Dedication

For my very own Elinor (Ellie)

Epigraph

The room was most dear to her, and she would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain, had suffered all the ill-usage of children – and its greatest elegancies and ornaments were a faded footstool of Julia’s work, too ill done for the drawing-room, three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland; a collection of family profiles, thought unworthy of being anywhere else, over the mantelpiece, and by their side, and pinned against the wall, a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the main-mast.

Mansfield Park, vol 1, ch. 16

[S]he seized the scrap of paper … locked it up with the chain, as the dearest part of the gift. It was the only thing approaching to a letter which she had ever received from him; she might never receive another; it was impossible that she ever should receive another so perfectly gratifying in the occasion and the style. Two lines more prized had never fallen from the pen of the most distinguished author – never more completely blessed the researches of the fondest biographer. The enthusiasm of a woman’s love is even beyond the biographer’s.

Mansfield Park, vol 2, ch. 9

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Prologue: Captain Harville’s Carpentry

1. The Family Profile

2. The East Indian Shawl

3. The Vellum Notebooks

4. The Subscription List

5. The Sisters

6. The Barouche

7. The Cocked Hat

8. The Theatrical Scenes

9. The Card of Lace

10. The Marriage Banns

11. The Ivory Miniature

12. The Daughter of Mansfield

13. The Crimson Velvet Cushions

14. The Topaz Crosses

15. The Box of Letters

16. The Laptop

17. The Royalty Cheque

18. The Bathing Machine

Epilogue

Picture Credits

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Also by Paula Byrne

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Each chapter begins with a description of the image that sets its theme. Jane Austen’s novels are quoted from the Oxford World’s Classics editions, but references in the endnotes take the form of volume and chapter number, so as to make it possible to locate the relevant passage in other editions. So, for example, 1.8 means chapter 8 of volume 1 (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were each originally published in two volumes, the other four completed novels each in three volumes). The irregular spellings in Austen’s letters and youthful writings are retained (most famously, ‘Love and Freindship’, but also ‘beleive’, ‘neice’, ‘Lime’ for Lyme, ‘Keen’ for the actor Kean, and so on). The endnotes also acknowledge, at relevant points, the work of the many wonderful Jane Austen scholars on whom I have drawn.

In order to give readers an idea of monetary values – whether for the cost of a card of lace or the worth of Jane Austen’s royalty cheque – I have given 2011 equivalents derived from the Bank of England’s online historical inflation calculator (and with a dollar equivalent on the rough basis of $1.50 to a pound). It must, however, be remembered that these are merely indicative sums: over the centuries inflation has been much greater for some things than others.

PROLOGUE

Captain Harville’s Carpentry

This is a watercolour of Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England. The cottages nestle on the hillside. An old stone breakwater leads down to the shoreline. A man and a woman are walking on the beach and a solitary figure is looking out to sea. A rowing boat is on its way out to a ship at anchor in the bay. The eye is drawn to an expansive view of sloping cliffs and open sky.1

Jane Austen loved the sea. The story goes that when her father announced in December 1800 that he was leaving his position as rector of the parish of Steventon and retiring to Bath, she was so shocked that she fainted. She reconciled herself to the move only when the family promised to take a holiday by the seaside every summer. In 1801 and 1802 they went to Sidmouth and Teignmouth in Devon. In 1803 and 1804 it was the turn of Lyme Regis.

‘The young people were all wild to see Lyme.’ When they arrive, in chapter eleven of Persuasion, Jane Austen describes the little seaside resort in the style of a tour guide: the pleasant bay, the new-fangled bathing machines, the famous Cobb, the beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, the charms of ‘the immediate environs’ – the high sweep of countryside around Charmouth, ‘the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks … a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight’.2

‘These places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood,’ Jane Austen tells her readers. She had visited Lyme at least twice, on one occasion witnessing a fire that destroyed a number of houses. When she describes the place in her novel, she is visiting it yet again, this time in her imagination. Her description is the literary equivalent of the engravings of popular tourist sites that were readily obtainable in the burgeoning print market of the age – the Regency version of the picture postcard.

Jane Austen cared a great deal about accuracy. She wanted her novels to be true to life. When reading a draft of a novel by her niece Anna, she pointed out that it was an error to portray people in Dawlish gossiping about the news from Lyme: ‘Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles distance from Dawlish and would not be talked of there.’3 Her novels were grounded in the real world. In order to create them, she drew upon the reality that she knew: the people, the places, the events. The celebrated fictional scene in which Louisa Musgrove nearly dies when being ‘jumped’ off the narrow steps of the Cobb is not based on a real incident, but it could not have been written if Jane Austen had not visited the real Lyme and memorized its topography.

The picturesque description of the romantic rocks of Lyme is not, however, her most common style. And in this case her passion for the sea perhaps led her to idealize the reality of the place. ‘I was disappointed in Lime,’ wrote her sister-in-law Mary to that niece Anna, ‘as from your Aunt Janes Novel I had expected it a clean pretty place, whereas it was dirty and ugly.’4

The fall on the Cobb, the bad-tempered exchange at Box Hill, the escape across the ha-ha from the grounds of Sotherton, the road-traffic accident with which her final unfinished novel begins: outdoor scenes in Austen’s novels are often dramatic excursions – involving misadventures, transgressions, arguments, misunderstandings, proposals – whereas her habitual location is indoors, within the world of polite, if barbed, conversation in drawing rooms and over dinner tables. Chapter eleven of Persuasion does not dwell for long on the seaside panorama. The narrative swiftly follows the visitors inside.

