Jane Austen (22 page)

After temporary lodgings they moved into a rented house on a corner of Castle Square in 1807. The Revd James-Edward Austen-Leigh remembered it, half a century later, as having a pleasant garden bounded on one side by the old city wall. The top of this wall, reached by steps, was wide enough to walk along, offering an extensive view of the river and its wooded banks. At that time there was a castellated folly in the square, built by the second Marquis of Lansdowne, an eccentric who welcomed the French Revolution and collected portraits of its heroes. The original castle, dating from the eleventh century, had been incorporated into a new mock-Gothic palace in 1804. The Marquis was the Austens’ landlord. The Marchioness had a light phaeton drawn by six or eight little ponies decreasing in size and graduated in colour from dark brown through light brown to bay and chestnut. The two leading pairs were managed by young postillions, the two pairs nearest the carriage driven ‘in hand’. This elaborate procession practically filled up the square. To the small boy looking out of the window of the house lived in by his grandmother and his uncle and aunts, this was a fairy equipage. For Mary Russell Mitford, who visited Southampton in 1812, the town deserved to be the capital of fairyland. It certainly had its picturesque aspects. Newly fashionable bow windows had been added to the old houses. Southampton, at the mouth of the River Itchen, had until Brighton surpassed it in popularity been a fashionable watering place, with sea-bathing and mineral springs. The castle and Frank Austen’s house are long demolished. The site was cleared in 1818, and in 1823 Zion Chapel replaced them. Jane’s memories of Southampton were unromantic: she had nearly died there during her schooldays. In an early extravaganza, written when she was fourteen and a half, Jane has one of her characters refer to ‘the dissipations of London, the luxuries of Bath, and the stinking fish of Southampton’. However, it was nearer Steventon than Bath and on the coast.

Portsmouth, the naval town so well evoked in
Mansfield Park
, was eighteen miles away. In January 1807 Jane entertained Captain Edward James Foote RN, a relation by marriage of Sir Brook Bridges, to a boiled leg of mutton, underdone and barely edible. Captain Foote particularly disliked it, but he was so good-humoured and pleasant that Jane ‘did not much mind his being starved’. He gave them all a most cordial invitation to stay at his house in the country. Later Captain Foote was impressed with the Portsmouth scenes in
Mansfield Park
.

After being so far away from her childhood home Jane looked forward to being once more within visitable distance by her eldest brother. Steventon was twenty-three miles away. He did come; not every day, as he had done when they were at Steventon and he was at Deane, only a mile and a half away, but roughly once a week. Unfortunately, his appearances were unpredictable, and Jane complained that although she knew she ought to enjoy the visits of so good and clever a man the truth was that he irritated her by walking about the house, banging doors and ringing the bell for a glass of water. She wished James were more like self-contained Frank. Frank, considerate and kind, gentle in his manner, was used to cramped quarters on board ship and knew how to keep himself occupied; he knotted fringes, cut out patchwork and even worked in silver. Bookish James had no such resources. The church records show James to have been less conscientious than his father. The registers are not so well kept, and he called in surrogate celebrants more often. The ‘improvements’ to her former home may have aroused Jane’s envy or perhaps her regret.

James was suffering a diminution of income. Anna’s grandfather General Mathew had died, so James lost the allowance of £100 a year. However, Lord Craven offered James a caretaker appointment, a living worth £300 a year, until a young protégé was ready to be ordained and take it up. James refused, as to him this arrangement smelled of simony (the buying and selling of benefices, an offence against ecclesiastical law). Mary could not understand this principled rejection and did not forgive her husband. There are several of Jane’s letters missing from this period, which suggests that Cassandra censored further criticisms of James and Mary.

In January 1807 James, Mary and their toddler, Caroline, were staying at Southampton and Jane had provided rice pudding and apple dumplings. Cassandra was away at Godmersham and had been at Canterbury with Mrs Knight. Frank’s wife Mary was expecting a baby, and James’s wife Mary had invited Mrs Austen to stay with them in Steven-ton at the expected time of the birth. Jane was also invited, but because of her hostile feelings towards James’s Mary she hesitated.

