Jane Austen, the Secret Radical E-Book

Helena Kelly

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 588

Beschreibung

'A sublime piece of literary detective work that shows us once and for all how to be precisely the sort of reader that Austen deserves.' Caroline Criado-Perez, Guardian Almost everything we think we know about Jane Austen is wrong. Her novels don't confine themselves to grand houses and they were not written just for readers' enjoyment. She writes about serious subjects and her books are deeply subversive. We just don't read her properly - we haven't been reading her properly for 200 years.  Jane Austen, the Secret Radical puts that right. In her first, brilliantly original book, Austen expert Helena Kelly introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason.  Uncovering a radical, spirited and political engaged Austen, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical will encourage you to read Jane, all over again.

Leseprobe

Jane Austen The Secret Radical

Jane Austen The Secret Radical

HELENA KELLY

Published in the UK in 2016

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

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ISBN: 978-178578-116-2

Text copyright © 2016 Helena Kelly

The author has asserted her moral rights

Extract from Letter to Lord Byron copyright © 1937 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset in Dante by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

1. The Authoress

2. ‘The Anxieties of Common Life’ – Northanger Abbey

3. The Age of Brass – Sense and Sensibility

4. ‘All Our Old Prejudices’ – Pride and Prejudice

5. ‘The Chain and the Cross’ – Mansfield Park

6. Gruel – Emma

7. Decline and Fall – Persuasion

8. The End

Further Reading

Notes

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helena Kelly holds degrees in Classics and English from Oxford and King’s College London. She teaches Austen at various Oxford colleges, and on a programme for American visiting students in Bath. She has taught Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical is her first book.

To David and Rory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to Pamela Hunter, the archivist at Jane Austen’s bank, Hoare’s, and to the exceptionally helpful David Rymill at the Winchester archives.

I’d also like to thank my agent, Sally Holloway, for doing so much to help me shape my rather incoherent ideas into a book, and my publishers, for being much nicer than Austen’s. I’m particularly grateful to Duncan Heath, for his tact and care in editing.

And thank you too to all my students, and to my family.

CHAPTER 1

The Authoress

England in April. Even here, in Southampton, in a town full of soldiers and sailors, in a country at war, April is still April. Sunlight and shadow chase one another across the sea ramparts, while the waves dance, mischievous, sparkling, to welcome in the yearly miracle of an English spring. The sun shines down on the house in Castle Square, and on the garden behind it. It shines on the careful, orderly rows of the shrubbery; on the young leaves; and on a small child in a pinafore, squawking and flapping her arms like wings, then crouching to scoop up a handful of gravel and offer it to her companion, as astonished and enchanted as if she’s found jewels. Everything seems new at this time of the year, even in this old-fashioned house. Everything seems possible. A few weeks more, and the lilac will be out, and after the lilac, the long yellow fronds of the laburnum, and then the roses. The buds are still furled tight, but, buffeted by the salt breezes, they’re beginning to stir.

The other inhabitants of the house are stirring, too. They have been a dutiful lot in Castle Square, these three years past. The man of the house has spent much of the time at sea, as an officer in His Majesty’s navy, leaving all his many womenfolk together – his young wife, his tiny daughter, his widowed mother, his two unmarried sisters, and a family friend who had nowhere else to go. A houseful of women, they have been a comfort to each other during his absences. His brothers have helped to support them, but now, at long last, the richest (newly bereaved, newly generous) is offering help of a more practical kind – a cottage for his mother and sisters, rent-free, on one of his Hampshire estates – and, until that should be made ready, a visit to Godmersham, his grand house in Kent. The captain has done his duty. The Southampton household is to be broken up. They remain for only a few weeks more. The lilac, the laburnum, and the roses will flower here without them.

The child has thrown herself on to the path, legs kicking in fury. Her companion lifts her and, turning towards the house, points up to one of the windows. The little girl exclaims with delight. The woman watching at the window – a brown-haired, brown-eyed woman of 33, caught idling when she ought to be working – waves down at her niece, and mouths an apology to her sister. She turns back to the room, to the neat bed with its dimity cover, the old chair and the small rickety table, which are all that could be spared from downstairs, and to the letter which she hasn’t even begun to write.

