Jane Austen (7 page)

At home, the girls’ education was probably much like that of the Bennet sisters in
Pride and Prejudice
. Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine they were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary. When Jane was eleven her father was paying a drawing master. Jane’s family considered her to be talented in that direction, and Cassandra and Henry both drew. Jane wrote in a letter when she was forty that she did not have her niece’s ‘fondness for masters’. Fanny Knight’s music teacher, Mr Meyers, ‘gives his three lessons a week - altering his days and his hours … just as he chooses, never very punctual and never giving good measure.’ Jane herself learned the pianoforte in her teens. Jane was fortunate because the instruments were so expensive they were a rare luxury in country parsonages. When Frank Churchill in
Emma
gives a pianoforte to his secret fiancée Jane Fairfax, the gift is munificent indeed, an amenity the impoverished Mrs Bates and her daughter could never have provided.

If Mr and Mrs Austen could not afford to import many masters, the clever father and brothers filled the gap. James and Henry went to Oxford University, where James edited a periodical called
The Loiterer
.

An elegant hand was considered important for letter-writing. Jane’s own letters are beautifully penned, their neat flowing handwriting sloping elegantly to the right. Only quill pens, which quickly wore down and needed recutting, were available to write with. Steel nibs did not come into general use until the mid-nineteenth century. In the circumstances, neat legible handwriting was important and the ability to write small made for economy in paper and postage. Members of Parliament had the privilege of sending mail for nothing, by signing letters above the address. This was called franking. Everybody else had to pay not when sending letters but on receiving them. When Jane was staying with maternal relatives at Stoneleigh Abbey in 1806, a Mr Holt Leigh, MP for Wigan in Lancashire, arrived and gave the family ‘franks’ for their letters so they could go for nothing.

In
Mansfield Park
when Fanny is pining for home, Edmund encourages her to write to her brother William. ‘… it will cost William nothing … when you have written the letter, I will take it to my father to frank.’ Sir Thomas is an MP.

Payment was according to weight, which is why single sheets were used economically, and sometimes ‘crossed’ - turned upside down and written between the lines, or written in both directions so that one line of writing was at right angles to another. Two sheets of paper meant ‘double postage’. Very penurious correspondents sometimes ‘double-crossed’ their letters. In November 1813 Jane received a ‘black and red letter’ from her brother Charles, written in black and crossed in red for clarity. Envelopes were hardly known and letters consisted of single sheets, folded and sealed with a thin wafer. Folding and sealing were necessary skills and while some people’s letters were loose and untidy, Jane’s were perfectly symmetrical, with the wafer always correctly placed. Although her own handwriting was neat and attractive, she thought it inferior to Cassandra’s. ‘I took up your letter again,’ she wrote to her sister, ‘and was struck by the prettiness of the hand, so small and so neat! I wish I could get as much on to a sheet of paper.’ Another time she wrote, ‘I am quite angry with myself for not writing closer; why is my alphabet so much more sprawly than yours?’ Ladies did not write ‘copperplate’ roundhand: that was for ledger clerks. ‘Ladies’ hand’, as it came later to be known, was a pointed style, enabling the reader to identify it as a woman’s writing.

Jane was clever with her hands in general. ‘An artist cannot do anything slovenly,’ she wrote lightly in a letter. She excelled at spillikins, a game in which each player takes pieces of wood off a pile with a metal hook without disturbing the others.

From her mother Jane learned the then essentially practical skills of needlework, including embroidery. She was specially good at overcasting and became expert at satin stitch, no easy accomplishment. A sampler made when she was twelve can be seen at Chawton Cottage, as can a patchwork quilt, as exquisite in design as in workmanship. Made, of course, entirely by hand, this full-sized quilt, whose weight cannot be negligible, is assembled with tiny, almost invisible, stitches of perfect evenness and tension. Mrs Austen and her daughters were expert needlewomen indeed. Jane refers to collecting the pieces of material for it in a letter of May 1811. As an adult, Jane made many of her own clothes and on one occasion had to take an outfit botched by a dressmaker to pieces and remodel it herself. Sometimes she wished it were possible to buy clothes ready-made. In her day all clothes were sewn by hand by tailors and dressmakers, some more skilful than others. She preferred quality to quantity, but was forced to count her pennies.