Not, however, into a great house of the kind that has become familiar in television and film adaptations of Austen’s novels (in which the houses are nearly always bigger than they should be). ‘Near the foot of an old pier of uncertain date’5 on the seafront at Lyme there is a row of cottages. We enter a cramped but welcoming parlour. It is the home of Captain Harville, who has retired in poor health as the result of a severe wound incurred on naval service during the war that lasted for almost the whole of Jane Austen’s adult life. This snug little dwelling-place will be revisited later, but for a first glimpse of Austen’s art of minute observation consider a single detail:

Captain Harville was no reader; but he had contrived excellent accommodations, and fashioned very pretty shelves, for a tolerable collection of well-bound volumes, the property of Captain Benwick. His lameness prevented him from taking much exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him with constant employment within. He drew, he varnished, he carpentered, he glued; he made toys for the children, he fashioned new netting-needles and pins with improvements; and if every thing else was done, sat down with his large fishing-net at one corner of the room.

Anne Elliot will soon engage Captain Benwick in conversation about books, debating the relative merits of the two most fashionable poets of the day, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. She gently suggests that romantic poetry might not be the most healthy reading for a man with a broken heart such as Benwick – though she sees the irony of her admonitions to ‘patience and resignation’ in the light of her own broken heart.

But it is Captain Harville’s carpentry that sticks in the mind: the prettily fashioned shelves, the varnish, the glue, the toys for the children. Jane Austen grew up in a house of books and reading, but she also came from a family that valued handiwork, the craft of making things, whether with needle or wood.

Captain Benwick reading poetry aloud while Captain Harville mends his net is a little image of how she imagined a secure home and a sense of belonging. Her family circle was a place of quick tongues, laughter and moving fingers, with a novel being read aloud and everyone busy at their needlework. Both her world and her novels can be brought alive through the texture of things, the life of objects.

***

Sketch of a Royal Navy ship by Jane Austen’s nephew, Captain Herbert Austen

In January 1852 Admiral Francis Austen received a letter from the daughter of the President of Harvard University. ‘Since high critical authority has pronounced the delineations of character in the works of Jane Austen second only to those of Shakespeare,’ Miss Quincy began, ‘transatlantic admiration appears superfluous; yet it may not be uninteresting to her family to receive an assurance that the influence of her genius is extensively recognised in the American Republic.’6 She was writing because she wanted an autograph of the great novelist.

The Admiral was more than obliging. He was delighted to hear that the ‘celebrity’ of his late sister’s works had reached across the Atlantic. He sent not merely a signature but a whole Jane Austen letter. And he was happy to provide a character sketch of her. She was cheerful, not easily irritated, a little shy with strangers. Her natural reserve was sometimes misinterpreted as haughtiness. She was kind and funny, never failing to excite ‘the mirth and hilarity of the party’. She loved children and they loved her: ‘Her Nephews and Nieces of whom there were many could not have a greater treat than crouding around and listening to Aunt Jane’s stories.’

Miss Susan Quincy shared the contents of the Jane Austen letter with her sister, who was ‘quite carried off her feet’ with excitement. The conclusion, they agreed, could only be that Admiral Austen was so charming that ‘he must have been like Captain Wentworth when he was young’. Was Jane Austen’s brother really the inspiration for the hero of Persuasion? Miss Quincy communicated her sister’s response to the elderly Admiral. He replied that he was very flattered, but:

I do not know whether in the character of Captain Wentworth the authoress meant in any degree to delineate that of her Brother. Perhaps she might, but I rather think parts of Captain Harville’s were drawn from myself; at least the description of his domestic habits, tastes and occupations bear a considerable resemblance to mine.

Admiral Austen does not deny the possibility that there might be some element of himself – or of Jane’s other naval brother, Charles – in the character of Captain Wentworth. But he positively celebrates the fact that Captain Harville’s handiwork is his own.

When Francis Austen’s baby was born in 1807, he cut out the patterns for the infant’s night-clothes himself. On another occasion, according to his sister Jane, ‘he made a very nice fringe for the drawing room curtains’. Like Harville, he ‘turned silver’ to make needles for fishing nets. When Jane Austen watched her young nephews passing the evenings by making nets in which to catch rabbits, she described them as sitting ‘side by side, as any two Uncle Franks could do’.7 Jane also remembered her brother Frank, as she always called him, making ‘a very nice little butter-churn’.8 He was skilled at turning wood.

There can be no doubt that Captain Harville’s carpentry is both a compliment to Frank and a family joke. By acknowledging the allusion after Jane’s death, Admiral Austen is giving her readers warrant to make connections between the people his sister knew and the characters she created. By implication, he is also licensing us to make links between her novels and the places she went to (and those she heard about), not to mention the historical events through which she lived.

Yet in the ‘official’ family biography of Jane Austen, it is stressed that hers was an enclosed, sequestered world and that the characters in her novels were always generic types, never based on real individuals. The ground for this reading of her was laid by her brother Henry in the brief ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ which prefaces her posthumously published novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.’ Furthermore, ‘Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals.’9

Henry’s denial of eventfulness and of drawing ‘from individuals’ was of a piece with the desire of the clerical Austens to be discreet, decorous and reticent. That was the image of Jane Austen herself that the family wished to establish in the public domain. They reinforced it in the Victorian era by means of a memoir published in December 1869 by James Edward Austen-Leigh, son of another of her clergy brothers, James. Jane Austen was one of the wittiest of writers, but there are not many jokes in the official family record. Admiral Francis Austen was known for his lack of a sense of humour, but at least he manages to drop in a joke at the end of his second letter to Miss Quincy: ‘I am not a Vice Admiral, having for the last 3 years attained the higher rank of Admiral. I wish I could believe that in the change of rank I had left every vice behind me.’ Startlingly, here he seems to be remembering his sister’s most questionable joke, concerning ‘Rears, and Vices’ in the British navy. That was not the sort of subject to detain James Edward Austen-Leigh in his pious record of his aunt’s allegedly quiet life.

