Jane Austen (36 page)

Although Charles was cleared of all blame, this accident for a while did his career no good. Ultimately he triumphed over it, though he suffered from rheumatism and skin eruptions possibly as a result of stress. He had within a few months lost both his wife and his ship.

Jane was starting to feel ill. The catastrophes cannot have helped. Neither Henry nor Frank was able to keep up his contribution of £50 a year on which their mother depended, as Frank’s money had been invested in Henry’s bank, and Edward too was facing ruin.

Jane at the time was writing
Persuasion
, her last novel, with a sailor hero and several other naval men among the characters. In a letter to her niece Fanny Knight dated 13 March 1816, she said:
‘Miss Catherine
is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out; but I have a something ready for publication, which may, perhaps, appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short - about the length of
Catherine
. This is for yourself alone.’ Jane did not live to see either
Persuasion
or the other story published. She had changed its name from
Susan
to
Catherine
because another novel called
Susan
had been published in the interim.
Catherine
was retitled by Henry as
North anger Abbey
. The two novels were published together in one volume in 1818, with a biographical notice by Henry. This account of his sister was the first whitewash operation performed by her surviving relatives.

Jane saw Fanny for the last time on 21 May 1816 when Edward took his daughter back to Kent.

Elizabeth Leigh, sister to the late Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop and Stoneleigh, died. Jane wrote to her niece Caroline on 21 April, ‘We all feel that we have lost a most valued old friend, but the death of a person at her advanced age, so fit to die, and by her own feelings so
ready
to die, is not to be regretted.’ She invited Caroline to the fair at Alton to be held on her cousin Mary-Jane’s birthday but domestic chores could not be forgotten:

The wash-house at Chawton Cottage is still there. Washday was about once a month and involved backbreaking work. A blanket wash was heavy indeed. Cotton and linen had to be boiled in a copper boiler set in brick over a fire, the water having to be fetched in buckets from the pump and ladled in and out. After washing and rinsing came blueing and starching. The clothes had to be wrung out, either by hand or with an up-to-date mangle. In fine weather, the clothes were pegged out to dry. Then they had to be ironed, either with flat irons heated in the grate, or with hollow box irons filled with hot coals. Both cooled down inconveniently fast.

Washday or no washday, Jane Austen was at the peak of her career. Murray had sent her the copy of the
Quarterly Review
in which
Emma
had been favourably noticed by an anonymous critic who, unknown to Jane, was her rival Walter Scott.

In the year 1816 Jane was often surrounded by nephews and nieces. She lent them clothes for dressing up and joined in their make-believe. It is sometimes said that Jane did not like children. Like most adults she prefered them to be well-behaved. But she did her share of playing with her nephews and nieces, telling them stories and hearing them read. She encouraged them in their attempts at novel-writing, for James-Edward had acquired the family habit of scribbling. Jane wrote to Cassandra in September that his manuscript was extremely clever, written with great ease and spirit; if he could carry it on in the same way it would be a first-rate work and in a style to be popular. Tray tell Mary how much I admire it. And tell Caroline that I think it is hardly fair upon her and myself, to have him take up the novel line …’ For Caroline, though only eleven, was scribbling too.

Now that Henry was a clergyman, he wrote Very superior sermons’, she told James-Edward, unlike Edward Cooper’s, which were distorted by his zeal for the Bible Society. Jane teased James-Edward about some of his own writings which had disappeared and defended herself from the charge of having stolen them. She did not think such a theft would be useful to her. What should I do … with your strong, manly spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?’

Jane was here not apologising for smallness of scale, but staking her claim to be considered a finished craftsman, mistress of the art which conceals art and makes what is difficult look easy. Like his scribbling sisters, Anna and Caroline, James-Edward is noteworthy only for reminiscences of his distinguished aunt.

In May, Jane and Cassandra had been for a few weeks to Cheltenham, then a spa town, from Chawton, breaking their journey at James’s house, Steventon Rectory, and leaving nine-year-old Cassandra Knight to stay with Caroline while they were in Gloucestershire. They also made a short stay with the Fowles at Kintbury, where Ful-war and Eliza were shocked by Jane’s visibly failing health. Jane went about her old haunts as if she did not expect to see them again. Cassandra returned to Cheltenham with James’s wife Mary and Caroline. The
Cheltenham Chronicle
of 1 August mentioned the Duke and Duchess of Orléans and Jane was entertained to think that the Duchess ‘drinks at my pump’. But Jane’s health was beyond the aid of spa waters.

Charles had asked to visit Chawton with his three girls. Jane wanted to see him but worried about bedrooms: he did not mention bringing a maid but if he was going to bring one there would be no bed for him, let alone one for Henry. There were other general anxieties about one family member or another. Frank’s wife, Mary, seldom seemed quite well: 'Little Embryo is troublesome, I suppose,’ wrote Jane, caustic as usual about mothering. Perhaps worse, ‘Mrs FA' was still without a housemaid and was dreading the forthcoming visit of her parents. There was too much reason to fear that they would stay above a week. Jane’s back, she wrote in reply to Cassandra’s inquiry, had been almost free of pain for several days.

