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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In October 1851, a chance meeting in a Piccadilly bookshop changed the course of literary history. For it was here that Mary Ann Evans, an unworldly young scholar, was introduced to the love of her life, the critic George Lewes. Encouraged and supported by Lewes, Evans became the queen of literary London under her pen name, George Eliot. In nurturing Eliot's talent, Lewes drew inspiration from the works of an unfashionable author of the previous generation by the name of Jane Austen. On the face of it, Austen and Eliot had little in common. Jane Austen was a genteel spinster who spent her life in Hampshire, painting Regency domestic dramas with delicate irony and unfailing charm. George Eliot, meanwhile, was a radical intellectual who lived scandalously with a married man, travelled widely in Europe and documented with stirring realism the social upheavals of her age. And yet, when George Eliot embarked on her career as an author in the late 1850s, the works of Jane Austen were at her side, feeding her imagination. Separated by time, circumstance and temperament, the two writers nevertheless had a vital impetus in common: to prove the value of a woman's eye in a man's world. Packed with quotes from letters, diaries and the nation's favourite novels, this lively history traces the surprising connections between two of our brightest literary stars and shows, for the first time, how each can be illuminated by the other's light.
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vWith love to Ella, Honor, Josie and Ned vi
Contents
Acknowledgements
My overwhelming thanks are, of course, to Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose novels and letters provide us all with such extraordinary worlds to explore. They are authors of genius and their books have provided the world with endless pleasure.
This book was inadvertently started when my client and friend Ellyn Daniels gave me a handsome, green leather-bound notebook with the provocative caption embossed on the front cover:
‘Brilliantideas,profoundinspirationsandalistofmyfavourite clients.’
Ellyn invariably tops one of these lists, but she might be surprised to hear where the other lists took me – brilliantideas led me to re-read the brilliant novels of my favourite authors, Jane Austen and George Eliot, and finally to take up the challenge of reading Romola. The green notebook filled up as I began to write my reactions to these two magnificent authors and added my reading of the Brontë sisters.
The profoundinspirationcame when I was exploring Charlotte Brontë’s letters and came across the pivotal moment when the literary critic George Lewes was given a copy of a first-time novel to xreview. The novel was JaneEyre. Lewes wrote to the author, who apparently enjoyed the original name of Currer Bell, and proffered some helpful if patronising advice to him; namely, that he should endeavour to write more like Jane Austen. Currer Bell was eventually unmasked as Charlotte Brontë, and her powerful and indignant responses to this advice ran to several letters, all of which were kept by Lewes. I believe that Brontë’s letters, which contain not only a scathing riposte to his advice but also her poignant account of the challenges facing a lady novelist at the time, profoundly influenced the novels of Lewes’s partner, Mary Ann Evans, when she started to write her novels under the name George Eliot. Lewes acted as a lightning conductor, and the connection through him between Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot was the inspiration for me to write this book.
I wrote JaneAustenandGeorgeEliot: TheLadyandtheRadicalto pass on my love and admiration for these two authors (three, including Charlotte Brontë) to our children, Ella, Honor, Josie and Ned, whom I thank for having been my first readers and always providing unconditional and dynamic support. I would also like to thank Victoria Gray and Sigrid Rausing, who were early readers and who kindly gave me unflinching encouragement.
After twenty years since my last book, a financial thriller, my literary agent Mark Lucas was only momentarily blindsided by this account of Jane Austen and George Eliot. With his deft touch of ingenuity, Mark introduced me to Alan Samson, who helped me turn it from a collection of miscellaneous essays into a coherent manuscript. With similar literary alchemy, Laura Palmer then helped transform the book into the state where it became publishable. Olivia Beattie emerged as the publisher who I had always hoped and dreamed might be out there. She and her team at Biteback xiPublishing shared my vision of combining these two authors and looking at each of them through the lens of the other, learning so much more about them both in the process.
There are many extraordinary Austen and Eliot scholars who have paved the way. The extensive work of Deirdre Le Faye, including her collection and editing of Jane Austen’s Letters, and the works of Claire Tomalin, John Mullan, Kathryn Sutherland, Emma Clery, Jenny Uglow, Lucy Worsley and Clare Carlisle are exemplary blends of scholarship and pragmatism.
I would like to pay tribute to and celebrate Dorothy Bednarowska (‘Mrs Bed’), my late English tutor at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She was so inspiring, and together with Ann Pasternak Slater she opened my eyes to a detailed and rigorous reading of Austen and Eliot. (She also taught Jenny Uglow.) Dorothy Bednarowska died in 2003, but, Ann, I hope that this book goes a little way to thank you for your patience, your kindness and your tenacity in continuing your tutorials with me. You stirred up something that has taken forty years to emerge in this form. As you used to greet my inventive excuses for a late essay: ‘Well, let’s hope that it’s worth the wait!’