The family memoir inaugurated the tradition of full-length Jane Austen biography. It proceeded from cradle to grave at uneventful pace and with provincial calm. In the century and a half since it was compiled, devoted scholars have gathered many more details about Austen’s life. One hundred and sixty of her letters survive, as do the pocket books of family members, the diaries of acquaintances, the banking transactions of her father.10 With the benefit of such mundane material, biography after biography has followed the pattern of James Edward and tracked Jane Austen’s daily life from Steventon to Bath to Chawton to Winchester.11

This book is something different and more experimental. Rather than rehearsing all the known facts, this biography focuses on a variety of key moments, scenes and objects in both the life and work of Jane Austen. It does not begin where the official family record began, with the tracing of ancestry. It does not seek to foster the illusion that Austen knew little of the world. It recognizes the gaps in our knowledge as well as in the documentary evidence. Several thousand of her letters are lost or destroyed and for some crucial years we know hardly anything of her whereabouts.

In addition, this biography follows the lead of Frank Austen rather than Henry. It suggests that, like nearly all novelists, Jane Austen created her characters by mixing observation and imagination. She drew on people she knew and experiences she went through. Captain Harville is not a portrait of Frank, but the fictional character is brought alive and made memorable by the adoption of a particularly charming characteristic of a real individual: his fondness for carpentry. When Austen writes about ideas – the virtues and vices of the British navy, the case against the slave trade, the Evangelical movement – she does so by creating memorable characters, not by writing sermons. Her sympathy for abolition may be inferred not only from what she writes in her letters about the campaigner Thomas Clarkson but also from the pro-slavery associations of two of her most monstrous characters, Mrs Norris and Mrs Elton.

Jane Austen loved nothing more than to talk about people. She knew a great deal about the lives of her extended family, her friends and her slighter acquaintances. When we tell the stories of these people’s lives, we suddenly see Austen on a much wider stage than that on which she is confined in the clerical brothers’ version of her life. We are transported to the East Indies and the West, to the guillotine in revolutionary Paris, to a world where there is high-society scandal one moment and a petty case of shoplifting the next. This biography follows Austen on her travels, which were more extensive than is often recognized, and it sets her in contexts global as well as English, urban as well as rural, political and historical as well as social and domestic. These wider perspectives were of vital and still under-estimated importance to her creative life.

Kingsley Amis, a comic novelist who admired Austen enormously, once wrote that ‘those who know my novels and me will also know that they are firmly unautobiographical, but at the same time every word of them inevitably says something about the kind of person I am’.12 It is in this spirit that we should read the relationship between Jane Austen’s novels and her world.

The opinions of her characters are not her own. The writings in which she exposes her true self most directly are her letters. When her devoted niece Fanny Knight died in 1882 (by which time she was Lady Knatchbull), Fanny’s son Lord Brabourne came upon a treasure-trove: the original manuscript of Lady Susan ‘in Jane Austen’s own handwriting’ and:

a square box full of letters, fastened up carefully in separate packets, each of which was endorsed ‘For Lady Knatchbull,’ in the handwriting of my great-aunt, Cassandra Austen, and with which was a paper endorsed, in my mother’s handwriting, ‘Letters from my dear Aunt Jane Austen, and two from Aunt Cassandra after her decease,’ which paper contained the letters written to my mother herself.13

These letters, Brabourne suggested, ‘contain the confidential outpourings of Jane Austen’s soul to her beloved sister, interspersed with many family and personal details which, doubtless, she would have told to no other human being’. With his mother’s death, the time was ripe for their publication. The unique talent of ‘“the inimitable Jane” (as an old friend of mine used always to call her)’ was, Brabourne argued, that she ‘describes men and women exactly as men and women really are, and tells her tale of ordinary, everyday life with such truthful delineation, such bewitching simplicity, and, moreover, with such purity of style and language, as have rarely been equalled, and perhaps never surpassed’.

For this reason, what could be more fitting than the publication of ‘the letters which show what her own “ordinary, everyday life” was, and which afford a picture of her such as no history written by another person could give so well’? ‘It is certain’, Brabourne triumphantly concluded, ‘that I am now able to present to the public entirely new matter, from which may be gathered a fuller and more complete knowledge of Jane Austen and her “belongings” than could otherwise have been obtained.’14

All subsequent biographers have made extensive use of the letters. Nevertheless, a fresh reading of them reveals a number of hitherto neglected but significant details and connections, among them a crucial act of literary patronage, the momentous consequences of a will, and evidence of Austen’s knowledge of the extraordinary story of the abolitionist judge Lord Mansfield’s adoption of a black girl.

Lord Brabourne’s view of his great-aunt as the inimitable novelist of ‘ordinary, everyday life’ had become a commonplace opinion by the late Victorian era. It is ultimately derived from the most important account of Austen’s work written in her own lifetime: a long review-essay on the publication of Emma, also discussing Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, by Sir Walter Scott, the most celebrated novelist in all Europe (though one who at this time was still publishing his fiction, like Austen herself, under the veil of anonymity). Scott’s essay will be further discussed towards the end of this book, but its main thrust is indeed the high claim that Jane Austen was the first novelist in history to offer an accurate representation of ‘the current of ordinary life’. She presents to the reader ‘instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him’. Scott concludes that ‘The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.’15

The ‘correct and striking representation’ of scenes from ‘ordinary life’, rendered with precision, tact and minute detail: this is indeed the essence of Austen’s art, as it is of Dutch realism in painting. Vermeer creates the sense of a real world by means of an opened letter, a pearl earring, a latticed window, a jug and a tablecloth, a musical instrument. By the same account, objects play a key part in bringing alive Austen’s fictional worlds.

My inspiration for the writing of this book came from two exquisite moments in Mansfield Park, quoted earlier as my epigraphs. First there is Fanny Price’s little sitting room, made real by a few carefully chosen things.

