Jane Austen (37 page)

It was to Fanny whom Jane poured out her love and it was this niece who used her aunt as confidante in letter after letter. Fanny had finally chased away Mr Plumptre, who was now engaged to somebody else. Now she was wondering if young Mr Wildman, of Chilham Castle in Kent, might do. Chilham Castle was a fine Jacobean brick mansion, built by Sir Dudley Digges, Master of the Rolls to King James I, in front of an old Norman keep on a site with a pre-Roman history. The garden was the work of the famous Lancelot Capability’ Brown, who had created a lake to fill the bottom of the valley, with planned vistas. It was at Chilham that Jane had been amused to find she had become a sort of chaperone’. Fanny had tested Mr Wildman by lending him Jane’s novels without telling him who had written them. This was her way of checking him out for compatibility. Jane was enormously amused and the compliment doubtless pleased her. Presumably Mr Wildman failed the test, as Fanny married Sir Edward Knatchbull.

Jane called Fanny inimitable, irresistible, the delight of her life. Fanny was worth her weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage. Jane had felt pity, concern, admiration and amusement. What a loss Fanny’s intimacies would be when she married and her delicious play of mind was all settled down to conjugal and maternal affections. On the one hand, she did not want Fanny to get married, but on the other she did because she knew Fanny would never be happy until she was. She urged Fanny, in a letter of 20 February 1817, not to be unhappy over Mr Plumptre:

And the following month:

Jane Austen looked to marriage as productive of happiness for women, but marriage without too many children. As her sisters-in-law Anne Mathew, Elizabeth Bridges, Eliza de Feuillide and Frances Palmer were all dead, this was understandable. Jane promised Fanny that the right man would come at last, who would love her and whom she would love in return with deeper emotion than she had felt so far. Fanny looked at her spinster aunts and all their unmarried female friends and shivered. She was twenty-four and feared she was on the shelf.

Jane was revising
Persuasion:
another book was almost ready for publication, Jane told Fanny. ‘You will not like it, so you need not be impatient,’ she teased. ‘You may
perhaps
like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.’

Jane had been very poorly, with raised temperature and bad nights. She thought she had recovered her looks a little, which had been ‘black and white and every wrong colour’. Her disease caused mottled patches on her skin.

Although retrospective diagnosis can never be certain, she is believed to have had either Hodgkin’s disease or more probably Addison’s disease, which in its later stages is grim. It is a wasting ailment of the adrenal glands, which are sited near the kidneys. The body produces antibodies to its own tissue. Symptoms are constant weakness and exhaustion, and a tendency to faint, combined with depression. Patients lose weight and their skin develops dark patches. People who saw Jane Austen late in her life noticed that her skin had a mottled appearance. Bowel movements become irregular and women cease to menstruate. Today the disease is treatable with steroid hormones.

Despite her weakness Jane found time to write several letters to Caroline. (The name must have been correctly pronounced ‘Carolyn’, for Jane mocks an acquaintance for saying ‘
Caroline
.) In March Jane complained to Caroline of rheumatism and described herself as ‘but a poor honey at present’. The donkey was pressed into service but she was too weak to ride it more than once, Cassandra walking beside her. The animal drew the humble carriage which Jane used to get herself to Alton, where Frank was living, as Edward, now short of money himself, needed to let the Great House. Frank and his Mary now had six children aged between ten years and fifteen months.

Jane was weaker. She had needed spectacles for some time, and her eyes tired easily. Unselfish to the last, the dying Jane Austen, dizzy because of low blood pressure, hardly able to eat because of nausea, her limbs aching, chose to lie on three chairs so that her mother could have the sofa. Jane insisted that this wretched arrangement was just as comfortable as the proper couch. Even when the sofa was empty, Jane refrained from using it in case her mother might feel inhibited about relaxing on it. Mrs Austen was seventy-seven and Jane had always considered her something of a hypochondriac. But although sceptical in her letters to Cassandra about Mrs Austen’s ailments Jane honoured her mother at severe cost to herself.

