accomplished, milliners if not. Governesses were downtrodden, isolated and underpaid. It is not clear whether or not Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
has a marriage portion, but in situation she resembles Jane Austen most closely A single woman, her youth gone, she is forced to leave her childhood home and friends for Bath because her father is moving there. Anne hates everything about it. Creative writing, including comedy (and Jane Austen is a brilliantly funny writer), is often fuelled by pain and anger, the grit that makes the pearl.