She’s never had any cause to write a letter of business before. At the Abbey school, in Reading, she sat through hours of lessons in French and sewing. A year, did she spend there? It can’t have been much more. The garden, the tall trees, are vivid in her memory; so, too, the view to the ruins of the church; the other girls bundled in shawls giggling round the fireplace, dying of laughter, as they used to say. The big girls had lessons, though not, she suspects, very good ones, in all the usual feminine accomplishments, dancing and drawing and music, but if letter-writing was taught at the Abbey, she doesn’t recall it. And before that, at Mrs Cawley’s … well, of Mrs Cawley’s school, here, in this very town, she remembers little. Only fever-dreams, and her sister Cassandra being sick, too; and their cousin Jane Cooper; and more than anything else the pain that twisted and twisted in her bowels. They nearly died of the typhoid fever.

She was seven, then. More than 25 years have passed, and what has she done, in all that time? She has no husband, no children – unless she counts the ones nestled, sleeping, about her room. Elinor and Marianne tucked up in a tin trunk under the bed, together with all the foolish stories from her childhood; and Susan in the writing box, half-hidden here at the back of the closet, behind a pile of shifts and petticoats, safe from little fingers. She sets the box on the bed, and, kneeling, turns the key in the lock, folds back the lid, opens, looks, touches the faint roughness of the leather on the writing slope. The wood – smooth and cool as satin under her fingers – warms until it almost feels like a living thing. Here are her pens and pencils, her penknife, her inkwell, waiting to be filled. Paper. Wafers of wax to seal her letters. And Susan.

It is about Susan that she is to write. Susan, not the most dear of her children, but nonetheless the only one who has shown any promise to date.

Such a deal of paper, though! The woman – who has not lived for three years in so expensive a town as Southampton without getting to know the price of everything – winces inwardly at the extravagance. To salve her conscience, she leafs through the old correspondence in her writing box, searching for a piece of scrap paper. She finds one sheet which has only a line or two written at the top and, seizing a pencil, scrawls on it the single word ‘Gentlemen’.

Well then, to the point.

‘In the Spring of the year 1803 a manuscript Novel in 2 volumes entitled Susan was sold to you by a Gentleman of the name of—’ What was the name again of her brother Henry’s lawyer, who had helped to oversee the sale? Seymour. That was it. ‘—of the name of Seymour, & the purchase money £10 received at the same time. Six years have since passed, & this work of which I avow myself the Authoress—’

She pauses. Why not? Why not avow herself an authoress? After all, she has been writing for nearly all her life.

‘—of which I avow myself the Authoress has never to the best of my knowledge, appeared in print, tho’ an early publication was stipulated for at the time of Sale.’

She knows little of the publishing trade but is it not queer – extraordinary, even – to purchase a book and never to publish it? How proudly, how happily, she set to the work of copying out her novel for these men, all those years ago; powdering and polishing the pages, tending her pen nib as carefully as ever she could, worrying over the tiniest smudge of ink. But perhaps publishers, seeing so many manuscripts, don’t cherish them as authors and authoresses do. Perhaps poor Susan is lying forgotten somewhere, nibbled by mice. Maybe a maidservant has used her to start a fire, thinking that one bundle of paper would never be missed among so many. Did they think that the novel was too short, or the title too unexciting? Perhaps it is what Susan says – but surely there is very little in it that could worry even the most anxious publisher. And did not this Mr Benjamin Crosby publish William Godwin’s Things as they Are? If ever there was a novel that criticised the world and everything in it—! Only, of course, that was before the treason trials, and before the publisher Joseph Johnson was sent to prison for printing a book that did not meet with the approval of the men in government. Perhaps Mr Crosby has grown more cautious, since then.

Well, enough of caution. ‘I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance by supposing the manuscript by some carelessness to have been lost; & if that was the case, am willing to supply You with another Copy if you are disposed to avail yourselves of it, & will engage for no farther delay when it comes into your hands.’

