Microsoft Word - Copy of Jane Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins.doc Read online

  "'It is not like Udolpho at all, but yet I think it is very entertaining.'"

  "'Do you indeed? You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.'"

  It would be amusing to speculate which novel of the present century has made so strong an impression on its readers that in a hundred years' time the character of two people in a then contemporary novel could be estimated by their respective attitudes towards it.

  - 44 -

  5

  THE YOUNG ladies of Steventon Rectory were two very pretty

  girls. They were rather above middle height. Jane especially was very slender and lightly moving; her hair was dark brown and curled naturally, her large dark eyes were widely opened and expressive.

  Sir Egerton Brydges, who had admired her when she was a

  schoolgirl, said that then her cheeks were too full, but a portrait of her as a young woman suggests that she outgrew this defect. She had a clear brown skin and blushed so brightly and so readily that Henry applied Donne's lines to her:

  Her pure and eloquent blood

  Spake in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought

  That you had almost said her body thought.

  Her voice was charming--sweet and clear and of exquisite

  articulation--and though her behavior was quiet, her unconsidered, spontaneous remarks impressed themselves on the hearer's mind; her conversation was very pleasant when she had to make it in company, and brilliantly lively when she was in the freedom and safety of the home circle. Of the two girls, she was the immediately striking one, though she

  - 45 -

  sometimes kept deliberately behind Cassandra. As the older sister to such a younger, Cassandra was an ideal being. She was very

  intelligent--indeed, she had their mother's shrewdness--at the same time her outward appearance was completely tranquil; there was a gentle sweetness in her manner which was the more remarkable

  because it did not bespeak an uncritical or easy-going nature. It is needless to say that she had not Jane's powers of intuition, but, as an ordinary human being, she possessed extremely good judgment and at the same time the tendency to like people and excuse them, and that other unusual combination of great gentleness and undeviating firmness in doing what she considered to be right. The family said of them that Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always

  under control, and Jane had the happiness of a temper that needed no control.

  The sisters slept together, and out of their bedroom opened a good-sized dressing room, plainly furnished but containing their personal possessions. The carpet had flowers on a brown ground; an oval looking-glass hung between the two windows; there was a chest of drawers of painted wood, with a bookcase over it; Cassandra's

  drawing materials, and Jane's piano; also a writing desk, a box with a sloping lid.

  The part of her life which Jane lived in this room, where she spent so many absorbed and happy hours, with Cassandra beside her, whose presence interrupted her not at all, did not interfere with her life below stairs. At this time Eliza de Feuillide said that Jane and Cassandra were both very pretty and breaking hearts by the dozen, and though the second part of the sentence could perhaps be

  explained as Eliza's way of putting things, the Austen family, during Jane's late 'teens, were all alive with love-making and getting married. James, who had become the curate of a neighboring

  - 46 -

  parish, had married the daughter of the great house, Ann Matthew, who was five years older than he was, but for whose discrepancy in age James' seriousness well made up. General Matthew allowed the couple £100 a year, and James had £200 of his own. On this it was possible to live in the country districts of eighteenth-century England very comfortably; Mrs. James Austen had her carriage, and, the Austen passion for sport being shared even by the pensive James, a pack of harriers was kept for the curate.

  The marriage of Edward was also about to take place. Edward, the heir to Mr. Knight's great fortune and his estates of Godmersham and Chawton, was marrying in circumstances widely different from his brother's. He had become engaged to the beautiful Elizabeth Bridges, whose father, Sir Brooke Bridges, owned a considerable property.

  His wife's miniature by Cosway remains to show that Edward

  Austen's extraordinary good fortune was constant to him in marriage as well as in worldly prosperity.

  Edward remained warmly fond of his relations and interested in their affairs, and though he was not so intimate with the family as a whole as he would have been if he had been brought up with them, he

  claimed Cassandra as his own special sister, and from the time of his marriage she was constantly staying with him. Cassandra in the meantime was becoming very happy on her own account. Martha

  and Mary Lloyd's kinsman, Lord Craven, another descendant of the Cruel Mrs. C., had a young cousin named Thomas Fowle. As a

  visitor in the Lloyds' household he inevitably made the acquaintance of the Austens, and he fell in love with Cassandra Austen. With her parents' consent, the two became engaged. Fowle had just been

  ordained, and it was confidently hoped that Lord Craven, who was very kind to him, would give him one of the several valuable livings in his gift.

  - 47 -

  A certain Shropshire living, perhaps because it was about to fall vacant, was the one which everybody supposed would be given to Fowle. Because of the present slight uncertainty of his prospects and possibly because Cassandra disliked a bustle about herself, the engagement was not publicly announced.

  In the meantime there was a wedding actually in their midst. Jane Cooper had accompanied her father, Dr. Cooper, on a cruise for his health, in the course of which she met Lieutenant Thomas Williams, and became engaged to him. Unhappily Dr. Cooper died before the wedding could be arranged, and after the period of mourning, Jane Cooper, having neither father nor mother, came to Steventon to be married from the house of her uncle and aunt.