There were circulating libraries at Ford’s in the High Street next to the Market House and at Skelton’s at 22 High Street, in addition to a third kept by a Mr Baker. Jane’s fastidious taste rejected
Clarentine
, a novel by Sarah Harriet Burney, half-sister to the more famous Fanny, published in 1798. She was surprised to find how foolish it was. She recalled liking it less on a second reading than on the first and decided it would not bear a third. It was full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties, wrote the woman who had already drafted three distinguished novels herself but as yet published nothing. Jane was disgusted with a new
book Alphonsine, or Maternal Affection
by Madame de Genlis. Not only was the translation poor but ‘indelicacies’ made the Austens give up reading it aloud in the evenings after twenty pages.

They were much happier with Charlotte Lennox’s
The Female Quixote, or, the Adventures of Arabella
, already fifty-five years old. Jane found it as enjoyable as she had remembered, and Frank’s young wife, to whom the book was new, enjoyed it too. Jane added sourly that ‘the other Mary’ had little pleasure from that or any other book. ‘Mrs JA got on Jane’s nerves and she found it a matter of regret that too many of clever James’s opinions were copied from his less-clever wife. Mary was debating whether she could economize on a journey in order to buy little Caroline a new pelisse. Even so, she talked less about poverty than formerly Jane observed.

Jane was amazed that her mother was not too disappointed at getting none of the Leigh money but was enjoying the comfortable state of her own finances which to her agreeable surprise left her with a balance of £30 to begin the new year. Mrs Austen had begun 1806 with £68 and was now beginning 1807 with £99, and that after spending £32 on stocks. Frank too had been settling his accounts and making calculations and they all felt they could manage though they hoped the rent would not go up. Frank supported his mother and sisters, his wife and himself, on £400 a year. Of course they still had servants. At this time their cook, Jenny, was away with her own relations and their dinners had suffered from having only Molly’s head and Molly’s hands to provide them. She was not as good at frying as Jenny.

‘Our acquaintance increases too fast,’ wrote Jane. Admiral Bertie and the Lances had been added to their circle, and Mrs Lance had offered to introduce them to some more people, but Jane and Frank declined. Jane did not think the Lances would come often. They were rich and lived in a handsome style. The Austens gave Mrs Lance to understand they were far from being rich themselves and Jane thought that Mrs Lance would soon drop them as not worth knowing. Jane was restless and gloomy again and her letters were full of strained wisecracks. A cramped house in Southampton was even less lively than Bath. Even so, Edward’s eldest son, Edward, was going to the ancient boys’ college at Winchester and Jane said there would always be a spare bed for him at Southampton.

They did not find it easy to avoid company, though, as many local people turned out to be connections. Mrs Maitland in Albion Place was sister to Anne Mathew, James’s first wife. A Mrs Harrison, née Austen, was a distant cousin. There was Captain Sir Thomas Williams, whose first wife had been their cousin Jane Cooper, as well as numerous other naval officers who all knew Frank.

That February Jane wrote to Cassandra at Godmersham that she had managed to find some fish’ four small soles that cost six shillings, to send to Kintbury She sent them back in the basket that had brought poultry to Southampton. Jane rather resented her sister’s extended absence and said she had more Sonys than Glads to report. She complained that she saw nothing to be glad about, unless she rejoiced that Mrs Wylmot, a neighbour of Edward’s in Kent, had another son and that Lord Lucan had taken a mistress, both of which events were of course joyful to the actors.

Mrs Austen would knit a rug for Cassandra as soon as she returned to choose the colours and the design. Jane teased her sister by saying that Frank and Mary needed her at home in order to help them buy household goods. Jane threatened Cassandra they would spite her by choosing knives that would not cut, glasses that would not hold, a sofa without a seat, and a bookcase without shelves. A dressing table was being made out of a large kitchen table belonging to the house, for which they had the permission of Lord Landsdown’s painter, who lived in the castle. ‘Domestic chaplains have given way to this more necessary office, and I suppose whenever the walls want no touching up, he is employed about my lady’s face,’ Jane joked.

The garden was being put in order by a man who charged less than the first one they had asked to estimate. They were to have currants, raspberries and gooseberries, and a laburnum. Jane asked specially for a syringa, for the sake of the line by William Cowper in his long poem,
The Task:
 '...Laburnum rich/In streaming gold; syringa ivory pure’. She asked Cassandra to bring flower seeds from Godmersham, especially mignonette. Jane was gratified to hear that they were envied their house by many people and that their garden was the best in town.