Mounted on the window-panes are three pictures of romantic scenes – the ruin of Tintern Abbey, a wild cave in Italy and a moonlit lake in Wordsworth country – in the new and fashionable form of ‘transparencies’. In An Essay on Transparent Prints and Transparencies in General, published in 1807, a certain Edward Orme claimed that he invented the medium by accident when he dropped some varnish on to the dark part of an engraving ‘which afterwards being exposed again to light, the spot where the varnish had been spilt formed a light in the midst of shadow’.16 Their presence hints at Fanny’s romantic sensibility.

Over the mantelpiece hangs a collection of family ‘profiles’: this was another fashionable non-elite artistic medium, the silhouette, a form of portraiture that will be discussed in chapter one. The close-knit Austen family cherished their profiles and miniatures, the equivalent of framed photographs of loved ones in a modern home.

Beside the profiles, pinned against the wall by Fanny herself, is the thing that makes the room truly her own: ‘a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the main-mast’. Just as Jane Austen corresponded constantly with her brothers when they were away at sea, worrying about their survival in the face of war and weather, so Fanny stays close to her midshipman brother through his sketch on the wall. Though the action of the novel rarely leaves the confines of Mansfield Park, the objects transport the reader on to a wider stage.

In the second passage, Fanny invests all her seemingly unrequited love for Edmund in two other small objects: a scrap of paper and a simple gold chain. Small things in Jane Austen’s world do not only evoke distant places. They can also be the bearers of big emotions. The intense emotions associated with love and death are often refracted through objects. Letters and tokens are of great importance in the novels: focus upon an object is often a signal to the reader that this is a key sequence in the emotional unfolding of the narrative. This biography is an attempt to write Austen’s life according to the same principle. Following the example of Captain Harville’s carpentry, each chapter begins with a real thing, some of them coming directly from her life, others evoked by her novels. These objects and images cast new light on Austen’s life and her fictional characters, on the workings of her imagination and on the shaping of her incomparable fictional worlds.

1

The Family Profile

All the faces are turned towards the young boy. He is being passed to one of the two fashionably dressed women with powdered hair who are sitting at the table playing chess. The surrounding drapery makes the portrait resemble a theatrical scene. In the manner of actors well versed in the art of gesture, the figures are talking with their hands: the father’s fingers rest on his son’s shoulders, while the boy has his arms outstretched in supplication towards his new mother. Her hand remains on a chess piece, as if she has won a pawn. The master of the house leans on the back of the chair of the other woman, who is his sister. His relaxed pose bespeaks the casual assurance of proprietorship. The sister is pointing her finger at the boy, as if to say ‘so this is the child who is coming to our great house’. The boy’s birth-mother is absent.

The silhouette, dated 1783, is by William Wellings, one of the leading practitioners of this highly fashionable form of miniaturized portraiture. A plain black profile cut on card could be taken in a few minutes and cost as little as a shilling. Though sometimes known as ‘poor men’s miniatures’, profiles were renowned for the accuracy of representation that they could achieve. ‘No art approaches a well-made silhouette in truth,’ wrote the influential physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward would become renowned within the family for his skill at the art. He could execute silhouettes without preliminary drawing, cutting them out directly with a special pair of scissors, ‘the points … an inch long, and the curved handles about three inches’.1

Silhouettes were known as ‘shadows’ or ‘shades’ or ‘profiles’. Hence Austen’s imagining of the ‘collection of family profiles’ in Fanny Price’s sitting room in Mansfield Park. This one tells a story. To modern eyes, the starkly shaded medium seems particularly fitting because of the solemn nature of the subject: the handing over of a child from one family to another. It was commissioned by Thomas Knight, a wealthy but childless gentleman from the county of Kent, to commemorate his formal adoption of his nephew, Edward Austen, one of the elder brothers of the future novelist. It was not only the Wellings silhouette that commemorated the adoption. The Knights also had an oil painting commissioned. This painting hangs now in Chawton Cottage and shows a very handsome child with golden hair and bright hazel eyes. He is wearing a blue velvet suit.

In the family profile the father, to the left of the scene, is George Austen. The adoptive mother, receiving Edward, is Catherine Knight, who many years later became Jane Austen’s only literary patron. Thomas Knight himself is to the right, standing over his sister Jane. In 1783, the boy Edward reached his sixteenth birthday, whereas the child in the silhouette appears to be rather younger. This suggests that Knight may have requested the artist to evoke the scene two or three years earlier when the boy first went to stay with the childless couple in the great house.

Little Neddy first met his wealthy uncle and aunt when he was twelve. In 1779 the newly married Knights visited their relatives at Steventon and took such a fancy to the golden-haired boy that they decided to bring him along with them on their honeymoon. It was quite common to do such a thing: George and Cassandra Austen took a boy called George Hastings with them on their own honeymoon tour. Genteel children generally had more freedom and independence than we might expect by today’s standards: as a young girl, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra often visited her aunt and uncle Cooper in Bath.

In 1781 Thomas Knight inherited two large estates in Hampshire and Kent. By then, it was a matter of concern that he and his wife Catherine showed no sign of having children of their own. They needed a suitable boy to adopt and make their heir. Again, the practice was not unusual in the Georgian era, when the preservation of large estates was the key to wealth and status. So it was that young Edward Austen was taken away to Kent, first for extended visits during the summer months and eventually as a permanent arrangement. According to perhaps over-dramatic family tradition, George Austen hesitated, only for his wife to say, ‘I think, my Dear, you had better oblige your cousins and let the Child go.’ Mr Knight’s coachman, who had come on horseback, had led a pony all the way from Godmersham in Kent. The boy rode it all the way back, about a hundred miles. Among the brothers and sisters he said goodbye to when he left home was Jane Austen, aged about five and a half.