Finally and above all, I would like to thank my wife, Araminta, who is my bedrock of support. We met when we were both studying English at Oxford and over the subsequent years I have now understood that, with her lightning quick observation and profound wisdom, Araminta combines all the best qualities of Jane Austen the lady and George Eliot the radical. xii
Prologue: Bluestocking Passion
It was 6 October 1851. In London’s Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was about to enter its final week. Already over 6 million visitors, twice the size of the population of London, had made the pilgrimage to the Crystal Palace to see what became known simply as the Great Exhibition, a spectacular series of towering glass pavilions in which Prince Albert had arranged for the wonders of Victorian invention, technology and industry to be showcased to the world.
But among the tourists teeming along Piccadilly that October afternoon, two Londoners had a different destination in mind. Unknown to each other and coming from different directions, they were both heading to William Jeff’s bookshop in the Burlington Arcade.
Like much of Victorian London, the Burlington Arcade operated on two different levels. Along the ground floor were a variety of jewellers, gold and silversmiths and luxury boutiques selling gloves, silks, watches, perfume and handbags to the swelling ranks of London’s wealthy shoppers, much as they do today. William Jeff’s xivbookshop was halfway along at No. 15. Meanwhile, running along the first-floor gallery above the shops were a series of brothels that advertised their presence by hanging black stockings out of their windows. The boutiques on the ground floor made good sales from eager customers impulsively buying presents on their way upstairs.
Coming from her lodgings in The Strand and passing by Nelson’s Column, the startling latest addition to the city skyline, Mary Ann Evans had recently arrived in London. At thirty, the same age as Queen Victoria, Mary Ann already had a formidable record of scholarly achievement. The major literary endeavour of her twenties had been the painstaking translation of a lengthy German academic treatise DasLebenJesuby the philosopher David Strauss, in the course of which she had taught herself German, Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Determined to avoid being stuck in the Midlands, after her father died Mary Ann had packed her carpet-bag and left Coventry and her brother behind her in order to live an independent literary life in London. In the words of Henry James, Mary Ann was a ‘bluestocking’ – a female scholar, fierce and intelligent, who would soon be known as the best-read woman in London.
Coming across from his bohemian household in Bayswater was George Lewes, a freelance journalist who was always on the lookout for the next story. The illegitimate son of an obscure and itinerant poet and brought up partially in France, Lewes had gravitated to London, where he had tried his hand at various things – he had worked in a Russian trading house, he had toured with a troupe of actors when he had acted with Charles Dickens and played Shylock in TheMerchantofVenice, he had written book reviews and miscellaneous articles for magazines and he had even published a novel. Lewes had been the first reviewer to spot the talent of a first-time author with the unusual name of Currer Bell, who had written a xvnovel called JaneEyre. Lewes had engaged in a long correspondence with Bell in which he advised him to improve his writing style by reading a slightly forgotten Regency author called Jane Austen, who had died some thirty-five years previously. Notoriously, Lewes was living in a commune with Thornton Hunt, his best friend and co-editor of TheLeader, a periodical magazine. Hunt, who would go on to become the first editor of the DailyTelegraph and TheSpectator, had already fathered one son with Lewes’s wife Agnes. Lewes had happily adopted the baby along with his own sons, which would later have significant repercussions for any possible divorce proceedings. Short, heavily bearded with whiskers, long straggling hair and so invariably described as ‘simian’, Lewes was mercurial, extroverted, a dazzling raconteur and he loved a party. He was, wrote Jane Carlyle in 1849, ‘the most amusing little fellow in the whole world – if you only overlook his unparalleled impudence, which is not impudence at all but man-of-genius bonhomie’.
Mary Ann Evans’s powerful intellect coexisted with a rebellious and passionate streak. When she had first arrived in London and taken lodgings with John Chapman, the publisher of her translation TheLifeofJesus, they had also become lovers. In a dramatic intervention, Chapman’s wife Susanna and his existing mistress Elisabeth had joined forces to demand that he put an end to his affair with Mary Ann. Reluctantly he had done so, but she remained a lodger at his house at 142 The Strand and Chapman had just appointed her as deputy editor of the WestminsterReview. It was Chapman who had walked with Mary Ann to the Burlington Arcade that October day, where he promptly recognised Lewes and made the introduction.
As between any freelance journalist and magazine editor, there would have been a frisson of interest. With his antennae finely xvituned to detect whatever the next best article might be, Lewes would have been keen to bag a lucrative commission. Equally, Mary Ann would have been keen to impress on John Chapman that she could go toe to toe with a bright writer, no matter how brilliant or impudent his conversation.
While less immediately blatant than what was going on above them in the brothels upstairs, this meeting in William Jeff’s bookshop between the ‘bluestocking’ and ‘the most amusing little fellow in the whole world’ clearly also had a powerful charge of physical attraction. Later that week, Mary Ann let slip to Charles Bray this brief and beguiling mention: ‘I was introduced to Lewes the other day in Jeff’s shop – a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance.’
The Comte de Mirabeau was a flamboyant figure from the French Revolution. Looking at Mirabeau’s portrait today, it is difficult to fathom his appeal, yet he was infamous for his many scandalous love affairs. Despite Lewes’s simian looks and straggly hair, Mary Ann Evans had identified in him the pull of a magnetic charisma and in herself, perhaps, the beginning of an attraction.
