Letters to Alice (8 page)

Neither Jane nor Cassandra had children. I am not saying that Jane stayed single because she didn’t want them, and children were where marriage led. I am just saying she was an imaginative person — and just as an imaginative person has more difficulty than others in learning to drive — the mind forever leaps ahead, constructing possible
scenarios
of death and disaster — so she would have looked ahead into her own life, and not relished the screams, and the pacings, and so forth. Would you have been brave enough, Alice — and why should she be braver than you?

It is only recently that it has become acceptable for a woman to give voice to her quite rational fears of childbirth. She was supposed to keep quiet and get on with it: and certainly not take steps to avoid childbirth by using contraceptives, abstinence or declining to marry. Queen Victoria, a mother of nine, disgraced herself by grumbling publicly about the pain, and referred to child-bearing as ‘the shadow side of marriage’; and when anesthetics first became available, took chloroform — just a little, soaked into a handkerchief — at the birth of her eighth and ninth child. The country felt rather let down; ‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth’ was much quoted at her, but fortunately for the rest of us, she refused to be abashed, and the habit caught on. Nowadays, the woman who declines to have children is still regarded with some (though shrinking) curiosity: her motives are not likely to be nearly as strong, her fears not nearly so basic, as those that must have assailed her female forbears. Namely, the expectation of pain and the fear of death.

But those matters lay ahead for Jane Austen. It was 1790. She was not yet ‘out’. That is to say, she had not yet been put on the marriage market: adorned, taken to balls and parties and exposed to the company of suitable young men, in the hope that she would ‘catch’ one. I am not against such methods of regulating the hearts and lives of young women: it is certainly better that they should fall in love with someone suitable than with someone who, to the older generation, can be seen to be, say, a neurotic bully and a potential alcoholic. I know such observations will annoy you very much: but arranged marriages are normal in great areas of the world today — and the record of the modern West in marriage matters is not so hot. But I can already hear you say ‘but marriage is an outmoded institution, anyway, what
is
she talking about…’ I’ll desist.

Anyway, at the age of fifteen Jane Austen seemed happy enough. She wrote
The History of England
and dedicated it to her sister Cassandra in these terms:

…by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian. To Miss Austen, eldest daughter of the Revd. George Austen this work is inscribed with all due respect by

The Author

N.B. There will be very few dates in this History.

The young Miss Austen encompassed three hundred years of England’s past in fifteen pages, in a kind of early
1066 and All That.
She shows herself as very clever, very funny, exhilarated and exhilarating and impatient.

The Events of this Monarch’s reign…(Charles 1st) are too numerous for my pen, and indeed the recital of any Events (except what I make myself) is uninteresting to me.

You see! The born novelist. She is raising invention above description; what she makes herself above what the real world has to offer. She will put up with writing a history so long as she doesn’t have to get the dates right, and mocks those who take the whole thing seriously, and so long as she can be biased:

My principal reason for undertaking the History of England being to prove the innocence of the Queen of Scotland, which I flatter myself with having effectually done, and to abuse Elizabeth, tho’ I am rather fearful of having fallen short in the latter part of my scheme —

— and also so that Cassandra — at the time eighteen — could be involved, could illustrate the
History,
in the form of kings and queens, which she did, with evident pleasure, but in a manner which would nowadays be thought to be the work of someone far younger. (She would never, these days, have got to art school.) History, of course, was seen as the story of monarchs; the notion that it concerned the development of society is comparatively new. I doubt that you could reel off the dates of the Kings of England, Alice, as I still can.

In the same year Jane Austen wrote an unfinished novel —
Lesley Castle
— also in the form of letters, but with a bigger cast of letter-writers — and dedicated it to her brother Henry in these terms:

To Henry Thomas Austen Esqre.

Sir

I am now availing myself of the liberty you have frequently honoured me with of dedicating one of my Novels to you. That it is unfinished, I grieve: yet fear that from me, it will remain always so: that as far as it is carried, it should be so trifling and so unworthy of you, is another concern to your obliged humble

Servant — The Author.

Messrs. Demand & Co. — please pay Jane Austen, spinster, the sum of one hundred guineas on account of your Humble Servant

£105.

H. T. Austen

There! You see, already conscious that writing is worth money, deserves money, that pleasure for one is work for another, and must be compensated for in financial terms. And
Lesley Castle
was, increasingly, work, as she got herself embedded deeper and deeper into the pit she’d dug for herself; that is, too many characters, and too much peripheral event, and no apparent central drive or purpose — which is why she simply stopped writing it — she’d bored herself.

I hate this kind of cold conclusion; these sweeping assessments of motive with which, in the present, we look back at the past. I despise it in biographers, and yet find I am doing it myself. Put me in a pulpit and I know I too would soon be saying: ‘God wants us to do this, that and the other because God means us to be this way, that way or the other way…’ As if I knew: as if I had a special Hot Line to Him.

Do be warned, Alice. The reason Jane Austen joked about charging Henry one hundred guineas for
Lesley Castle
is as likely to be the result of a frivolous conversation over the dinner table the night before, as to the motive I attribute to her. The reason she stopped writing
Lesley Castle
may have been because she ran out of paper, or shut her thumb in the lych-gate of Steventon Church the previous Sunday: or because she was reading the manuscript aloud to her family one evening and they all started yawning and looking for the cards. There is simply no way of knowing — and I take it back.

But
Lesley Castle
starts marvellously! Little by little the awfulness of this Scottish castle, and the eccentric nature of its inhabitants, emerges: the two Lesley sisters, both very tall, gain a stepmother who is very short. Charlotte Cuttrell, to whom all write in their passion and despair, is an unfeeling audience and, it is evident in her replies, thinks only about food — its preparation and its eating — but by the ninth letter (the one before last) invention is wearing thin, as the postscript to the letter shows:

I am afraid this letter will be but a poor specimen of My Powers in the Witty Way: and your opinion of them will not be greatly increased when I assure you that I have been as entertaining as I possibly could.