Women rarely learned Latin or Greek, then the basis of male education. ‘Literacy’ at the time meant mastery of classical literature, not the ability to read English. The rare women who had shared their brothers’ lessons in the ancient languages, before the boys were sent away to school, and who found these studies of interest, were advised to keep quiet about it. Perhaps Mr Austen, who taught Latin to his own boys as well as to paying pupils, and cared enough about his daughters’ education to send them to boarding school, included them in these lessons, but if so Jane’s brothers do not mention it. She knew enough Latin to write
'Ex dono mei patris'
(my father’s gift) in the manuscript book her father gave her when she was fifteen. Wit was dreaded in women and clever women learned to keep their tongues under control. As the narrator
of Northanger Abbey
remarks, ‘A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.’ Jane was well read in English literature: her favourite writers were William Cowper in verse and Dr Samuel Johnson in prose. Her copy of Johnson’s
Rasselas
, volume two, survives, with her signature in it. She had read Henry Fielding’s picaresque and outspoken novel
Tom Jones
, but preferred Samuel Richardson’s
Sir Charles Grandison
, which she knew extremely well. She was familiar with Shakespeare and Milton, and in
Persuasion
Byron’s poetry is mentioned. There was not much money to spare but the Austens always bought books.

Jane, like her character Fanny Price, was a quiet, shy girl. She was tall for her age and slender. When, in 1788, the family visited Great-uncle Francis, by now over ninety, at the Red House in Sevenoaks, her cousin Phila Walter cast upon her a cold eye. Phila was in her twenties and not very sympathetic to adolescents. She wrote to her brother that she preferred Cassandra, who talked well ‘The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve. They all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire -Jane is whimsical and affected/ It is noteworthy that both the writer Mary Russell Mitford, a granddaughter of Dr Russell, the Rector of Ashe, and Phila stigmatized Jane as affected: possibly Jane was experimenting with the face she presented to the world and wondering how to contain her own wicked wit within socially acceptable bounds. The implied judgment that Henry was not handsome either is surprising, as the surviving portrait shows him with fine features. The Austens were a good-looking family. Perhaps Jane, in her turn, did not care much for Phila, who was censorious and two-faced. Their cousin Eliza de Feullide, née Hancock, however, described Cassandra and Jane in their teens as ‘perfect little beauties’. She reported to Phila when Jane was sixteen that Cassandra and Jane were both much grown and greatly improved in manners and looks. ‘They are I think equally sensible, and both so to a degree seldom met with, but still my heart gives the preference to Jane.’

To be seventh in a family means that you can have only a limited share of attention. Cassandra was the elder girl and Jane grew up in her shadow, in a house full of boys, related and unrelated to them. Cassandra was always in demand at Rowling, Edward’s first married home, a manor house provided by Elizabeth’s relatives, and at Godmersham after he inherited in 1797, while Jane usually stayed behind. Jane may well have felt her clever brothers and Cassandra were more important, more highly valued, than herself. She was ten years younger than James, settled in his career as a clergyman, and possibly in awe of him.

She may have felt too that she could not compete in what, at home and outside it, seemed to be a man’s world. The then current social morality discouraged assertiveness in girls, who were supposed to be cheerful and unselfish. The bluestockings of the mid-eighteenth century were no longer fashionable role models, if they ever had been. How could a girl with only reasonable prettiness and no fortune achieve recognition and respect? There were no competitive exams to challenge her, not even in music. Today’s seventeen-year-olds prove themselves by taking exams and passing driving tests. Jane must often have felt crushed by her own lack of consequence in the world and the lack of opportunities to shine. In adult life she looked with amazement at the self-confidence of young people and asked half-humorously ‘What has become of all the shyness in the world?’