In March James and Mary were sorting out the affairs of the recently deceased James Leigh-Perrot on behalf of his widow, and Caroline was sent to Chawton. Jane, however, was too ill for a visitor to be convenient so Caroline went to stay with her half-sister Anna instead at their rented red brick farmhouse within walking distance of Chawton. The day after Caroline’s arrival the nieces went to inquire after their Aunt Jane. She was not able to leave her bedroom but received them in her dressing gown, sitting in an armchair. She got up and greeted them affectionately. Pointing to seats by the fire, she said, ‘There’s a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline.’ Caroline was shocked to see how ill Jane was looking. There was a general appearance of debility and suffering that the little girl could not mistake. Jane was very pale and her voice, normally so pleasing, was weak and low. She was not strong enough to talk for more than about ten minutes and Cassandra soon took the girls away. Anna, living so near, was able to make a few more visits, but Caroline never saw her beloved Aunt Jane again. After Caroline was grown up, she felt that she had never loved or valued Jane enough.

In April, Jane told Charles she had had a bilious attack and fever. She was now an invalid, living upstairs and being coddled. She had imagined herself to be better, but confessed that the shock of her uncle James Leigh-Perrot’s will had brought on a relapse. Mr Leigh-Perrot had left everything to his wife for her lifetime, with reversion to James and his heirs. Jane had been expecting something. Mrs Austen bore up better under the disappointment. Her belief was that her brother had expected to survive his wife and to make another will after her death. The bereaved Mrs Leigh-Perrot was wretched: unpleasant and selfish though she was, she sincerely loved and was loved by her husband. She told James-Edward how generous her husband had been to her and how anxious to make up to her for late deprivations’ in prison. ‘He was the whole world to me,’ she said. She added that when the Stoneleigh settlement increased their income, horses and a new carriage had been bought but ill-health spoiled their enjoyment.

That same month Jane made her own will, leaving everything to her sister, except £50 to Henry (who was still in debt after the collapse of his bank) and £50 to Madame Bigeon, who had suffered financially from Henry’s misfortune. Cassandra was her executrix.

Meanwhile Edward Knight still had money worries as the lawsuit was dragging on. On 22 May Jane wrote to Anne Sharp, formerly governess to Edward’s daughters, in Doncaster. Jane wrote that she could now sit up in bed; her sister and brothers had been kindness itself. She was going to Winchester for treatment, with Cassandra, her indefatigable nurse. Jane described herself, attempting humour, as a very genteel, portable sort of invalid. In two days’ time she would be travelling the sixteen miles in James’s carriage to comfortable lodgings which had been taken for them. ‘Now that’s the kind ofthing which Mrs J Austen does in the kindest manner!’Jane acknowledged, but could not resist adding that her sister-in-law was not on the whole generously inclined. The fact that James was to inherit from the Leigh-Perrots after his aunt’s death was not calculated to soften her judgment of Mary’s character: it was too late in the day, Jane knew. The missing legacy still rankled with the dying Jane Austen. She cheered herself up with the thought that Mary might have to wait ten years before Mrs Leigh-Perrot was dead. Frank’s wife had another baby, with what Jane called a much shorter confinement than Jane’s own. Jane added significantly:

Jane was hiding her head in the sand. The removal to Winchester was a doomed search for health. A relative of their own medical man had a high reputation and Jane put herself under the care of this doctor, Giles King Lyford, surgeon in ordinary at the county hospital. The case was never very hopeful. Mr Lyford told James’s wife Mary that Jane’s illness might be lingering, or that the end might be sudden. He was afraid there would be agony at the end.

Jane found the journey less tiring than she expected but fretted over Henry and William, who accompanied her on horseback, riding in the rain. She and her sister lodged at 8 College Street, which was a narrow picturesque lane, with small old-fashioned houses on one side, terminating in the ancient stone buildings of the famous public school. The house had a neat little drawing room with a bow window overlooking a garden with waving trees, the red roofs of the Cathedral Close and the grey cathedral towering over them. Now in private hands, and painted yellow outside, the house in College Street bears a plaque saying that Jane died there. A handwritten note in the window explains that it is not open to the public.