But while she took pleasure in the garden, Jane’s view of society was almost as sour and scornful as it had been in Bath. She put forward a grim view of a recent engagement between a Miss Jackson and a Mr Gunthorpe, predicting she would be very unhappy because of his unpleasant personality and the disapproval of both sets of parents. Of another possible match, she opined that a widower with three children had no right to look higher than his daughter’s governess. She snarled, ‘Mr Waller is dead, I see; I cannot grieve about it, nor perhaps can his widow very much.’ Another malicious comment was called forth when a distant cousin, John Austen, inherited a fortune stemming from old Francis Austen. ‘Such ill-gotten wealth can never prosper!’ What annoyed her was that it was not ill-gotten. It had bypassed her and it did prosper.

There was a fresh embarrassment: Jane’s brother Henry had been engaged to, and jilted, a Miss Pearson before he married Eliza de Feuillide, and Frank’s wife had innocently made friends with the family. What a contretemps! in the language of France; What an unluckiness! in that of Madame Duval.’ Madame Duval is the heroine’s grisly grandmother in Fanny Burney’s novel
Evelina
. Miss Pearson was a pretty, wicked-looking girl with bright black eyes who gave herself airs and was a notorious flirt. After the break-up Henry had been very much upset, looking thin and ill.

Jane was growing increasingly depressed about childbearing, lamenting that the recurrently fertile Mrs Deedes, Elizabeth Knight’s sister Sophia, was going to have another child. Frank’s pregnant wife wanted to know via Cassandra at Godmersham how often Elizabeth nursed her baby in the course of twenty-four hours, how often it was fed and with what. This was Elizabeth’s tenth, Cassandra Jane, then three months old. Frank was on half-pay waiting for a frigate, having been disappointed two or three times. He spent his time making a fringe for the drawing room curtains.

Luckily, Frank was soon at sea again. He was to command the 74-gun HMS
St Albans
for convoy duty to and from South Africa, China and the East Indies. Early in April he went aboard at Sheerness to provision his ship and was away from Southampton when his daughter Mary-Jane was born on 27 April 1807. The mother was very seriously ill but recovered. Frank came home again before sailing.

At the end of 1807 Jane noted at the back of her diary that she had started the year with £50 15s 6d (she had inherited £50 from Mrs Lillingston) and now had £6 4s 6d left. The largest item of expenditure was £13 19s 3d on clothes, followed by washing at £9 5s 11d. Presents accounted for £6 4s 4d and letters and parcels had cost her £3 17s 6d. The legacy had enabled her to treat herself to the hire of a pianoforte at £2 13s 6d.

There are no letters from Jane for the early part of 1808. She and Cassandra were paying visits together in Hampshire and Berkshire, going to Steventon, Manydown and Kintbury. Catherine and Alethea Bigg were both still single, but their sister Elizabeth was widowed and had returned home with her seven-year-old son, William Heathcote. He went to school with, and became a lifelong friend of, James and Mary Austen’s son James-Edward. Years later William remembered a Twelfth Night party where Jane Austen played the part of the malicious Mrs Candour in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal
‘with great spirit’.

In May Jane and Henry spent a night at Steventon on the way to London. She stayed with him in his little house at Brompton and on 4 June saw the ladies going to court for the King’s birthday celebrations. James had taken Anna to Southampton to stay with Mrs Austen and Cassandra and then brought his wife, Mary, and their children, James-Edward and Caroline, in his new chaise to stay at London’s Bath Hotel in Arlington Street. On 14 June Jane met them there. James went ahead by public coach, while Mary, Jane and the children travelled to Godmersham in James’s carriage. Mary and James had not been to Kent for ten years. James-Edward enjoyed playing with cousins Lizzie and Charles, but Caroline was overwhelmed by the boisterousness of her many Godmersham cousins. Caroline was then aged three. She dimly remembered this visit to Godmersham in later years. She recalled a lime tree walk and her cousins’ pet rabbits, but was not really happy in a strange house.

That summer of 1808 Jane was given the Yellow Room at Godmersham and was surprised to have such a great bedroom all to herself. She found it strange to be at Godmersham with James and Mary but without Cassandra, who had stayed in Southampton. Jane was feeling lonely and sorry for herself. Elizabeth’s sister Louisa Bridges was there, looking remarkably well, having recently received an inheritance: ‘Legacies are wholesome diet,’ commented Jane wistfully.