It wasn’t just boys who were transferred into wealthy families. Jane Austen knew at least two childless couples who adopted young girls and made them their heirs. There was Lord Mansfield, the great abolitionist judge, who adopted his niece Lady Elizabeth Murray. She became a neighbour of Edward Austen, and met Jane Austen on several occasions. And then there was a family called the Chutes in a big house near by, who adopted a girl called Caroline Wigget when she was three years old. So it should not come as a surprise that Jane Austen’s novels show more than a passing interest in adoption. In Mansfield Park Fanny Price, considered a burden on her family, is sent to live with her wealthy cousins, the Bertrams. In Emma, Frank Churchill is adopted into the family of a rich but childless couple, and Jane Fairfax, an orphan, is brought up with the Dixons.

The case of Emma Watson in Jane Austen’s incomplete novel The Watsons offers a striking reversal of the convention, whereby she has lived away from her birth family but is sent back to live with them. In Emma, Isabella Knightley exclaims against adoption, suggesting that it is unnatural: ‘there is something so shocking in a child’s being taken away from his parents and natural home! … To give up one’s child! I really never could think well of any body who proposed such a thing to any body else.’2 But Jane Austen believed that the good fortune of one family member was the good fortune of all.

***

On a fine summer’s day in 1782 a six-year-old girl was excitedly awaiting the return of her father in a hack chaise, the equivalent of a taxi cab, from the main stage-coach post in Andover, Hampshire. Her father was returning home with his elder daughter, who had been visiting relatives in Bath. Unable to contain her excitement at seeing her beloved sister, and with the promise of a ride home in the chaise, the six-year-old dragged her three-year-old brother Charles by the hand and they walked alone as far as New Down, a hamlet near Micheldever – some six miles away – to meet the chaise.3

The entrance hall of the big house at Godmersham, where Edward Austen lived on being adopted by his wealthy uncle

Jane Austen, the seventh child of the Reverend George Austen and his wife Cassandra, née Leigh, was born in the Steventon village rectory on Saturday 16 December 1775, and baptized privately by her father on the morrow to ensure that her soul would be saved should she die in her first few days. He said that she looked very like her brother Henry, who was four, and would be ‘a plaything’ for her sister Cassandra, who was nearly three.4 Jane was publicly christened the following April, on Good Friday. She had three godparents: her great-aunt, also called Jane Austen, wife of Francis Austen of Sevenoaks in Kent, a well-to-do relative; Samuel Cooke, a vicar from Surrey who had graduated from Oxford and was related to a maternal cousin; and a Mrs Musgrave from Oxfordshire, wife of another maternal cousin.

These are the bare facts of her birth, but the walk to meet the hack chaise is the first glimpse we have of her as a child. The vignette may suggest that she was bold and unafraid to take the lead. What it certainly indicates is how much she loved and missed her elder sister. It sets a pattern for the rest of her days. For most of her life, Jane Austen was under the same roof as Cassandra. When they were parted, with one of them visiting friends or relations, they wrote to each other almost daily. Infuriatingly, Cassandra’s letters to Jane are lost and, to our eyes unforgivably, Cassandra destroyed far more of Jane’s than she kept. But those which survive provide the best record we have of her inner life.

Jane Austen was brought up in a large and loving family, consisting mainly of boys. She was one of two girls in a family of eight, sandwiched between Frank, who was born in 1774, and the youngest, Charles, born 1779. These two would grow up to become her ‘sailor brothers’. Frank was just twenty months older than Jane. Charles she described, quoting one of her favourite writers, Fanny Burney, as ‘our own particular little brother’.5 Her brothers were of immense importance to her throughout her life. The loss of nearly all her letters to them leaves the biggest gap in our knowledge of her. She wrote to Cassandra only when they were apart; she wrote to her brothers away on service almost all the time.

All the Austen children were nursed with a neighbouring family, the Littleworths, returning home when they were toddlers. One of them gave the family particular anxiety: George, the second son, born in 1766, was mentally incapacitated. He was epileptic and possibly deaf. In July 1770, his father wrote that the little boy was suffering from fits and showed no sign of improvement: ‘God knows only how far it will come to pass, but for the best judgment I can form at present, we must not be too sanguine on this Head; be it as it may, we have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child.’6

By December of that year George, now four, was living with foster parents. His mother wrote that he was still having fits. ‘My poor little George is come to see me today. He seems pretty well, tho’ he had a fit lately; it was near a twelve-month since he had one before, so [I] was in hopes they had left him, but must not flatter myself so now.’7 The severity of his condition is apparent from a letter in which his godfather Tysoe Saul Hancock, Mr Austen’s brother-in-law, mentions ‘the case of my godson who must be provided for without the least hopes of his being able to assist himself’.8

Around the time this letter was written, Mrs Cassandra Austen told a relative that she could not visit Kent because of her domestic situation.9 She was seven months pregnant and had four young boys all living at home: seven-year-old James, George six and with special needs, Edward just turned five, Henry seventeen months and recently back from being nursed in the village. There were servants to help, but it was necessary to manage both the household and its small plot of land, which had chickens and a cow. The Reverend George Austen was busy with his parish duties and business affairs. The following year he obtained the living of a second parish. In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that a home was found for young George where he could be given more attention and assistance.10

Mrs Austen was no stranger to mental infirmity. Her younger ‘imbecile brother’ Tom had been placed under the care of a parish clerk, Francis Culham, at Monk Sherborne near Basingstoke. George was sent to join him there when it became clear that he was not improving. He lived with his uncle Tom and the Culhams for the rest of his life, surviving into his seventies. He died of dropsy (accumulation of bodily fluid, often caused by kidney failure) early in the reign of Queen Victoria, just over twenty years after his sister Jane’s death. On his death certificate he was described as a ‘gentleman’.

On Mrs Austen’s death in 1827, some stocks that she owned were sold and the proceeds divided among her surviving children. Edward Knight, adopted into wealth, made his portion over to George to pay for his care. Some biographers have taken a censorious attitude towards the Austens for their treatment of George. Several have assumed that the family was ashamed and ill-prepared when it came to mental illness, exiling George for the sake of the other children. Others have argued to the contrary that a reference in Jane Austen’s letters to ‘talking with fingers’ suggests that she might have been adept at sign language as a result of conversing with her allegedly deaf ‘idiot’ brother. We will never know whether or not she visited him at the Culhams’.

There were many private madhouses in the Georgian era, some of which had dark reputations for their inhumane treatment of the insane, Bedlam Hospital in London being the most infamous. The majority of the mentally ill were confined to workhouses, poorhouses and prison. By boarding out George with a family, the Austens saved him from this fate.

Jane Austen’s life coincided with a period of new enlightenment in relation to madness and mental incapacity. King George III went mad and was treated, in a firm and well-publicized manner, by Dr Francis Willis at his asylum in Lincolnshire. The search for a cure for the King led to a shift in public attitudes towards the mentally infirm. By the end of the century, the Quaker William Tuke had founded The Retreat, an asylum in York that pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. It provided a model for other institutions.11

Thanks to the madness of King George, which was witnessed at first hand by the novelist Fanny Burney, mental illness ceased to be an unmentionable topic of conversation in polite society. Jane Austen frequently joked about madness in her earliest writings. As an adult she made fun of her family’s history of madness in relation to her niece Anna, who was hoping to marry, against her family’s wishes: ‘My dear Mrs Harrison, I shall say, I am afraid the young Man has some of your Family Madness – and though there often appears to be something of Madness in Anna too, I think she inherits more of it from her Mother’s family than from ours.’12 This is not entirely a joke: Jane Austen’s mother’s family, the Leighs of Stoneleigh, had a spectacular history of madness, and her attitude towards madness and mental illness shows a lack of embarrassment and sentiment perhaps because of her proximity to those affected by it. In addition to those in the immediate Austen family circle, her uncle Tom and her brother, Jane’s cousin Eliza de Feuillide had a son called Hastings who had ‘fits’ and did not develop like other children.

The story of George Austen remains shadowy. As a little girl, Jane was especially close to two other brothers Frank and Charles. Frank, nicknamed ‘Fly’, was a small, burly boy, ‘fearless of danger, braving pain’. He often got into trouble. Jane gives a lovely retrospective glimpse of his childhood self in a poem she wrote to celebrate the birth of his son:

My dearest Frank, I wish you joy

Of Mary’s safety with a Boy …

In him, in all his ways, may we

Another Francis William see! –

Thy infant days may he inherit,

Thy warmth, nay insolence of spirit.13

Warmth, insolence, spirit: these were qualities that Jane Austen had herself and that she valued in Frank. At the same time, she had a soft spot for Charles, the baby of the family, who was sweet-tempered and affectionate, without the fiery nature of Fly. It is easy to see him being dragged along by Jane to meet Cassandra’s coach. The affection in which she held her siblings is clear from the way that her novels are full of private jokes – a phenomenon that is common among large families, who so often have their own secret language.

It was not only because of the brothers that Steventon parsonage, the family home, was a household of boys. Jane Austen’s father George took in scholars to supplement his rector’s stipend, effectively running his own little boarding school. Over the years there were probably more than fifteen boys, who provided a network of contacts among prosperous local families. Many of them remained devoted to the Austens and among them were some potential suitors for the two girls. Jane’s mother Cassandra seems to have been very popular with the schoolboys. She composed comic verses for them. She wrote a funny poem urging one reluctant schoolboy to return to school and his studies, rather than wasting his time dancing. Another boy complained to Mrs Austen that he felt left out because she hadn’t written a special poem to him.

The first schoolboy to be taken on at Steventon, in 1773, was a five-year-old aristocrat, John Charles Wallop, Lord Lymington. He was the ‘backward’ and eccentric eldest son of Lord Portsmouth, who lived just ten miles away at Hurstbourne Park. A boy called William Vanderstegen was taken on later that same year. By 1779, the year that Jane Austen’s mother Cassandra gave birth to her last child, there were four boys living at Steventon – Fulwar Craven Fowle, Frank Stuart, Gilbert East and a boy named Deane (either George or Henry). By 1781, the pupils included George Nibbs and Fulwar’s brother Tom and possibly his brothers William and Charles. In later years, John Warren, Charles Fowle, Richard Buller, William Goodenough, Deacon Morrell and Francis Newnham attended the school. At least ten of the boys stayed four years or more. The Reverend George Austen only stopped teaching in 1795 when Jane was in her twentieth year.14

Lord Lymington stayed just a few months at Steventon. Mrs Austen found him ‘good-tempered and orderly’,15 but his mother took him away on account of his very bad stammer, which grew worse as his behaviour became more erratic with the passage of years. Tales abounded of his eccentricities, including his habit of pinching servants, throwing them into hedges and playing other practical jokes. He once tried to hang a young boy from the bell tower of the village church. The young Lord Byron objected strongly to being pinched by Lord Portsmouth, threw a large shell at his head in retaliation (breaking a mirror) and, many years later in 1814, exacted cruel revenge by taking part in a devious plot to marry him off to a vicious woman who tortured him and beat him with a horsewhip. Jane Austen commented on this marriage to her sister Cassandra: ‘And here is Lord Portsmouth married too to Miss Hanson!’16 Whether or not she knew that Lord Byron gave away the bride is not known. Byron recorded in his journal that he ‘tried not to laugh in the face of the supplicants’ and ‘rammed their left hands, by mistake, into one another’.17

Later, John Wallop became known as the Vampyre Earl for his supposed addiction to drinking the blood of his servants. He was eventually certified a lunatic. Despite all his tribulations, he never forgot the Austens and invited them to his annual ball at Hurstbourne Park. In 1800, just after his first marriage, Jane attended his ball and wrote a long vivid account to her sister. Cassandra had clearly made a favourable impression on the Earl over the years. Jane seems surprised by his interest: ‘Lord Portsmouth surpassed the rest in his attentive recollection of you, enquired more into the length of your absence, and concluded by desiring to be “remembered to you when I wrote next”.’18 Our customary image of Jane Austen’s family home does not usually make room for her fond memories of the lunatic Earl.

The other boys opened up a range of worldly contacts for the Austen family. William Vanderstegen was an only child, born almost twenty years after his parents married. His father was one of the first Commissioners of the Thames, deeply involved in a campaign to make the river more navigable. George Nibbs’s father owned a plantation in the West Indies: we will meet him in a later chapter. Richard Buller, who stayed for five years, became a clergyman in Devon before dying at a sadly young age. His closeness to the Austens is apparent from a letter written by Jane to Cassandra in 1800, in which she gives the news that he has recently married: ‘I have had a most affectionate letter from Buller; I was afraid he would oppress me by his felicity and his love for his Wife, but this is not the case; he calls her simply Anna without any angelic embellishments, for which I respect and wish him happy – and throughout the whole of his letter indeed he seems more engrossed by his feelings towards our family, than towards her.’19 The following year, they visited him in his Tudor vicarage in the little stone-built town of Colyton on the Devon coast.

Rear view of Steventon rectory: Jane Austen’s childhood home

Cassandra made an especially strong impression on another of her father’s boarders, Tom Fowle. They became engaged and were due to be married before he died of yellow fever in the West Indies. This loss was a decisive factor in the development of Jane Austen’s own life. George Austen clearly had no compunction about bringing up his daughters alongside a variety of unfamiliar young men, though no record survives of any romantic interest on Jane’s part. The uproariously funny tales that she wrote as a young girl, full of violence, drunkenness, madness and suicide, suggest that she played more of a tomboyish role at Steventon than that of a young ingénue looking for love. She was more of a Catherine Morland – playing baseball,20 rolling down the green slope at the back of the house, preferring cricket to dolls – than a boy-mad Isabella Thorpe chasing unsuspecting young men along the streets of Bath. There was indeed a green slope at the back of Steventon rectory, perfect for rolling.

***

Perhaps in part due to the need to house an ever-increasing number of boarders, George and Cassandra Austen decided to send their daughters away to school. At the age of seven, Jane Austen, together with her ten-year-old sister, was taken to Oxford by their cousin Jane Cooper. They were to be taught by a Mrs Cawley, a Cooper relation. Seven seems to us an early age for a young girl to be living away from her family, especially from such a warm, loving home, full of life and animation. It must have been a wrench to leave the safety and security of the family home for school in Oxford, though elder brother James Austen was studying there and showed the girls the sights of the city. The arrangement was similar to that in Steventon: it was a case of a family taking in pupils, not a formal school environment. Presumably George Austen had made the financial calculation that the income gained from sending his girls away and creating more space for boy boarders in the rectory would exceed the outlay required to keep them in Oxford.

According to family lore, Jane insisted on accompanying her sister to Oxford. Mrs Austen claimed that if ‘Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate’.21 Hampshire to Oxford is about fifty miles, which the two young girls would have travelled in a stage-coach.

In September, Mrs Cawley moved her ‘school’ to Southampton, only for it to be struck by a typhus outbreak. The three girls fell ill, but Mrs Cawley failed to alert the family. It was Jane Cooper who wrote to her mother and told her the news. Mrs Austen and Mrs Cooper came immediately to take the girls home. Jane Austen was very ill and nearly died. They all made a full recovery, but Mrs Cooper caught the fever and died in October. One can only imagine the shock and distress of the family. Dr Cooper was heartbroken and devoted the rest of his years to bringing up his children Jane and Edward. To commemorate his beloved wife he sent Cassandra a ‘ring representing a sprig of diamonds, with one emerald’ and Jane was given a headband, which she wore to balls.22

The Southampton experience did not deter the Reverend and Mrs Austen from the idea of boarding school. Within a year, Jane and Cassandra, together with their now motherless cousin Jane Cooper, found themselves at a more formal establishment, this time in Reading, a prosperous trading town just over twenty miles from Steventon, on the main coaching routes from London to Oxford and the west country.

It was called the Abbey School and was run by Sarah Hackitt, who went by the name of Madame Latournelle, no doubt because female French teachers were the height of fashion. The school adjoined the remains of the ancient Abbey of Reading: ‘the greater part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful old-fashioned garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees in hot summer evenings’.23 The school was connected to an antique gateway, which looked out on the green and a marketplace beyond. Inside, new girls were received by the headmistress in a wainscoted parlour in which chenille tapestries depicting tombs and weeping willows were hung round the walls.

According to a family member, the school was a ‘free and easy one … In Cassandra and Jane’s days the girls do not seem to have been kept very strictly, as they and their cousin, Jane Cooper, were allowed to accept an invitation to dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper.’24 As the family descendants noted, it all sounds rather like Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma, which ‘had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter [she] dressed their chilblains with her own hands’.25 Madame Latournelle always dressed in the same way and had a cork leg. She encouraged the arts, dancing and theatre in particular. It seems to have been a happy place, full of girlish glee. ‘I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school,’ Jane Austen remarked in one of her letters to Cassandra.26

After twenty months spent in the Abbey School she returned home for good in December 1786, just approaching her eleventh birthday. Her formal education was over. But the home to which she returned was one from which her brother Edward was now permanently absent.