They were visited nearly every day by the widowed Mrs Elizabeth Heathcote and her sister Alethea Bigg of Manydown, who were living for the time in the Close. Harris Bigg-Wither had inherited Many-down in 1813. Mrs Heathcote‘s son was at Winchester College, and to be near him she rented a house from one of the cathedral canons. She visited Jane every day, but Alethea had soon ‘frisked off, like half England, to Switzerland’, as Jane wrote enviously. When Mrs Heathcote died, she owned copies of all Jane’s novels.

Jane by this time lived chiefly on the sofa, able to walk no further than from one room to another. She went out once in a sedan chair and looked forward to going out in a wheelchair when the weather grew warmer but this hope was never fulfilled. Cassandra was a tireless and loving nurse, helped out by James’s wife Mary. Mary had often got on Jane’s nerves but now Jane told her, ‘You have always been a kind sister to me, Mary.’ Jane seemed to be recovering, and Mary went home.

On 12 June, James wrote to his son James-Edward to tell him there was no hope for ‘your dear valuable Aunt Jane’. Mr Lyford had candidly told them all her case was desperate. ‘I need not say what a melancholy gloom this has cast over us all. Your grandmama has suffered much, but her affliction can be nothing to Cassandra’s. She will indeed be to be pitied. It is some consolation to know that our poor invalid has hitherto felt no severe pain…’

Jane knew she was dying. One of her last letters has been mutilated by the family. A paragraph dealing with ‘domestic disappointment’ which did not ‘concern the public’ was suppressed. They allowed an expression of ‘her characteristic sweetness and resignation’ to stand:

In health Jane was often tart and impatient, but now she suffered considerable pain she bore it bravely, resolutely keeping cheerful out of consideration for those around her. Henry and James, both clergymen, visited constantly to give her Holy Communion. Charles arrived on 13 June and was shocked to find Jane so ill. On 16 June he rode to Chaw-ton on Henry’s horse and found his mother poorly. Charles went back to Winchester on top of the coach on 18 June and found Jane better. Next day he saw her twice and in the evening left again, knowing he had seen his sister for the last time. Frank, whose wife had recently had a seventh baby, did not come but stayed home to comfort his mother. Edward also went to their mother.

On 27 June, Jane seemed better again and Mary, who had returned to nurse her, went home to Steventon. She told Caroline that Jane was resigned and composed, a believing Christian, though she had everything to live for. She was just learning to feel confidence in her own success. A few days later Cassandra sent for Mary again, as the paid nurse kept falling asleep. Mary, Cassandra and a maid nursed Jane in shifts.

On 9 July Jane received £15 from Hoare’s bank, still trading today, where her father had had an account. This sum was interest due on her investment in navy stock.

July 15 is St Swithin’s day. St Swithin was a local saint, Bishop of Winchester from AD 852. An old superstition, still current in England within living memory, says that if it rains on that day the wet weather will continue for forty days and forty nights. That year it was the date of a race-meeting, and Jane dictated a comic verse about the incongruity of horse-races on a saint’s day and the saint’s revenge of wet weather. It wasn’t much better than her usual attempts at verse, but it showed her sense of humour was still alive although she was fading fast.

During Jane’s last forty-eight hours she slept a great deal. She knew she was dying half an hour before she lost consciousness. She said she could not tell her listeners what she was suffering. When Cassandra asked her whether there was anything she wanted, she replied, ‘Nothing but death.’ She also said, God grant me patience. Pray for me, oh pray for me.’ She lay gently breathing, her head almost off the bed. Cassandra sat beside her with a pillow on her lap for six hours, supporting her. Mary took over for the next two and a half hours until Cassandra came back for the last hour. There was nothing convulsed about Jane’s dying look, except for a restless motion of the head. She reminded her sister of a beautiful statue. On Friday 18 July 1817 she died in Cassandra’s arms and Cassandra closed her eyes. In her coffin she had an appearance of sweet serenity.