But when is she to sit and write out another copy? Not soon. There is so much to be done. The house to be packed up – all their belongings – and only she and Cassandra to do it; Frank gone to sea; her sister-in-law Mary expecting again and complaining; their mother; the visit to her brother Edward and his motherless children in Kent; a week lost in travelling there, and another in travelling back again; then setting the new house in order. She loves her family – truly, she does – but the days seem to slip through her fingers. There is always some demand on her time; someone needing to be nursed or entertained, a letter of condolence to be written, paper boats to be sailed on the river, yet another new niece or nephew to sew caps for. The hours of her life that she has wasted, feigning deafness while the women of Southampton drink tea and compare their latest lyings-in; the weeks that have vanished this past ten years, in moving in and out of rented houses and rented rooms, in making new acquaintances and taking leave of them again. Sometimes she thinks that, since they left home, she has not remained in the same place for three months together.

That part of her life is over now. No more removals. She will stay in Chawton until she is 70 at least, except for visits. And she means to be more particular about visits. She will go and see Henry in London because she loves him, and because his wife, fashionable, fascinating cousin Eliza, makes her laugh. Besides, London has galleries and theatres and all manner of diversions. And she will go and see her brother Edward because he is rich, and she loves to stay at Godmersham, his great estate in Kent, where the grounds are delightful and the cooking very much superior to her usual fare. She’s looking forward to the walks and the dinners she will have soon. Besides, now that Edward’s wife is dead, she has a duty to the children; the little ones will soon grow accustomed, but the older ones will not, and poor Fanny, just turned sixteen, is of an age to feel the loss of her mother most acutely.

Chawton is not yet home, but it is no more than fifteen miles from where she grew up. She will have her native skies, her native air and, Cassandra has promised her, time for her writing. It is only a question of being firm, of holding fast, as sailors say, to her purpose.

‘—It will not be in my power from particular circumstances to command this Copy before the Month of August, but then, if you accept my proposal, you may depend on receiving it.’

She will sit up at night and copy it out, if need be. She will order working candles every night she is in Kent and then smuggle them to Chawton in her luggage. Writing paper, too. It is not the least of the attractions of Godmersham that there are no quibbles over candles, no complaints about expense. Edward might, perhaps, not even complain about a London publisher addressing letters to her at his house, but he will not care for it. She will instruct the publishers to reply quickly, and to the Southampton post office. It will be easy enough to slip out for half an hour, even in all the bustle of the coming fortnight. But it will have to be soon. They have no idea of time, these people. To hold on to a book for six years and not to publish it! She should have written this letter years ago.

‘Be so good as to send me a Line in answer, as soon as possible, as my stay in this place will not exceed a few days. Should no notice be taken of this Address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work, by applying elsewhere.’

She reads over what she has written, her pencil poised above the page. It is a trifle brusque, perhaps, but this is a letter of business after all, and that last sentence should fetch her a prompt answer, at least. It will do for a first draft. She dashes off her signature: her initial – J – and her surname.

She has always envied her sister Cassandra for having a pretty name. Cassandra is named for their mother, while she is named not for her aunt Philadelphia nor her aunt Leonora – both of whom had names to conjure with – but for her aunt Jane, Jane Cooper’s mother, who caught the typhoid fever from them and died. A plain name, and a common one, too. When she was at school she was obliged to share it not only with her cousin Jane but with any number of Janes besides, so that the mistresses, and the other pupils, assigned them all nicknames and nursenames – Jane A., and Jane C., and Janet, and Janice, and Jenny. She had been Jenny – little Jenny, snotty-nosed. Patted on the head, sent away, forgotten.

Has he even read her book? This publisher, this Mr Crosby?

But of course he doesn’t yet know it is her book. Six years ago, she remained decorously in the background. Henry had thought it necessary. So far as Mr Crosby is concerned, Susan is simply a book ‘by a lady’. Once she signs her name to this letter, once he knows who she is, will he put it in advertisements? In catalogues? Will it be printed on the book’s title page or tooled in gold on a leather binding in the grand libraries of grand houses? It is possible. It’s happened to other authoresses. But once it is out it cannot be taken back again. And then, her brothers will be so angry, because after all, the name Austen does not belong only to her—

She pours ink into her inkwell, spilling out the letters of her name in her mind, shuffling them about like the ivory alphabets you play with on a rainy day, when no better entertainment offers. The letters rearrange themselves into a riddle. Who doesn’t love a riddle? She can hardly help smiling.