She took refuge in becoming a shrewd observer. In her writings from the age of fifteen onwards she took apart the excessive sentiment and far-fetched sensationalism of current pulp fiction, especially in her short epistolary novel,
Love and Friendship
, She enjoyed being witty about her neighbours and the words she puts into the mouth of Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
have often been understood as applying to her own practice: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies
do
divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’

Pride and Prejudice
is a Cinderella story. All Jane Austen’s novels follow the romance pattern of happy marriage achieved after difficulties have been overcome. Her own life was very different, emotionally unfulfilled. She was far from unfeeling, but she cultivated detachment and avoided emotionalism. She became adept, in her letters and in her novels, at making jokes on painful subjects. It was her way of coping.

T
HE AUSTENS WARDED
off boredom with family jokes, conundrums, home-made verses, and theatricals in the dining room or the barn. James was fond of writing prologues and epilogues. In 1782, when Jane was just seven, he produced
Matilda
, a ranting blank verse tragedy by Thomas Francklin, set in the time of the Norman Conquest. Edward spoke the prologue, Mr Austen’s pupil Tom Fowle the epilogue. Family mourning for their aunt Mrs Edward Cooper prevented festivities the next Christmas, but in July 1784
The Rivals
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan was acted.

At Christmas 1786 Mrs Austen entertained Philadelphia Hancock, her married daughter Eliza de Feuillide and Eliza’s little boy. Eliza had been considered too grave as a child, but now, in her twenties, was quite lively. She played every day on the pianoforte the Austens had borrowed for her. The visitors brought a present for Jane’s eleventh birthday, a set of Arnaud Berquin’s book,
L'
Ami des enfans
. Jane had not met this cosmopolitan cousin before, and was enchanted with her and her social grace.

The following Christmas, when Jane was just twelve, her cousin Eliza played the lead in a domestic production of Susannah Centlivre’s comedy
The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret
. Eliza wrote to Phila Walter begging her to take part, but Phila puritanically objected to the idea of appearing in public. In the New Year the Steventon company performed
The Chances
, an old play by John Fletcher, adapted by David Garrick. This was a comedy set in sixteenth-century Naples, dealing with girls in disguise and their jealous lovers. When Jane was fifteen, the family performed Isaac Bickers taffe’s recently published
The Sultan
, with Jane Cooper as Roxalana and Henry as the Sultan. A proto-feminist English girl, the heroine teases the Sultan into giving up his harem and making her his sole Sultana. Jane Austen learned from the dramatic writers to write brilliantly witty dialogue. Aged fifteen, she wrote an absurdist playlet called
The Mystery
, dedicated to her father, and later, she adapted Samuel Richardson’s novel
Sir Charles Grandison
into a five act drama.

Energetic Mrs Austen was in favour of the theatricals, saying she had no room for idle young people, though the plays gave Eliza, a married lady and mother of a baby boy, Hastings de Feuillide, the chance to flirt shamelessly with Jane’s brothers James (then in his early twenties) and Henry (in his late teens), as Henry Crawford does with Maria and Julia Bertram in
Mansfield Park
.

In September the following year the Austens heard of a couple who had fallen in love while they were rehearsing an amateur production and eloped to Scotland. The Honourable Thomas James Twisleton, aged eighteen, ran away with Charlotte Anne Frances Wattell, also under age. The age of majority was then twenty-one. The play was
Julia
by the Irish dramatist Robert Jephson, friend of Dr Johnson and his circle. It may be that the name Julia stayed in Jane’s mind, to reappear in
Mansfield Park
. Another link in the chain of associated ideas was that Thomas Twisleton’s sister Julia had married a distant cousin of Jane’s, James Henry Leigh, of Adlestrop Park. Twisleton’s younger sister, the Honourable Mary-Cassandra, was an ‘Adultress’ Jane was to recognize at a dance in Bath in 1801, having homed in on Mary-Cassandra’s likeness to Julia Leigh. Jane wrote: