Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (14 page)

Jane Austen was born in rural Hampshire, the sixth of seven children of a well-off, cultivated clergyman with a good library: strong, it would seem, in fiction (some volumes, like Sterne and Fielding, not always thought suitable for a young lady). The Revd George Austen’s relationship with his daughter is, biographers have presumed, evoked in that of Mr Bennet with Elizabeth. She was educated at home, other than a year (1785–6) at boarding school in Reading. She wrote in the small recesses of privacy she was able to create in a crowded home – but shared her work in progress with her family, who were her earliest critics and encouragers. Austen visited friends and relatives in London, Bath, and Lyme Regis – places which later served as locations for her stories. In 1801, the family moved to Bath and, after the Revd Austen’s death in 1806, to Southampton; and finally in 1809 they settled in Chawton, Hants, where she wrote her last three novels, the actual composition of which has always been uncertain chronologically. She died, tragically early, of what used to be thought to be Addison’s disease, but recently medical experts are less sure and surmise that it may have been TB, or lymphoma. Another thing we shall never know.

Throw it all into the pot and the conclusion is that we know little more about Austen than about Shakespeare. With both writers, the biographical vacuum around their work has done no harm whatsoever. Arguably, with the very greatest writers (to paraphrase Walter Bagehot on monarchy): ‘We must not let daylight in upon the magic.’

The offspring of no common genius.
Coleridge on
The Monk

The naughty novelist of his age, he was universally nicknamed ‘Monk Lewis’ after his naughtiest novel,
The Monk
. It was the Marquis de Sade’s favourite English work of fiction, tellingly an endorsement which perhaps rings more attractively in 2010 than it did in 1810. Lewis was, like William Beckford (author of the similarly notorious
Vathek
), thoroughly homosexual. Unofficial awareness of the fact added to his contemporary allure. His family had been enriched by sugar plantations in the West Indies and his father was Deputy Secretary for War at the time of
The Monk
’s publication. Lewis’s mother was a famous society beauty; she was only nineteen when Matthew (her first child) was born. Lewis was between Westminster School and Oxford when his parents’ marriage broke up, furiously, in 1790: she ran away with a music master. Emotionally close to his errant mother (with whom he later lived), he enjoyed generous financial and career patronage from his father. For him, it was the ideal domestic arrangement.

Lewis was writing precocious plays at fifteen. He travelled widely in Europe (currently shaken by the French Terror) in preparation for a diplomatic career. He resided in Paris in 1791 (where he imbibed anti-clerical pornography, later exploited in his novel) and in Weimar 1792–3, where he learned German and immersed himself in that country’s vogue for
Schauerromantik
. In 1793 he returned to England where his mother actively urged him towards a literary career. Well born and rich, he none the less cut an unimpressive figure in society. A young lady in 1808 described him, witheringly, ‘as a slim, skinny, finical fop, of modish address, with a very neatly rounded pair of legs and a very ugly face’, the last further disfigured by ‘jagged and slovenly teeth’.

In May 1794 he travelled to The Hague, on diplomatic business, having just devoured Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, which came out that month. While in Holland he wrote sections of
The Monk
, which was duly published the following March. The period 1795–6 was to be a highpoint of florid, post-Radcliffean Gothic. In addition to
The Monk
, it saw John Palmer Jr’s
The Haunted Tower
(1795) and
The Mystery of the Black Tower
(1796); and Regina Maria Roche’s
The Children of the Abbey
(1796).

In 1796 Lewis was introduced as a Whig MP into the House by Charles James Fox. But following the huge success of his play,
The Castle Spectre
(the title says everything), in 1797 he gave up his planned career in public life. Between 1798 and 1812 he published verse and translations and had a number of melodramas staged. He was, however, cautious never to offend as extremely as he had with his first (and
only) novel. In consequence he never enjoyed great fame again, either in print or on the stage.

Lewis was, reportedly, deeply involved in the amoral life of the London theatre set. He became loosely attached to the remarkable party at Geneva, which produced in 1816 John Polidori’s
The Vampyre
and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. In later life he inherited his father’s estates in Jamaica: he was inclined towards abolition but prudently decided that any unilateral gesture on his part would be pointless (and expensive). It’s nice to fantasise that he met Jane Austen’s Sir Thomas Bertram as those two
bien pensants
tended to their affairs in the Caribbean. Like Sir Thomas, Lewis visited Jamaica where his attention to the welfare of ‘his’ blacks was commented on. He died of yellow fever on a return voyage from his plantations in 1818.

The Monk
, published anonymously in three volumes in 1796, was still tingling English spines at the time of his death and long thereafter. The British Library contains ‘mutilated’ copies of the novel which was, at various times, suppressed or furtively merchandised as a ‘prohibited’ book. The narrative contains gloating descriptions of sexual deviance (a French translation, for example, did not mince words in its title –
Le Moine Incestueux
). The novel also draws on traditionally scabrous ‘Nunnery Tales’, as spiced up by Jacobin anti-clerical pornographic satire. It was a dangerous book.

The monk of the title is Ambrosio, Abbot of the Capuchins in Madrid. Behind a saintly disguise, he debauches penitents, murders his mother and rapes his sister. In one of the most sensual scenes in the novel, the beautiful Matilda comes to Ambrosio’s monastic cell and lovingly sucks the venom from a ‘centipiedra’ bite in the monk’s arm, after which the couple surrender themselves to three days of sexual madness before she reveals herself to be a vengeful sorceress and an agent of the devil. Nemesis finally comes at the hands of the Inquisition. Facing death at the stake, Matilda appears to him again and offers him escape if he will sign over his soul entirely to the devil. This he does, only to be cheated by the Evil One who hurls him down a ravine to suffer unimaginable torment for six days. Insects drink Ambrosio’s warm blood and eagles tear out his eyeballs ‘with their crooked beaks’.

Lewis’s own death was as gothic as anything in his fiction. On board the ship he wrote his will on his servant’s hat. With a macabre gothic touch, his body was put in an improvised coffin which was wrapped in a sheet with weights and dropped overboard; but the weights fell out and the coffin bobbed up on the surface – the sheet acting as a sail in the wind – and floated across the waves back to Jamaica.

If Fanny is remembered at all today, it is as an admittedly courageous and hard-working woman who nevertheless neglected her talented son, and was herself a second-rate writer, a political dilettante and a bit of a snob.
Biographer Pamela Neville-Sington, who disagrees with the depiction

Most male novelists have learned to read at their mothers’ knees. Only one comes to mind who learned to write novels from observing his mother. The essence of what we think of as the Trollopian method – early rising, tradesmanlike application to the task, and indomitable ‘cheerfulness’ – can be traced directly to Anthony Trollope’s mother. There is a description in
An Autobiography
of Mrs Trollope heroically penning her light fiction to keep the wolf from the door, while her children die, one by one, from consumption:

She was at her table at four in the morning, and had finished her work before the world had begun to be aroused … There were two sick men in the house, and hers were the hands that tended them. The novels went on, of course. We had already learned to know that they would be forthcoming at stated intervals – and they were always forthcoming. The doctor’s vials and the ink-bottle held equal place in my mother’s rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances; but I doubt much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son.

The main lines of Fanny Trollope’s life are laid down in the second chapter of
An Autobiography
– ‘My Mother’. There is no corresponding chapter on ‘My Father’. The sprightly daughter of a West Country clergyman, Frances Milton waited until she was thirty before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ from a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin the family finances buying land, losing briefs and antagonising patrons. The uncle married at the age of sixty-plus and produced heirs as lustily as his nephew. In the crisis of their affairs, in November 1827, Mrs Trollope, aged forty-eight, went off to America for three and a half years. She had in tow her favourite son Henry, two small daughters, a couple of servants, and a young French artist who was devoted to her, Auguste Hervieu. Mr Trollope was not in attendance. Nor was twelve-year-old Anthony.

Mrs Trollope’s first destination in America was an Owenite community, Nashoba, in backwoods Tennessee, founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What
Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love, and, less publicly stated, lesbian freedoms. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, the degree of her commitment to Owenite ideals, and her precise relationship with Fanny Wright and Hervieu, have been carefully excised from the official record.

Inevitably, the community was a squalid shambles. After ten days and the inevitable rupture with Wright, Mrs Trollope and her brood moved on to Cincinnati. Here she put on dramatic shows and erected a ‘bazaar’ – ‘Trollope’s folly,’ as it came to be called – a kind of proto-shopping mall (the Paris arcades evidently gave her the idea for it). Ironically, the bazaar came close to succeeding. A key factor in its eventual failure was Mrs Trollope’s having affronted her potential clientele, the bourgeois ladies of the town, by living with a French artist away from her husband. She could have been the Donald Trump of her day.

After more than three years in America, Fanny Trollope was fifty-one and broke. She returned to England and published a book – ‘blowing up the Merrikins’, as Tony Weller would say. The gloriously spiteful
Domestic Manners of the Americans
(they have none) was an 1832 bestseller – in England. Just as profitably, she turned from travel book to fiction, promptly entering the select ranks of the £1,000-a-book authors. Her novels included
Tremordyn Cliff
(1835), the study of a dominant woman (a character type which was to become Trollope’s trademark); the anti-slavery novel
Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw
(1836) – a likely influence on Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
; the ‘social problem’ novel
The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy
(1840); and her fictional attack on the country’s bastardy laws,
Jessie Phillips
(1843). The work of this ten years is the high point of her career in fiction. It was also the high point in her earning. It was, her son Tom said, as if a fairy godmother had waved her wand over the Trollope household.

With her husband’s death in 1835, Mrs Trollope’s life became easier – though no less industrious. Latching, with cynical speed, on to every fictional fashion that came along and allying herself with huckster publishers (like Henry Colburn), she continued to delight circulating library readers while infuriating the stuffier kind of male critic with her ‘unwomanly’ smartness. Mrs Trollope, wrote the young fogey Thackeray on reading her maliciously anti-evangelical novel,
The Vicar of Wrexhill
, ‘had much better have remained at home, pudding-making or stocking-making, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill’.

Having married off her daughter Cecilia (the unfortunate young woman soon died, leaving behind a novel), and launched Anthony into a Civil Service and novel-writing career, finding him his first publisher, Mrs Trollope left in 1844 for villa life
in Florence with her older son, Thomas, another part-time novelist. She was sixty-five. Her retirement years were characteristically active. Thomas, his father’s son in more than name, needed the cash. As Anthony recalls, ‘she continued writing up to 1856 when she was 76 years old; – and had at that time produced 114 volumes of which the first was not written till she was 50. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence.’