As has been suggested, the transference of children from one home to another by formal adoption, as with Edward Austen Knight, or by a more informal arrangement, as with the fictional Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, was by no means uncommon. If the Knights, like Lord Mansfield and the Chutes, had wanted a girl rather than a boy, then Jane Austen would have been separated from her beloved Cassandra.

Jane Austen reworked the theme of adopted children several times in her novels and uses it to suggest her ideas about nature and nurture, good parents and bad parents, the importance of childhood in relation to the adult. ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,’ as the old Jesuit saying had it.

Jane Austen was close to her father, who supported her ambition to become a published writer. Her feelings towards her mother were far more complicated. There are few examples of effective parenting in the novels. This is partly a plot device: the heroine must make her own choices, judgements and mistakes before reaching maturity and finding an equal mate worthy of her. The exception to this rule of the flawed heroine is Jane Austen’s most disliked (or least well-understood) heroine, Fanny Price. The fictional Fanny is almost the same age that the real Edward Knight was when he was first taken from his home. Mansfield Park is perhaps the first novel in history to depict the life of a little girl from within.27

Jane Austen enters intuitively into the feelings and consciousness of the child as she is uprooted from her family and transferred to Mansfield Park. Fanny’s fear and anxiety, exacerbated by the vicious bullying of Mrs Norris, are brilliantly executed. Told that she must be a good grateful girl and given the treat of a gooseberry tart to comfort her, Fanny dissolves into tears. It is the careless neglect that affects her sensitive spirit: ‘Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.’28

One of the main themes of the novel is the importance of home. The word is repeated over 140 times in the course of the narrative. What does ‘home’ mean? Is it a place or is it a family? What happens when a home is left unprotected or badly governed? When Fanny returns home to Portsmouth she has an epiphany that shakes her to the core:

Her eagerness, her impatience, her longing to be with them, were such as to bring a line or two of Cowper’s Tirocinium for ever before her. ‘With what intense desire she wants her home,’ was continually on her tongue, as the truest description of a yearning which she could not suppose any school-boy’s bosom to feel more keenly.

When she had been coming to Portsmouth, she had loved to call it her home, had been fond of saying that she was going home; the word had been very dear to her; and so it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now the home. Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home.29

The literary reference is crucial. William Cowper was Jane Austen’s favourite poet. The poem to which she refers here, Tirocinium, was extremely well known. It bids a father not to send his son away to school, but to educate him at home so that the natural ties of affection are not damaged and so that the father’s spiritual and moral guidance will be uppermost.

Why hire a lodging in a house unknown

For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?

This second weaning, needless as it is,

How does it lacerate both your heart and his!

The indented stick, that loses day by day,

Notch after notch, till all are smoothed away,

Bears witness, long ere his dismission come,

With what intense desire he wants his home.30

Indeed, Mansfield Park shares many of the concerns of Tirocinium. It is a profound exploration of the duty of parents to shape their children’s moral and spiritual development. It includes a father who is emotionally distant, his children ‘chill’d into respect’. It reflects on the importance of home, the nature of good education, the alienation of sons from their father, the importance of conscience: ‘In early days the conscience has in most/A quickness, which in later life is lost.’ At the centre of the book is a timid, shy displaced child with an unshakeable sense of conscience.

Fanny is a heroine who is deeply sensitive, and loves nature, poetry and biography, especially Shakespeare, Crabbe and Cowper. She is religious and her spirits are easily depressed. As well as quoting from Tirocinium she also loves Cowper’s The Task, a poem inspired by his muse, Lady Austen (a distant relative of Jane’s), an elegant and attractive widow who set him ‘a task’ to write a poem about a ‘sofa’. This extraordinary poem in six books is the eighteenth century’s great celebration of the retired and religious life. ‘God made the country, and man made the Town’ is among its most famous lines. Cowper undertakes a fierce assault on contemporary society, condemning the slave trade, French despotism, fashionable manners and lukewarm clergymen. ‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still –/My country!’ writes Cowper, and the sentiments could have been Austen’s own.

It was Henry Austen, Jane’s brother, who revealed that Cowper was her favourite poet. But one could have guessed as much from her portrayal of Fanny Price and of Anne Elliot in Persuasion. As much admired by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth as by Jane Austen, Cowper was a brilliant but deeply troubled man, a depressive who tried to kill himself at least three times and was for a time confined to a lunatic asylum before finding refuge from his despair in a profound Christian faith. He was a friend of slave trader turned Evangelical preacher John Newton, the author of ‘Amazing Grace’. Cowper’s poetry was pioneering because he wrote about everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. For Jane Austen, his work embodied love of the country as Dr Johnson’s embodied the energetic life of the town.31 He transformed English poetry rather in the way that Jane Austen herself would transform English fiction.

Though Jane Austen was to return to the theme of the adopted child in Emma, there she does not enter the mind of the child as she does in Mansfield Park. In that novel, Fanny’s transference into the great house is a blessing and a final redemption, especially to Sir Thomas: ‘Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself. His liberality had a rich repayment.’32 The child of the impoverished branch of the family redeems the materially more prosperous but morally bankrupt household. By accepting Fanny, the Bertrams become more human.

Mansfield Park is not a retelling of the story of Jane Austen’s wealthy relatives, the Knights of Godmersham Park. Her brother Edward Austen, who became Edward Knight, is not the ‘original’ of Fanny Price. But the theme of the bond between branches of a family with very different prospects came close to Austen’s own experience. The liberality of the Knights eventually made it possible for her to become a novelist. Mrs Knight, her only patron, was described by her as ‘gentle and kind and friendly’.33 And, crucially, it was through the Knights that Edward was to give his mother and sisters a home. Had he not been adopted, he would not have grown up to inherit the great house at Chawton, from where he was able to give his poor relations the modest property near by in which Jane lived the last eight years of her life and wrote her novels.

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