Lewes, for his part, had no doubt heard the gossip about John Chapman’s and Mary Ann Evans’s affair. Did he know enough to see this young, erudite editor in a different light? Did she suspect that he suspected? Would this meeting rip off the sticking plaster from her scholarly exterior, revealing the passionate radical beneath? Mary Ann’s subsequent letters are coy about when she and Lewes started their affair, but since he was impulsive and she was a radical thinker who was prepared to blow away all social conventions, I do not think that they waited very long. At any rate, their lives were soon entangled. At first, it was a secret affair, conducted through the editing of articles and visits to the theatre and opera. While mentioning Thomas Carlyle and Robert Browning as possible xviicontributors to the WestminsterReviewin her letter to Charles Bray of November 1851, Mary Ann includes the aside: ‘Lewes says his article on Julia von Krudener will be glorious. He sat in the same box as us at TheMerryWivesofWindsorand helped to carry off the dolorousness of the play.’
By 1854, the scholar from the Midlands threw caution to the winds. In a scene as exciting and passionate as any of the romantic novels which she would later satirise, Mary Ann and Lewes caught a cross-Channel steamer and fled to the Continent. Her journal takes up the story:
‘I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street on 20th July 1854 and found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp.’
Mary Ann was now committed. Living out the reality of the biggest gamble of her life, she arrived at St Katharine Docks before Lewes. Understandably she was anxious – might he have had second thoughts? Had he been able to say goodbye to his wife and children?
‘I had 20 minutes of terrible fear least something should have delayed G. Before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder and all was well.’
All really was well. Clearly immune to the night chill, they sat out on the deck – presumably in each other’s arms – and watched the dawn break over the Antwerp skyline. They were heading into uncharted territory and Mary Ann knew that their trip abroad would irrevocably change her life. Her journal entry catches the sublime excitement of the moment:
The day was glorious and our passage perfect. The sunset was lovely, but still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the River Scheldt between two and three in the morning. The crescent xviiimoon, the stars, the first faint blush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass of clouds on the horizon which sent forth flashes of lightning.
Until this point Mary Ann’s letters to her three Coventry friends, Sara Hennell, her sister Cara and Cara’s husband Charles Bray, were generally long, wordy and discursive. Keen to impress upon them how important she was becoming in London literary life, Mary Ann often listed various great men of letters who were in and out of her office and while apparently self-deprecating, she liked to imply how reliant they were upon her judgement. The trio in Coventry would have been thunder-struck to receive these terse three lines scribbled to them as she dashed to catch the steamer:
‘Dear Friends, I have only time to say good-bye and God bless you. Poste Restante Weimar for the next six weeks and afterwards Berlin.’
Mary Ann’s excitement and rush of adrenaline is palpable. By the time the letter arrived, she had left with Lewes. Their affair was out in the open and there was no way back. Determined to start a new life, Mary Ann threw herself out of Victorian society. Her poetic journal entry could stand as the mantra to this new life: ‘Stilllovelier the dawn.’
* * *
That chance meeting at William Jeff’s bookshop changed the lives of Mary Ann Evans and George Lewes. With Lewes’s help, Mary Ann not only reinvented herself, but as a writer she reinvented English literature and the art of the novel. And if Lewes was looking for the next story, in Mary Ann the bluestocking he found the story of xixthe rest of his life. She would become his lover and lifelong partner and he would help shape her writing career as she became the most important literary figure of her generation and a bestselling author to rival Charles Dickens.
In fact, I believe that the momentous meeting in William Jeff’s bookshop on that October day in 1851 was the occasion of not just one highly charged encounter but two. The second encounter was less vivid, but it was no less consequential. For in that bookshop, I think that Mary Ann Evans most likely had her first introduction to the work of the novelist Jane Austen, who had died two years before Mary Ann had been born.
Lewes was one of Austen’s most committed fans. He invariably invoked Austen as his first line of reference in any literary context and had recently provoked the author Currer Bell into violent indignation by telling him that he should endeavour to write more like her. Given his evangelical love of Austen, I like to imagine Lewes pointing her out on the bookshelves, skipping over and leaping up onto a chair to pull out one of her novels and brandish it under Mary Ann’s nose, probably declaiming his favourite expression of praise: ‘This is capital!’
Certainly at that time Mary Ann Evans, a high-brow scholar of the classics and a specialist in German philosophy, would not have read Austen. Indeed, for Lewes to admire Austen and to pick her out was surprising. By the 1850s, novels were written in a very different literary style from Jane Austen. This style was exemplified by the bestselling works of Charles Dickens, then at the towering height of his powers, whose vast novels with huge casts, implausible plots and indignant social commentary were serialised on a monthly basis to a mass market. Described by Henry James as ‘large loose baggy monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and xxthe arbitrary’, these sprawling Victorian novels had eclipsed the neatly structured romantic comedies of Austen and the Regency period she portrayed. This was 1851, after all, and as the Great Exhibition so magnificently displayed, bonnets, barouches and calling cards left on silver trays had given way to railways, steamships and telegraph wires. The manners and values of the Regency era had been overtaken and outpaced by the extraordinary progress of the Victorian industrial revolution. Before reading Austen, Mary Ann might easily have confused her with the throngs of female authors who she would later poke fun at in her essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’.
Whether as the first upshot of the William Jeff’s bookshop meeting or not, Lewes was indeed duly commissioned by the new young assistant editor to write an article for the WestminsterReview. Austen was the trigger. Lewes wrote an article that reviewed Austen’s novels in depth alongside other female novelists such as the Brontë sisters (now revealed as the women behind their male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) and George Sand. In his article ‘The Lady Novelists’, Lewes laments how little Austen was then recognised and champions her as ‘the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end’. He goes on to praise her novels as demonstrating ‘the special quality of womanliness in tone and point of view. They are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman.’
If Mary Ann was attracted to Lewes – as she was – she could now also readily see that in turn he found Jane Austen highly attractive. Lewes also fell for the convenient male fantasy (which still prevails today) that Jane Austen herself was most like her beguiling heroine Elizabeth Bennet, writing in a later review: ‘We may picture her as xxisomething like her own sprightly, natural but by no means perfect Elizabeth Bennet in PrideandPrejudice, one of the few heroines one would seriously like to marry.’
As well as providing some insight into the character of Austen, this declaration of love for her would have given Mary Ann greater insight into Lewes himself. As we shall see, there is a great deal to unpack between Jane Austen and Mary Ann Evans. In a mirror image of the role he played when he had his extensive dialogue with Currer Bell (who was of course revealed as Charlotte Brontë), Lewes would stand as a lightning conductor between Mary Ann Evans, by then his lover, and Jane Austen, his great literary love.
* * *
That meeting in William Jeff’s bookshop shaped their destiny. If Lewes did talk about Austen he laid the groundwork not just for his next commissioned article but also for the time when Mary Ann Evans would stop writing literary articles and take up the challenge of writing novels. Five years later in 1856, both Lewes and Austen provided the key influences to Mary Ann when she began to write her first fiction.
As well as reinventing the English novel, Mary Ann Evans also reinvented herself. Most obviously she reinvented her own name. Today we do not recognise and know her as Mary Ann Evans in the way we recognise and know Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, we know her and discuss her as GeorgeEliot, which was the name that she used to conceal her female identity when she started to write fiction.
The choice of the name George Eliot is itself significant. Many years later after Lewes had died, Mary Ann explained how she had xxiichosen it to her financial advisor John Cross, whom she married in the last year of her life. In his edited edition of her letters, Cross recalled: ‘My wife told me the reason she fixed on this name was that George was Mr Lewes’s Christian name, and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.’
The ‘George’ is clear enough, but I have a slightly different view of the ‘Eliot’. During the summer of 1856, when she was planning her first fiction, Lewes had encouraged Mary Ann to read Jane Austen’s novels. Among Austen’s heroines, one in particular is likely to have caught her attention: Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion. The personal similarities between Anne Elliot and Mary Ann Evans are striking. With her mother long dead and her remote father failing to understand her, Anne Elliot is trapped by her family; furthermore, aged twenty-seven Anne has lost the bloom of her youth and is universally considered too plain to attract a partner. If Henry James had met Anne Elliot, he might have also described her as a ‘bluestocking’. However, thrillingly, Austen turns the tables and by the end of PersuasionAnne casts off this haggard appearance, regains the light in her eyes and is passionately pursued and embraced by Captain Wentworth. Lewes might not have been Captain Wentworth, and he was certainly no Darcy, but he was mesmerising, provocative and sexually attractive to Mary Ann. Equally, while Mary Ann might have appeared ostensibly more Mary Bennet than Elizabeth Bennet (Mary Ann’s clothes were notoriously dowdy), she was a radical who was clearly highly attractive to him.
From the first spark in William Jeff’s bookshop, theirs was a bluestocking love affair that grew to sustain them for the rest of their lives. Their passion was invariably heightened when Mary Ann was in the creative process of writing. They established a pattern whereby every evening she would read aloud to him the prose xxiiithat she had written that day and if he liked it, he would exclaim ‘That’s capital!’ and jump up from his chair and come over to kiss her. Writing as George Eliot, Mary Ann wrote seven lengthy novels full of magnificent prose. There would have been a great many kisses.
* * *
Conscious or not, the choice of ‘Eliot’ as a pseudonym has a strong flavour of Persuasion and Lewes clearly approved. Nevertheless, on the face of it Jane Austen and George Eliot have little in common. Austen was genteel and ironical. Staying single all her life, she remained under the wing of her family and rarely strayed from her native Hampshire. As Virginia Woolf commented: ‘Of all great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.’ The title pages of Austen’s original editions bore a simple if enigmatic byline: ‘By a Lady.’
Eliot, on the other hand, was no lady. Her pseudonym was deliberately masculine. Unlike Austen, she had several affairs with married men before she met her partner Lewes and they lived together in an atmosphere of radicalism, sexual liberty and scandal. Most of all, if Austen was hard to catch in the act of greatness, Eliot was immediately recognised and celebrated for achieving greatness. Her first novel AdamBede was a runaway bestseller and reprinted seven times in its first year of publication. Writing in her journal after the first print run had sold out, Eliot noted with some surprise: ‘John Blackwood writes to say, I am a popular author as well as a great author.’ The reaction of the poet Emily Dickinson to Eliot’s Middlemarchcaptures the spirit of the ecstatic contemporary critical responses. ‘What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?’ Sight unseen, Eliot’s fourth novel Romola attracted xxivthe highest advance any publisher had then ever paid for a novel. Henry James considered Romola to be her masterpiece and like all her other books it was a bestseller and made Eliot very wealthy.
It would have surprised Victorian critics to know that today it is Jane Austen rather than George Eliot who is the household name. Despite the focus of her work upon a privileged sector of Regency society, on the face of it not an area where we share much common ground with her, Austen is widely loved. Her books have been turned into a sequence of popular films and banner television series. As one of our most cherished British authors, her iconic image adorns the back of £10 notes and we all have our own view of what ‘Jane Austen’s world’ looks like, which might include horse-drawn carriages pulling up with a crunch of the gravel outside country vicarages (ideally enhanced by the strobe effect of the wheel spokes spinning backwards), ladies spilling out in a flurry of white muslin dresses and bonnets, gentlemen tall, straight and attentive in dress coats and top hats with quick-witted repartee fizzing between them.
I was first introduced to the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot as a student. Reading and examining Austen alongside Eliot illuminates many aspects of their respective works and writing techniques. Understanding Austen’s greatness requires close attention to detail. The perceptive and detailed views of Charlotte Brontë, which wash through Lewes and are evident in the later work of Eliot, both challenge and illuminate her genius. Likewise, looking at Eliot with the lens provided by Austen gives insight into the areas which Eliot addresses. Eliot is a profoundly radical writer who takes the literary world established by Austen as her starting point and breaks it apart. She then picks her way through and explores the extensive wreckage and difficult psychological territory that lies beyond.
Both authors were impacted by their fathers’ early deaths and xxvdecided to try to support themselves by their writing. With widely differing levels of family support, they each followed this tenuous and daunting literary path. While the lives of Austen and Eliot were utterly unrecognisable from each other, using the contemporary material they witnessed they each managed to produce works of profound genius. They also achieved something virtually no other women of their generations managed: they each earned their own income and – to the extent they wished – their independence.
Written between 1795 and the year of Austen’s death in 1817, Austen’s novels have one foot in the eighteenth century. Eliot lived until 1880 and the themes and characters in her books anticipate the concerns of twentieth-century fiction. Among the many classic novels of the nineteenth century, the six by Jane Austen and seven by George Eliot act as bookends to the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century. A close reading of these two sets of magnificent novels casts a revealing light on each other and on the different themes that preoccupied the authors and the different techniques they used to explore them. Their novels and their slightly overlooked letters also reveal their personalities and the lives they led and illustrate the shifting worlds that they lived in at either end of the nineteenth century.
I hope this book will inspire readers who love and know Jane Austen’s work but who are less familiar with George Eliot to take a chance and reach along the bookshelf for her novels and read them with admiration and enjoyment. And if any reader reaches right along the shelf and picks out two of George Eliot’s least read novels, Romolaand DanielDeronda(pausing with respect mingled with apprehension as you weigh them in your hand), I will have exceeded all my hopes – and you will be in for two of the greatest literary treats of your lifetime. xxvi
Chapter 1
From Regency to Radical
Jane Austen started writing extensively in the 1790s, and just after the turn of the new century in 1800 she had completed three draft manuscripts that she would repeatedly revise, initially with the working titles of Elinor&Marianne, FirstImpressionsand Susan. In 1803, six years after her father unsuccessfully tried to sell First Impressions, her brother Henry managed to sell Susan for £10 to the London publisher Crosby & Co. of Stationer’s Court. This £10 was the first money Austen received for her writing and should have marked the start of her writing career. However, inexplicably Richard Crosby failed to publish the novel. Perhaps Crosby was concerned that Susan, which was a mocking parody of the sort of Regency gothic thrillers that he was successfully publishing, might dent their credibility and damage their overall sales.
By 1809, frustratingly Austen was still an unpublished author. FirstImpressions, telling the story of the romance between Elizabeth Bennet and the curiously named Mr Darcy, had been gathering dust for twelve years, and her hopes for Susanand her adventures in the gothic Northanger Abbey had been thwarted. Breaking the 2convention that men managed business affairs, Austen decided to take action herself. Signing herself off as MAD, Mrs Ashton Dennis, to emphasise her mounting frustration, on 5 April 1809 she wrote to Richard Crosby to point out that six years had passed since he had purchased the copyright of Susanand to ask whether he intended to publish it. Provocatively suggesting that the only reason for the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of his failure to publish must be that ‘by some carelessness’ the manuscript had been lost, she gave Crosby an ultimatum: if he did not publish Susan, she would feel at liberty to secure its publication by applying elsewhere.
The letter itself is revealing – when studied under ultraviolet light, it is possible to detect the first draft of the letter which she wrote in pencil. In this pencil draft, Austen signed the letter using her own name. However, when she rubbed out the pencil draft and wrote the fair copy in ink, she changed her signature to Mrs Ashton Dennis, which both made the pun of MAD and protected her identity. In due course, this concealment of her identity would prove significant. Jane Austen vigilantes have also pointed out that when read backwards, ‘Ashton Dennis’ is revealed as ‘has not sinned’. Prompt in his reply, writing on Saturday 8 April 1809 to Mrs Dennis addressed to her at the Post Office at Southampton, Richard Crosby archly pointed out that having bought the copyright there was ‘not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to it’. Mrs Ashton Dennis may not have sinned, but Crosby was not going to forgive her for the threat to seek to publish Susanelsewhere. While threatening to take legal action himself ‘should you or anyone else [publish it], we shall take proceedings to stop the sale’, he offered to sell it back to her for the original £10. Austen baulked at this. Leaving Susangathering dust with Crosby, her careful pious anagram ignored and her sarcasm repudiated, she turned her attention 3to her other manuscripts and reworked the structure of Elinor and Mariannefrom a sequence of letters between the two Dashwood sisters to a more dramatic narrative.
Two years later, Austen finally became a published author. In 1811, her brother Henry, who since leaving the Oxfordshire Militia in 1801 had established himself as a successful private banker in London, managed to arrange for the private publication of the manuscript by Thomas Egerton, who was a publisher of miscellaneous military works and dictionaries based in Whitehall. The printing costs for 750 copies have been estimated at £180, well beyond Austen’s budget. It has been suggested that her brothers Henry and Edward (who was adopted by the wealthy Knight family in Kent and was the richest) paid Thomas Egerton. Austen had changed the title so that rather than Elinor&Marianne, the novel that appeared as a private, anonymous publication ‘Printed for the Author’ enjoyed the witty alliterative title SenseandSensibility. At last, Jane Austen’s writing career was launched.
Happily, Sense and Sensibility was well received and sold sufficient copies to allow Austen to repay whichever brother had paid for the printing costs and to move from having to pay to publish her second book to negotiating the sale of its copyright. In November 1812, Jane and Henry agreed a price of £110 for the copyright and she altered the title from FirstImpressionsto a more catchy, thought-provoking one that echoed the lively alliteration of SenseandSensibilityand neatly encapsulated the attributes of the leading couple. And so it was that PrideandPrejudicewas published and the iconic Regency romantic couple of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy were introduced to the world. While it now seems impossible to imagine English literature without them, the first print run was perhaps only 1,500 copies. By October 1813, this pair of novels 4were reprinted and there were profits to be distributed. Reporting news of the second edition to her brother Francis, now an officer rising up through the ranks in the Royal Navy, Austen writes with pride and pleasure: ‘I have now therefore written myself into £250, which only makes me long for more – I have something in hand.’
Jane Austen was certainly attracted to earning money. The ‘something in hand’ that might provide the further money she ‘longed for’ was MansfieldPark, which was published by Egerton in 1814 with a first edition print-run of 1,250 copies. Although this edition sold well and would eventually sell out, Jane and her brother Henry appear to have decided that Egerton, which specialised in military books, was not really an appropriate publisher of her novels. The print-run was perhaps rather low (John Murray noted his ‘astonishment that so small an edition of such a work should have been sent into the world’ – although that is an easy and cheap criticism for a rival publisher to make) and there was a disappointing lack of advertising and general reviews.
Writing to her niece Fanny Knight, the daughter of the richest Austen brother Edward, on 20 November 1814 after the first edition of MansfieldPark sold out, Austen remarks:
‘You will be glad to hear that the first edition of MP is all sold. Your Uncle Henry is rather wanting me to come to Town to settle about a second edition.’
She adds rather archly almost in the vein of what Mrs Norris, a notorious miser and the Austen family’s favourite character of Mansfield Park, might have written to her own niece in the novel, also called Fanny:
‘I am very greedy and want to make the most of it, but as you are much above caring about money, I shall not plague you with any particulars.’ 5
Expressing a sentiment of which Mrs Norris would have approved, Austen concludes:
‘People are more ready to borrow and praise than to buy, but though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls “pewter” too.’
In order to satisfy her longing for more pewter (money), and with her brother Henry now acting as her literary agent, Austen decided to sell her next novel Emmato a more recognised literary publisher. Their choice was John Murray, who had recently moved his office to 50 Albemarle Street in Mayfair and was the celebrated publisher of the sensationally successful Romantic poet Lord Byron. With queues forming along the length of Albemarle Street and jostling outside his office to buy copies of Lord Byron’s work, John Murray was certainly providing his authors with plenty of eye-catching publicity and pewter. Unashamedly, Austen wanted both.
As the negotiations over the publication of Emmatook place, three surviving letters provide insight into the various tactics and reactions surrounding the deal. William Gifford, John Murray’s reader, was an early fan of Austen’s three published novels. John Murray gave him the manuscript of Emmato read, and he came back with the following advice:
‘Five hundred pounds seems a good deal for a novel … cannot you get the third novel thrown in, PrideandPrejudice? I have lately read it again – ’tis very good.’
Meanwhile, Austen had come to stay with Henry in London to be on hand for the negotiations, and on 17 October she provided an update to her sister Cassandra:
‘Mr Murray’s letter is come. He is a rogue of course, but a civil one. He offers £450 – but wants to have the copyright of MP and S&Sincluded. It will end in my publishing for myself, I daresay.’ 6
John Murray had clearly taken Gifford’s advice and reduced his offer by £50, although he does not appear to have asked for the copyright of PrideandPrejudiceto be ‘thrown in’.
As the negotiations continued, Henry pushed back to John Murray in a magnificently self-assured response of 21 October, which still speaks for all aggrieved writers and their indignant literary agents who have ever felt that their work has been inexplicably undervalued by publishers:
‘The terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected that I am apprehensive of having made some great error in my arithmetical calculations.’
I like to imagine Jane and Henry drafting this letter together from his house in Hans Place, chortling and congratulating each other as they put the final flourishes to their chosen adjectives. ‘Apprehensive – that’s a good one!’
As Austen anticipated, the deal they eventually agreed with John Murray was a commission agreement, rather than the sale of the copyright. They now had the money to underwrite the printing costs. In a rather eye-catching manner, Austen dedicated Emma to the Prince Regent himself, who – bombastic, decadent and repulsive to Austen as he was – was above all the figure who defined the Regency period.
The dedication was arranged by Reverend James Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, whom Austen had met through Henry (they shared the same London doctor). Given their mutually exclusive sense of morality, Austen presumably swallowed a good deal of her pride to make this dedication, but she was also sufficiently commercial to realise that having the Prince Regent headline the publication might help attract publicity for Emma– and the more publicity, the more pewter. 7
Austen might well have expected to make some compromises in the course of promoting her work, but what she might not have expected was that James Clarke would pursue her, inviting her to come and stay with him at his house in Golden Square ‘when you come to Town’. Such a brazen invitation (when Clarke knew that she stayed with her brother Henry) is an indication of the sort of London life that a celebrated single female author could have been drawn into. Life in Regency London was racy and Clarke was blatantly offering Austen something very different from the time she spent in her muddy Chawton parish in Hampshire.
Undeterred by her initial rejection, after the publication of Emma James Clarke also made extensive suggestions about the next novel she should write, which he recommended should involve ‘an English Clergyman … fond of and entirely engaged in Literature. Carry your Clergyman to sea as the Friend of some distinguished Naval Character about a Court.’ Seeing through this semi-disguised, blatantly self-serving plotline, Austen demurred. Even more ludicrously, James Clarke tried to sway her towards another idea where he could offer her the patronage of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who was about to marry Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s daughter and only heir. Clarke suggested: ‘Perhaps when you again appear in print you may choose to dedicate your Volumes to Prince Leopold: any Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august House of Saxe-Coburg would just now be very interesting.’
While this suggestion strikes us now as wholly absurd, it nevertheless reveals the insidious pressure put upon an artist to bend their art to patronage. Just imagine – if Austen had yielded to this pressure (and there were the implications that there might be more money provided along this route), Persuasionwould have been based in some world involving ‘the august House of Saxe-Coburg’. 8As a German naval officer, Kapitan Wentworth might have turned out very differently.
Austen was having none of it. Her letter of 1 April 1816 robustly rejects James Clarke and illuminates her effervescent, decisive personality. She insists that she must do things her own way:
You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of Composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an Historical Romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Coburg might be much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity than such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in – but I could no more write a Romance than an Epic Poem – I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. No – I must keep to my own style and go on in my own Way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
Austen echoes the words that Mr Bennet uses in Pride and Prejudicewhen he asks Elizabeth: ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn.’
Vivacious and independent, her comments go to the heart of her writing. Above all else, Austen determinedly defines herself as a comic writer. Dancing away from the ponderous interference of James Clarke, she merrily and caustically follows her own path. We see in her the same spirit that she gave to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice when Miss Bingley tries to muscle her out of a walk in the garden: 9
The path just admitted three. Mr Darcy felt their rudeness and immediately said: ‘This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the avenue.’ But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them, answered laughingly: ‘No; no; stay where you are – you are charmingly group’d and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye.’ She then ran gaily off, rejoicing as she rambled about.
Emmawas published on 23 December 1815 ‘by the Author of PrideandPrejudice’. Austen’s future looked bright and assured – she was now an established author with four successful novels. After a long wait of almost twenty years since her father had so proudly yet ineffectually tried to sell FirstImpressions, the ultimate Regency love story between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Austen was now at last earning ‘praise and money’. The much-prized pewterwas coming in, and John Murray, the top London publisher, was looking forward to her next manuscript. As well as working on a story to which she gave the provisional title TheElliots, Austen was also finally able to afford the £10 to buy back the copyright of Susanfrom Crosby & Co., who had still not published it. In the intervening years, another novel called Susanhad been published and so before submitting it to John Murray, Austen changed the heroine’s name from Susan to Catherine – Catherine Morland. Among other edits, she also took the liberty of making a snide reference to Richard Crosby in the opening paragraph, a private joke between her and her brother Henry. Describing the apparently unprepossessing qualities of her heroine Catherine, Austen writes: ‘Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without 10being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man.’ So far, so gently amusing, and this feels as if it was the original text. Then Austen adds bitingly: ‘Though his name was Richard and he had never been handsome.’ Given that Catherine’s father makes no further appearance in the book, this was an easy manual edit to make and it feels like a fresh sharp stab at Richard Crosby.