She will create an imaginary husband to give her countenance, and, since he may as well have an elegant name, she will call herself Mrs Ashton Dennis. And she will sign the letter with the initials ‘M’, ‘A’, and ‘D’ – ‘I am sirs, your most obedient humble servant, M.A.D.’ A joke, to make Mr Crosby take notice of her letter. An acrostic, a word puzzle, to show him that he should read her book more carefully.

A joke, but also a private admission to herself. Ashton is nearly (but not too nearly) her own surname, and Dennis is not so very far from Janice or Jenny. The letter will still be an avowal of sorts – an acknowledgement of her children, a declaration that plain Jane Austen is an authoress, even if no one outside the family ever reads her.

She writes over the pencilled draft in ink, to test out her phrases and to try out her new, imaginary signature, and, though she can hear voices downstairs, duties calling, she selects a sheet of expensive, hot-pressed paper and copies out what she has written, slowly, carefully, stopping every few words to dust the page with powder and rub it dry. The next day she cherishes the perfect polished copy all the way to the post office.

This time the publishers do not keep her waiting long. Mr Richard Crosby’s answer reaches her within the week. Torn open with shaking fingers, read in the street, it sends her back to Castle Square as angry as she has ever been in her life, its phrases sounding in her head: ‘… we purchased of Mr Seymour a Novel entitled Susan and paid him for it the sum of 10£’; that is, it is nothing whatever to do with you, Mrs Ashton Dennis, whoever you may be. The novel is not worth publishing, but it is ours, and ours is a world of stamped receipts and ‘full consideration’, and threatening ‘proceedings to stop the sale’ if you try to take the book elsewhere. These matters are, by far, less simple than you imagine, you empty-headed female. And the final insult – you clearly value the novel, Mrs Ashton Dennis, but because I value it not at all, and because I pity you for your ignorance, you can have it for the £10 that we paid for it.

That night, in the dark, she lies rigid in her narrow bed, cursing herself for her clumsiness, imagining a dozen ways in which she could have managed the business better. Did she think her punning pen name would charm him? Nothing of the sort – he didn’t even notice it. How can she avow herself an authoress when she cannot write a simple letter? An authoress, when people don’t even bother to read what she’s written? Why didn’t she speak to Henry, as she should have done? What would a few weeks or months more have mattered, after all this time? Where was the hurry?

The night offers her no answers. Nor does the next day, nor the days after, as she pulls trunks from the box-room, folds clothes, invents games to distract little Mary-Jane, who wanders, cross and bewildered, through the once-familiar rooms. By the time the evenings come she is exhausted, her hands grey with dust. The weather turns chill and damp. Spring, optimism, possibility – all seem far away. It is some consolation to think herself useful, to know that, even if she is a most indifferent kind of authoress, she is a good daughter, a good sister and a good aunt. There is china to be divided between the two households, furniture to be sold or swathed in dustsheets, farewell visits to be made, a last service at the church, a last walk on the sea ramparts.

Her own belongings are packed in haste, on the final evening. She leaves her writing box till the end – she need only empty out the powder pot and the inkwell, and make everything secure so that nothing will rattle about on the journey. She needn’t read the letter again – but still she cannot help herself. If only—! But she does not have £10, nor is she likely to, and even if she did, how is such a thing to be managed, without the aid of one of her brothers, drafts on banks, men of business? No. It is not to be thought of any more.

She scrabbles under the bed for the tin trunk and flings its contents on to the bed in brisk handfuls. She had meant only to bury Susan and Mr Crosby’s letter at the bottom, under the bundles of paper she has so foolishly treasured all these years, but here too are her notebooks, gifts from long ago, and, reading through them, she grows tender. Here are the absurd plays she wrote, and her tales of legs broken in mantraps and drunkenness and sudden, surprising marriages. A heroine who steals ices from a pastry-cook’s shop – how gloriously wicked she and Cassandra had thought it! And Love and Freindship, too – she never was a great hand at spelling – the story which made her father cry with laughter. Her History of England, by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian; Cassandra’s pictures of all the kings and queens. Her hand brushes against the story about the clergyman’s daughters which she had started but could never finish. Here are other infant novels, begun and abandoned. And some completed, more or less. Wicked Lady Susan is too short, not even a volume. She has never been quite happy with the beginning of Elinor and Marianne. First Impressions, too. Her father had thought a great deal of her stories, had even written to a publisher about one, though he met with a flat refusal. The whole of her life is here, in ink and paper. She cannot but treasure it.

Little Mary-Jane won’t remember the house in Castle Square at all, won’t take any memories away.

Jane travels with hers, the tin trunk solid under her feet as they jolt through the streets of Southampton, northwards, towards the common, parallel with the river. She will miss the river, and the sea. She will miss the flowers. By the time the cottage at Chawton is ready for them it will be too late to plant any.

Jane stares out at the pale early morning; the day becoming by degrees brighter, too bright, showing her that the sleeve of her black velvet pelisse is growing sadly rubbed. They will pass through Winchester first, with its ancient cathedral, then on to Alton. Alton to Farnham, Farnham to Bagshot, through Staines, past the charming little villas about Richmond, and so on, to Brentford, and to London. To London, and a night at brother Henry’s house. Eliza and the latest fashions await them there, an evening being plied with coffee and plum cake and scandal before they travel on to Godmersham. Jane can imagine it already – her sister-in-law moving by delicate, insinuating degrees on to family matters.

What luck, Eliza will say, that Edward felt able to promote the scheme of moving to Chawton! And at such a time! How good he is, how truly generous. Have they seen the house? Has it a pleasant aspect? Will they have agreeable neighbours? And Cassandra, with a reproving frown, will reply that Edward is very kind to them.

Cassandra always says what ought to be said, but Jane has very little opinion of Edward’s kindness herself. Edward is not the eldest nor the cleverest nor the bravest of her brothers, no, nor the kindest either. He is only the richest. But Edward is bereft, Edward is grieving – this is no time to be thinking about the four years that have passed since their father died, no time for the resentful voice which whispers that a truly generous man would have welcomed his mother and sisters into his own home, either of his homes, rather than housing them in the cottage where his estate manager used to live. Jane sets herself to thinking about the children, about her niece Fanny, and to wondering whether perhaps it had been harder for Edward than she had supposed, to be separated from his family when he was so young – no older than Fanny is now – whether she might love him better if he felt more like a real brother, and she felt less like a poor relation.

The sound of the wheels, the jingling of the harnesses, lull her into restless sleep; thoughts rattle against each other, pictures bloom. Godmersham, Edward’s Kentish estate. Sorbet and French wine; chocolate and white rolls for breakfast; the park, walks in the woodland. ‘Run mad as often as you chuse …’

Another home left behind; sisters, poor while their brother is rich; a young woman running, tumbling on a hillside; a handsome gentleman with an ugly character; fine houses and cottages; journeys; city streets, London bustle. Sensibility fighting sense. Love and loss, greed and gain.

So long, so long since they have spoken to her, but she thinks – she is almost sure – that the young girl running on the hillside is someone that she knows. An impulsive girl, passionate, grieving for the loss of a father. And a sister, quieter, more serious – rational, controlled, sensible.

Jane’s fingers, resting in her lap, twitch. She opens her eyes.

We’re all going to be seeing a lot more of Jane Austen. 2017 is the bicentenary of her tragically early death at the age of 41. And by way of celebration, the Bank of England is introducing a new £10 note with her face on.

Actually, it’s not her face. It’s an idealised picture commissioned for a family memoir published 50 years after she died. She looks richer, prettier, and far less grumpy than she does in the amateurish, unfinished sketch it’s based on. And there are some other problems with the design for the note.

In the background there’s going to be a picture of a big house – Godmersham, where Jane didn’t live. Also featured will be an illustration of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet reading some letters and a quotation from the same novel: ‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!’ – a line spoken by a character who shortly afterwards yawns and throws her book aside.