‘Sir Thomas Miller is dead. I treat you with a dead baronet in almost every letter,’ wrote Jane. Mrs Digweed was parting with both Hannah and her old cook, because Hannah refused to give up her lover, who was a man of bad character, and the cook was guilty only of being unequal to anything. Madame Perigord, formerly Henry’s housekeeper, wrote to Jane after returning from her native France that the country after the Battle of Waterloo was a scene of general poverty and misery with no money and no trade. Ben Lefroy’s brother Christopher-Edward had also been in France and was ‘thinking of the French as one would wish, disappointed in everything’.

Jane complained that visitors left her little time for herself. She wanted a few days’ quiet. I often wonder how
you
can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the house,’ she mused to Cassandra, amazed that fellow-writer Jane West managed to run a household, rear children and produce books. Composition seemed impossible to Jane Austen, with a head full of joints of mutton and rhubarb medicines: not garden rhubarb but an imported root from China and Tibet, used as a purgative. She enjoyed Charles’s visit after all.

Edward spent three weeks at Chawton in November 1816; Henry was constantly coming and going; Charles had come home at the end of June. Mostly he stayed with the Palmer family in London to keep in close touch with the Admiralty but in November he came to Chawton, and because Edward had not succeeded in letting it, the Great House absorbed the overflow of relatives, children and servants. Something was wrong with Charles’s second girl, Harriet. It seemed she had water on the brain. Jane hoped Heaven in its mercy would soon take her.

Persuasion
was finished on 18 July 1816. Jane was dissatisfied with it. She was depressed, partly as a complication of her increasing illness, fearing her powers had left her. She felt the ending of the novel as it stood was tame and flat. One morning she woke feeling her gift had been restored to her, and rewrote the ending on 6 August. The title was discussed and the original plan was for it to be called
The Elliots
. It was probably given the title we have by Henry. A Mrs Barrett used to say ‘Anne Elliot was [Jane] herself; her enthusiasm for the navy and her perfect unselfishness reflect her completely.’

I
N THE LAST
year of her life Jane told Anna and James-Edward what happened to her characters after the novels in which they appeared ended, and other details of her plots. Miss Steele in
Sense and Sensibility
never did succeed in catching the doctor; Kitty Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
married a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary had to make do with one of her Uncle Phillips’s clerks but was content to be a star in the society of Meryton; the ‘considerable sum’ Mrs Norris in
Mansfield Park
claimed to have given William Price was only £1; Mr Woodhouse in
Emma
survived and prevented his daughter and Mr Knightley from moving to Don-well for two years; the letters Frank Churchill placed in front of Jane Fairfax, which she brushed away unread, spelt out the word ‘pardon’; Jane Fairfax lived for only ten years after marrying him.

She told Cassandra that in the unfinished fragment,
The Watsons
, Mr Watson was going to die, and Emma Watson would become dependent for a home on her narrow-minded brother and sister-in-law. She was to decline an offer of marriage from Lord Osborne and the interest of the story was to arise from Lady Osborne’s love for Mr Howard and Mr Howard’s affection for Emma, who finally was to marry him.

Jane was at work on something new when she died, the fragment to which the family gave the title
Sanditon
. The last page of the manuscript is dated 18 March 1817. Extracts were first published in James-Edward’s
Memoir
, It was first printed in full in 1925 and a facsimile was published in 1975 to mark the bicentenary of Jane’s birth. 

Brother James was also ailing in 1817 (he lived only till 1819, not long enough to claim his inheritance). James’s handsome son James-Edward delighted his aunts when he came to stay in January 1817. He was eighteen, tall and charming. The aunts loved him for his sweet temper and warm affection. Jane wrote to Caroline saying how much better she was feeling; she was looking forward to the summer when she hoped to be stronger. Her illness was in remission. She was convinced that her debility, nausea and vomiting were due to ‘bile’, and that she could treat herself. She sent news of her imaginary improvement to Alethea Bigg, the sister of Harris Bigg-Wither. Jane’s rejection of Alethea’s brother does not seem to have affected their friendship. Jane had been reading
The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo
by Robert Southey, published the previous year. She told Alethea she found the fond description of the poet’s dead son Herbert in the
proem
very beautiful. Henry, newly a clergyman, was expected at Chawton, and Jane had been marking his shirts for the laundry. The postscript to this letter is revealing:

Anna was better in health than she had been since her marriage. She already had two children, one a toddler, the other a baby in arms, and was to have five more. Ben Lefroy had not yet been ordained, and Jane fretted that she wanted to see the family settled in a comfortable parsonage house. Jane and her mother could only see Anna when she came to Chawton, as Mrs Austen was seventy-five, Jane had rheumatism in her knee and the roads were too wet and muddy for the donkey-carriage. The donkeys were having so long a run of luxurious idleness that I suppose we shall find that they have forgotten much of their education when we use them again,’ said Jane. Ben and Anna walked over to hear her Uncle Henry preach. It had been a pleasure to see Anna, who looked so young and pretty, so blooming and innocent, that it was hard to believe she could ever have had a wicked thought in her head. Jane was remembering Anna’s naughtiness during her girlish days. Soon she was lamenting that Anna was probably pregnant again: she had a bad cold and 'we fear something else; she has just weaned Julia,' Jane told Anna’s cousin Fanny Knight, who was still single. 'Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.’ Mrs Benn had had her thirteenth. 'I am quite tired of so many children,’ grumbled Jane, making her usual complaint.