‘Well, yes, Jane,’ Henry may have remarked, as the family sat beside the fire in the evening, and the servants drove the warming pans into the beds upstairs, and they had finished politely admiring Cassandra’s sketches, and talked a little about what was happening in France — that year of the declaration of the Republic and the setting up of the Revolutionary Tribunal — and whether cousin Eliza, who had married a French aristocrat, and a Roman Catholic one at that, would not soon be faced with the penalty of her wilfulness — and then perhaps wondered whether they should send off for Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women
— and then, when finally Jane had read out her last instalment of
Lesley Castle
(letter 9), ‘Well, yes, Jane, you are quite right. It
is
a poor specimen of your powers in the witty way, and I suggest you give up.’ Henry would have been nineteen at the time: he was a scholar and at Oxford: hard for any member of a family audience, hearing that postscript read aloud,
not
to make such a remark: and Henry seems the one most likely to make it. He was the joker of the family. He later, after Jane’s death, some twenty years later, when he had sobered down, wrote a preface to
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion,
of really acute sycophancy: ‘Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives…’ writes Henry. But oh, Henry, once your sister joked and said she’d charge you a hundred guineas for an unfinished novel — could you have forgotten that? Or even at the time, did you raise your eyebrows, even while you joked, and do your best to discomfit your clever little sister?

Whom not everybody, incidentally, liked. Philadelphia Walter, an Austen relative, wrote in this manner when Jane was twelve:

Yesterday I began an acquaintance with my two female cousins, Austens. My uncle, aunt, Cassandra and Jane arrived at Mr F. Austen’s the day before. We dined with them there. The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve; but it is a hasty judgement which you will scold me for. My aunt has lost several fore-teeth which makes her look old — [no one knew about calcium then: tradition held it that you lost one tooth with every child, and you probably did. So Mrs Austen would be eight down.] — my uncle is quite white-haired, but looks vastly well: all in high spirits and disposed to be pleased with each other…Yesterday they all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire — Jane is whimsical and affected.

Poor Philadelphia: if she had known the scrutiny this letter was to be subjected to — if she had known how she was to be disliked for daring to criticize Jane — no doubt she would have been more careful in her description. But girls are often at their plainest at twelve, of course, and certainly self-conscious, and in her efforts to impress her cousin with her virtue, Jane may have appeared self-righteous; and with her imagination, whimsical (i.e. given to an irritating irrationality).

But I do dislike all these ‘ifs’, and ‘may haves’; they can only be speculation; and are in a way parasitical: the present sucking nourishment from the past, the living from the dead, as if there wasn’t enough emotion and event now to sop up all our desire for analysis and explanation. Jane Austen made a bad impression on Philadelphia Walter, and that’s that.

She may (there we go again) have made an unfortunate impression on the young men she met. I suspect she was too clever, too well read, altogether too full of mockery. There is a race of young men abroad today who are fascinated by what we call ‘strong’ women, women who work, think, earn, have independent habits and who would no more make a man a cup of coffee — unless perhaps he was ill — than they would commit murder; women to whom the personal is the political, and for whom admiration is the most difficult emotion of all, defining men as they do as dangerous at best, and despicable at worst.

That is enough of that. I am going to pack. The temperature here is 32°C. That is very hot. In England, I believe, it is around 8°C. There seems little point in packing, since what little I have here is of even less use there. The manuscript has gone off to the publisher. I had it photocopied in Cairns and sent it off from the Post Office there. Australians do not take the post as seriously as we do. I had difficulty persuading them to put stamps on the package anywhere near sufficient to guarantee its arrival in Sydney, let alone in the UK. They are happy in their isolation, in the hot sun. But
Emma’s
there, in the bookcase: subversive reading, with its lessons in moral refinement.

I have taken a long time getting Jane Austen through her childhood and adolescence. ‘The facts known about Jane Austen can be put in a nutshell’, I remember reading in my Matric. English Lit. textbook at school, and wondered at the time why it was thought appropriate to put facts in nutshells. Do you know? It is true there isn’t much known: we have such of her letters as her sister Cassandra thought it proper for the world to see, after her death; a few reports from friends and relatives, and, of course, the texts of her books from which, as Seventh Day Adventists do with the Bible, you can deduce pretty much what you wish.

I will fill you in on the rest of her life, in a sentence or two, if not a nutshell, and return to it in later letters. I don’t think I will go to pack: I think I will simply lie in the shade by the pool. (The bus driver will take this letter to the post box for me. There is something about this place that reminds me of Georgian England. It is not just the alarming fact that they sentence criminals — those whom they define as criminal: that is, mostly Aboriginals — to prison sentences with hard labour, but that, more positively, simple human needs are recognized and met, with an easy, natural helpfulness, and with the sense that everyone is working together towards the best of all possible worlds.)

Jane Austen did not marry. She had no children. Nor did Cassandra. Jane Austen lived at Steventon until she was twenty-five, when her father retired. The family then went to Bath, where her father presently died. Her mother, Cassandra and she, left unprovided for, then lived by the courtesy of relatives for two years in Southampton, and then in the village of Chawton, in a house which had once been an inn, in the shadow (more or less. It’s half a mile away) of the great house where her brother Edward lived in style. In this house she wrote
Emma, Mansfield Park
and
Persuasion.
You can still visit the house, and see the small round table where she worked. I went there once and it seemed to me her spirit was still there: the part of her that was the writer, at any rate. You may dismiss this as silly if you like.

In 1817 she died, of, it is now said, Addison’s Disease. Then it was described as a lingering illness. She was forty-one.