The biggest problem, though, it seems to me, is that for most people that’s Jane Austen. That’s what they recognise – pretty young women, big houses, Pride and Prejudice – demure dramas in drawing rooms. Seeing it on a banknote half a dozen times a week is only going to embed it further.

Jane was born five years after the poet William Wordsworth, the year before the American Revolution began. When the French Revolution started, she was thirteen. For almost all of her life, Britain was at war. Two of her brothers were in the navy; one joined the militia. For several years she lived in Southampton, a major naval base. It was a time of clashing armies, and warring ideas, a time of censorship and state surveillance. Enclosures were remaking the landscape; European empire-building was changing the world; science and technology were opening up a whole universe of new possibilities.

We’re perfectly willing to accept that writers like Wordsworth were fully engaged with everything that was happening, and to find the references in their work, even when they’re veiled or allusive. But we haven’t been willing to do it with Jane’s work. We know Jane – we know that however delicate her touch, she’s essentially writing variations of the same plot, a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in any romantic comedy of the last two centuries.

We know wrong.

The indisputable facts of Jane Austen’s life are few and simple. She was born in the small Hampshire village of Steventon, on 16th December 1775, the seventh of a clergyman’s eight children. Apart from five years spent in Bath between 1801 and 1806 and three years in Southampton, a few months at school, and occasional visits and holidays, she spent all her life in rural Hampshire. She never married. She died in Winchester on 18th July 1817, aged 41, and was buried in Winchester cathedral. In the four years between the end of 1811 and the end of 1815 she published four novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Another two novels – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – were published right at the end of 1817, the year she died.a

Two hundred years on, her work is astonishingly popular. It’s difficult to think of any other novelist who could be compared to her. Yet Jane herself remains a shadowy, curiously colourless figure; one who seems to have spent the majority of her 41 years being dragged along in the wake of other people’s lives.

But what lives the people around Jane had – her father, orphaned in early childhood, who worked his way out of poverty; her mother, who could claim kinship with a duke but found herself making ends meet in a country vicarage; her aunt Philadelphia, who, with no prospects in England, travelled out to India to find herself a husband; Philadelphia’s daughter, Eliza, who lost her French spouse to the guillotine. The eldest of Jane’s brothers, James, was raised in the expectation of succeeding to the property owned by his maternal uncle; her second brother George seems to have suffered from some form of disability and lived apart from the rest of the family; her third brother, Edward, was adopted into a life of luxury; Henry, the fourth of the Austen brothers, bounced from career to career – first a soldier in the militia, like that scoundrel George Wickham, then a banker, and then, finally, after his bank went bust, a clergyman. The two youngest brothers, Frank and Charles, born either side of Jane, went into the navy and led lives full of excitement and danger. Even Jane’s only sister, Cassandra, had an engagement to her name, a story of her own.

We know what most of these people looked like, we know about their careers, their marriages, their children. We know that one of Jane’s aunts was accused of stealing lace from a shop in Bath, and that one of her cousins died in a carriage accident. We know that her sister’s fiancé died of yellow fever, and that her great-great-uncle was the Duke of Chandos. All of Jane’s modern biographers repeat these facts, just as they reproduce the portraits of her brothers and her aunts and her cousin and the men who may (or, more probably, may not) have wanted to marry her, and the confused, contradictory opinions of people who barely knew her, in the belief that somehow, by combining together every scrap, something will take shape – an outline, a silhouette, a Jane-shaped space. But in spite of all their efforts, Jane remains only a slight figure vanishing into the background, her face turned away – as it is in the only finished portrait we have of her.

The more determined our pursuit, the more elusive Jane becomes. Where should we look for her? Will we find her in modern-day Bath, in the rain-drenched gold-stone buildings that are now flats or dental surgeries, in the park which occupies the place where the Lower Assembly Rooms once stood, or at the Upper Rooms, which were rebuilt almost entirely after fire damage in the Second World War? Will we find her in the Jane Austen House Museum at Chawton? She did live there, for eight years, and her sister Cassandra for nearly 40. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was divided into separate dwellings; a century later it was turned back into one. Dozens of people have lived there. And if any trace of Jane remains, then the thousands of tourists who trudge through the rooms each year will have driven it away. Visitors are shown a piano ‘like’ Jane’s; a modern reproduction of a bed ‘like’ the one Jane had when she was twenty; a table at which Jane ‘may have’ written; the caps that Jane’s nieces and nephews wore as babies. The museum’s proudest boast is Jane’s jewellery – a topaz cross, a bead bracelet, a ring set with a blue stone. These are displayed in a narrow room off the largest bedroom, sitting dumbly in their glass cases, carefully lit but offering no sense of the woman who once wore them.