  Jane herself, whose only sister was already engaged, could "come out" as soon as she liked, even if the Austens rigidly observed the etiquette of not bringing forward the younger girls till the elder were disposed of, but so far her only romantic interest had been a standing flirtation with Mr. Lefroy's nephew, Tom, renewed whenever he

  came to Ashe, and not considered as very serious at present by anybody.

  Of this group of marriages which occupied so much of the family attention, James', the earliest made, was the shortest lived. His wife died while their daughter was so young that all she could remember of her mother was "a tall and slender lady dressed in white." The poor young widower was left with a child who asked continually for

  "Mama," and, unable to bear it, or to make any suitable arrangement for the little Anna in his own house, he sent her to Steventon to be

  "mothered" by her two young aunts. It is to the recollections of this child, remarkably intelligent for her age, that we owe the

  descriptions of the dressing room, and of something else very

  interesting. Jane, who began to be the perfect

  - 48 -

  aunt long before she was twenty, would tell Anna stories that went on from day to day, and when Anna made up stories for herself, she dictated them to Jane, who wrote them down. But Jane was also

  writing a story of her own; it was called First Impressions, and while Anna played quietly in the dressing room, Jane would read aloud the completed chapters of this story to Cassandra, who always burst out laughing. Anna heard so much of the story that she grew quite

  familiar with the names of the people, and at last she began to talk about them downstairs; but no sooner did Cassandra and Jane hear her doing this than they both asked her to be very careful not to say another word about the story to anybody, because it was quite

  private, and a secret that Anna had with them.

  First Impressions was not the only story Jane had produced. Elinor and Marianne, a novel in which the events were related in letters, she had either sketched out or
completed; but though she loved to write, and when actually at work proceeded with complete and

  unerring self-confidence, as soon as she laid down the pen she became once more the modest, self-distrustful tyro. To their

  acquaintances at large she would not be known to write for anything.

  The contemporary novelist whom she admired most was a woman,

  Madame D'Arblay, who as Fanny Burney had startled the literary world with Evelina, published in 1778, when she was a girl of twenty and Jane a child of three. Fanny Burney had followed her first success with Cecilia; at last in 1796, in Jane's twenty-first year, it was announced that she was about to bring out her third novel, Camilla. The public were, of course, invited to subscribe; several pages of the first of the five volumes are occupied with an imposing subscription list in alphabetical order, and among the A's is found the entry: Miss J. Austen, Steventon.

  - 49 -

  According to family tradition, the Rev. George Austen paid the money to give his daughter this extreme delight. The anticipation, the eagerness and excitement with which the five thick, small

  volumes, with their elegant large print, were received and carried off to the dressing room can be understood when we think of our

  pleasure in getting hold of a book we have wanted very much to read, and multiply that many hundred times, by imagining ourselves without a cinema, without a wireless set, without a gramophone, without a daily newspaper. Nor were these anticipations

  disappointed, and if Jane Austen's high opinion of Fanny Burney --or it might possibly be more accurate to say, the immense pleasure she took in Miss Burney's work--should surprise us, considering the immeasurable distance between them in their rank as novelist, we must remember that if Jane Austen were to take pleasure in a

  contemporary novelist at all before 1815, when, three years before her death, Scott published Guy Mannering, it had of necessity to be in someone whose work was inferior to her own.

  It must be agreed that despite her virtues, Fanny Burney's faults as a writer are too serious for people who have available for their delight the whole range of nineteenth-century novelists to consider her as more than an excellent but very unequal writer. Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla, and the first especially, contain scenes of a sharpness and gaiety approaching those of Sheridan, but they also contain noble characters who are intolerably priggish and verbose, and long

  stretches of moralizing through which the reader flounders in

  despair. These drawbacks are much more pronounced in the second two books. For Evelina, written in deadly secrecy, by a girl whose stepmother didn't approve of scribbling, has the true stamp of the first novel: written to please nobody but the writer, unmodified by any idea of public

  - 50 -

  taste; but the instant and overwhelming success of Evelina transformed its author from the retiring young lady who could not help sometimes going upstairs to scribble, though she had been told, and had agreed, that she ought not, into the famous Miss Burney, who had become a writer conscious of an eager audience. She was not strong enough to withstand the sensation; the rage for moralizing and sentiment which beset the latter end of the eighteenth century, from whose hampering cerements started forth the true sensibility of the Romantic Revival, is most dutifully pandered to in Cecilia and Camilla.

  Jane Austen already knew Evelina and Cecilia. One of her nieces remembered, as a very young child, hearing her read a part out of Evelina, one of the chapters concerning the Branghtons and Mr.

  Smith, and she thought it sounded like a play. The scheme of

  Evelina, in which the lovely, country-bred girl of seventeen is brought to town by some very well-bred and charming friends, but has to spend part of her time with a shocking old grandmother, Madame Duval, and her vulgar relations, the Branghtons--who very seriously interfere with the progress of her acquaintance with Lord Orville, which she made under the auspices of her friends the

  Mirvans--is excellently framed to bring in a wide variety of contrasts among scenes and people. The comic, the vulgar, the embarrassing parts of the story are brilliantly done. The serious love interest is much less successful, and years later, when Jane Austen was reading and commenting upon a story of the then grown-up Anna, she said:

  "I do not like a lover's speaking in the third person; it is too much like the formal parts of Lord Orville, and I think is not natural."

  Cecilia, the story of an heiress, with a doleful plot and a set of principal characters each one more tiresome and long-winded

  - 51 -

  than the last, has nevertheless a crowd of incidental figures who do full justice to Fanny Burney's power of vigorous observation and wit.

  One of the most successful is Miss Larolles, a young and pretty little creature, a perfect humming-top of fashionable nonsense. Miss

  Larolles in the theatre explained to Cecilia her disappointment at being unable to attract the attention of a much-sought-after young man, and said: "I sat on the outside on purpose to speak to a person or two that I knew would be strolling about; for if one sits on the inside there is no speaking to a creature, you know, so I never do it, at the Opera, nor in the boxes at Ranelagh nor anywhere. It's the shockingest thing you can conceive, to be made sit in the middle of those forms; one might as well be at home, for nobody can speak to one." Nearly twenty years later, when she wrote Persuasion, Jane Austen's mind reverted to this speech. Anne Elliot, when she begins tremblingly to hope that Captain Wentworth is becoming reconciled to her, finds herself present at a concert with him in the Assembly Rooms of Bath. She is obliged to talk to her neighbor during the pauses between the songs, but at the interval he leaves her for the bench behind, and Anne, seeing Captain Wentworth standing near, changes her seat to one much nearer the end of the row: "She could not do so without comparing herself with Miss Larolles, the

  inimitable Miss Larolles, but still she did it, and not with much happier effect."

  It is at the end of Cecilia, however, that one receives a start of surprise and recognition. The physician and family friend, Dr.

  Lyster, is reviewing the progress of Cecilia's affair with young Delville. "The whole of this unfortunate business," said Dr. Lyster,

  "has been the result of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE . . . yet this, however, remember; that if to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE you owe

  your miseries, so wonderfully are

  - 52 -

  good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE you owe

  also their termination."

  But it is with Camilla that we approach Jane Austen most nearly. At the time of its publication, the enthusiasm of Edmund Burke, who put his name down for five sets, probably gave Madame D'Arblay the most pleasure. If she had been asked to say whose name she valued next, she could have made her choice from amongst the most distinguished figures in society; she perhaps never even noticed that of the quite unknown young lady living in a Hampshire parsonage.

  The wheel has come full circle, and whatever the intrinsic merits of Camilla, we read it now because we know it pleased Jane Austen.

  The merits are considerable; the book has not the young gaiety of Evelina, but it has much more depth and the interest is more continuously sustained; the aridity of Cecilia it avoids altogether, and though its length would prevent its being reprinted now, at the time of Camilla's publication a good novel in five volumes was better by two-thirds than a good novel in three.

  Camilla was clearly destined, by her family's wishes and the

  author's, for a Mr. Edgar Mandlebert; but though they were mutually attracted and there was no reason why they should not marry

  immediately, the union was postponed for five volumes by Edgar's sage friend Dr. Marchmont, who, preying on the young man's

  reflective turn of mind, put this diabolical idea into his head: he was not henceforth to admire Camilla's gaiety and enthusiasm as a mere spectator, but every time she said or did anything, he was to say to himself: "How should I like this, were she mine?" Unhapp
ily for the satisfaction of the female sex, Madame D'Arblay did not see fit to provide Camilla with a female confidante who would encourage her in a similar line of conduct. Dr. Marchmont's

  - 53 -

  interference is, like the irresolution of Hamlet, the mainspring of the action; but the feelings we enterrain for Edgar Mandlebert and his affairs are the most tepid to which the book gives rise; and the enjoyment of the novel consists in the solid, brightly colored secondary characters and the scenes which have a nominal

  connection with the story but are really there on their own merits.

  The most famous of these is the celebrated episode of Mr. Dubster's summer house. In all Madame D'Arblay's novels there is a strain of extremely vigorous horse-play supplied by mischievous young men: in Camilla, by the heroine's brother Lionel. Mr. Dubster was a self-made man, uncouth and bumptious to the verge of farce. He had

  been attracted by Camilla at a village assembly, and had no idea that his attentions might be unacceptable. Lionel, having seen as much, drove his unsuspecting sisters out to a bare, flat country district where Mr. Dubster was building a staring villa; the latter, delighted at the interest in his work he supposed Camilla to feel, insisted on taking her and her sister Euphemia up to his summer house, which overhung the lane and was reached by a single ladder. When the party were inside, they looked out of the window to see Lionel joyously riding off down the lane, and realized that he had taken away the ladder. It was the builders' lunch hour, and Mr. Dubster was particularly annoyed that he could not go after them to see they didn't waste the time for which he was paying them. Camilla in acute dismay tried to attract the attention of people passing in the lane, and the party were finally rescued by a passing troop of huntsmen. This is the episode to which Jane Austen referred when she said that she was obliged to stay with Edward and Elizabeth at their house at Rowling until the end of the month, because her brother Frank, who was to take her home, was going away

  - 54 -