Austen’s fiction was contemporary. The year 1815 had seen not only the publication of Emmabut also the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. There was something almost Austen-like about the last movement of the Napoleonic Wars. When Napoleon made his final unexpected advance in the evening before the battle, the Duke of Wellington and his officers were enjoying a sumptuous if rather makeshift ball hosted by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels. From the fictional army officers scattered across Austen’s novels, we can imagine the cast of Regency characters who were dancing the quadrilles and waltzes at the ball – unscrupulous villains like George Wickham from PrideandPrejudicetaking their turn alongside decent younger sons of earls like Colonel Fitzwilliam; Captain Denny bowing deferentially to his senior officer Colonel Brandon from SenseandSensibility. The officers finished their dancing before leaving to take up their positions at Waterloo. Some officers danced all night and with no time to change fought the battle in their evening dress.
In the long term, the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo left Regency Britain in a dominant position on the world stage, which the next generation, the Victorians, would enjoy and systematically exploit. Unfortunately for the Regency generation, the immediate consequence of the end of the lengthy Napoleonic Wars was a severe recession caused by the disbanded soldiers returning back home. This recession was compounded by a freak climate that washed out 11two successive harvests, and it also destroyed a number of banks and struck the Austen family very close to home. In 1816, Henry Austen’s London bank, Austen & Maunde, went bust, and Henry was himself declared personally bankrupt. In Regency times, banks were unregulated and customers had no protection for their cash deposits. Along with other customers of the bank who had placed their cash deposits at Austen & Maunde, the Austen family lost a significant amount of their savings.
Jane Austen never dwelt for long on bad news. Her attitude was that she would ‘let other people’s pens dwell on anything odious’. After briefly lamenting the bankruptcy, she bounced back to encourage her brother Henry in his new incarnation as a curate, the lowest rung of the clergy in the Church of England. She also immediately introduced new themes of bankruptcy into her next book, still provisionally called The Elliots. The story opens with the Elliot family, who are teetering on the edge of financial ruin. Austen follows their moves to avoid catastrophe and intertwines their story with that of a young naval officer, Captain Wentworth, who has won a spectacular fortune for himself by capturing French ships. In a new departure for Austen, family fortunes are now prone to wild swings. In parallel with the financial success of Captain Wentworth, Austen creates her oldest heroine, Anne Elliot, who defies her age and wins back her former lover. Written in the bruising aftermath of Henry’s personal bankruptcy when all his possessions were publicly auctioned to pay his creditors and the family had to come to terms with the fact that there was no chance of them recouping any of the money that they had entrusted to him, it is an inspiring story of encouragement to both Henry and to herself. No matter how bad life is, Austen was determined to demonstrate that it is always possible to turn the tables and win back both money and love. 12
With both the newly rewritten manuscripts of Susanand TheElliots almost ready to send to John Murray, Austen even started a new novel. This one promised to be a story of financial speculation around a fast-changing Regency seaside resort called Sanditon. As 1816 progressed after the bankruptcy, on the surface Austen was as busily creative and engaged as she had always been. Later in the year, she received her first royalty cheque from the ‘civil rogue’ John Murray. Dated 21 October 1816 and addressed to ‘Jane Austin’ (spelling was more variable then, and in any event it represented pewter, so nobody was going to return it) the cheque was for £38 18s 1d.
Jane Austen did not submit any more manuscripts to John Murray. She did not live to see any more of her novels published or to celebrate the receipt of any more royalty cheques they earned. By the spring of 1817, after sketching out only the opening twelve chapters, Austen was too ill to continue writing the manuscript that she had provisionally called TheBrothers. The exact nature of her illness is unclear, but Addison’s disease, Hodgkin’s and lupus have each been cited. Austen was an unflinchingly brave patient, but her symptoms were ominous.
Writing on 25 March 1817, she admits: ‘I have had a good deal of fever at times and indifferent nights, but am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’. She adds, with black humour which still makes us catch our breath and read it again to admire her self-deprecating courage: ‘Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.’
Her illness was sufficiently threatening that on 24 May, her sister Cassandra arranged for her to move to Winchester, to be closer to 13medical care. Her last known letter, dated 29 May 1817, describes her rapidly fading world: ‘I live chiefly on the sofa, but am allowed to walk from one room to the other. I have been out once in a sedan-chair and am to repeat it, and be promoted to a wheel-chair as the weather serves.’
Describing the man who will deliver this letter, she signs off: ‘You will find Captain [Clement] a very respectable, well-meaning man, without much manner, his wife and sister all good humour and obligingness and I hope (since the fashion allows it) with rather longer petticoats than last year.’
It is both poignant and uplifting that even as her life was closing down around her, Austen’s last known written letter contains one of her classic gently barbed jokes.
Six weeks later, on 18 July 1817, aged just forty-one, Austen died. She left a surprise for Henry – her last two completed manuscripts were found in her desk. One of them was the reworked manuscript of Susan