The rectory at Steventon – the house Jane lived in until she was 25 – is long gone. The church it served survives. It’s left open, with a plaque on the wall and flowers, continually replaced, to reassure the pilgrims who make it this far that they really have come to the right place. It’s almost possible, closing the church door, brushing past the ancient yew tree, to catch a glimpse of a little girl running ahead of you – but, like all ghosts, this is only a trick of the mind.

We have to look for Jane elsewhere.

In the spring of 1809 the 33-year-old Jane Austen was living, not in the countryside, nor in Bath, but in Southampton, in a house rented by her sea captain brother Francis, usually known as Frank. Southampton is less than twenty miles along the south coast from Portsmouth, where the Price family lives in Mansfield Park. A guide book of the period describes Southampton as ‘handsomely built’ and ‘pleasantly situated’, with views ‘to the water, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight’. It mentions with approval that the streets are ‘well paved and flagged’ – a reminder that this was by no means a given for all town centres at this point. What the guide book glosses over is the fact that Southampton was also a naval dockyard. It was heavily fortified and, during the time that Jane was living there, towards the end of the long war with France which dominated her adult life, it was a major port of embarkation for soldiers going to fight Napoleon’s armies in Spain and Portugal.

If we associate Jane with an urban space, it’s likely to be genteel Bath, not a dock town filled with public drunkenness, street prostitution, and violence. In addition to press-ganging – the state-sanctioned abduction scheme by which the Royal Navy ensured it had enough men to sail its ships – both the army and the navy welcomed into their ranks men who would otherwise have been in prison. Fighting men were, by and large, rough men and Southampton can’t have been an altogether pleasant place for a household of women who were usually without a gentleman to protect them. Jane seems to have enjoyed some aspects of her time in Southampton well enough, however. She talks in her letters about walking on the ramparts, and rowing on the River Itchen with her nephews. But – so far as we know – it seems to have been the prospect of leaving Southampton and moving back to the country which reignited Jane’s interest in getting her work published.

For some few years before she moved to Southampton at the end of 1806, Jane’s life had been unsettled. You’ll usually read that Jane lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806, but in fact she was almost continually on the move, and the city was more a base than a home. Together with her sister Cassandra, their mother, and (until his sudden death at the beginning of 1805) their father, she lodged in various parts of Bath – in Sydney Place, Green Park Buildings, Gay Street, and Trim Street – making lengthy visits to family, and for months at a time removing to seaside resorts, among them Dawlish, Sidmouth, Ramsgate (where Wickham trifles with Georgiana Darcy in Pride and Prejudice) and Lyme Regis (the setting for some of the pivotal scenes in Persuasion). You may also come across the claim that Jane didn’t take much interest in her writing while she lived in Bath, but that’s not the case. It was during this period, in the spring of 1803, that she first had a novel accepted for publication.

That novel was Susan, almost certainly a version of the book we know as Northanger Abbey.b We know, too, that Jane had written at least one other full-length novel before she moved to Bath – a book she called First Impressions. This may have been an earlier version of Pride and Prejudice, and it may or may not be the same book her father offered, unsuccessfully, to the publisher Cadell in 1797. We have a fragment – the beginning of a novel – about a clergyman’s numerous family, which is usually known as The Watsons, written on some 1803-watermarked paper. A neat copy of Lady Susan, a short novella in letters, is written out on paper which bears an 1805 watermark, although it seems probable from the immature style that it was composed earlier. Between 1803 and the spring of 1809, however, we can be certain about virtually nothing connected with Jane’s writing, other than that she wrote one poem in December 1808, on her 33rd birthday – a memorial poem to a friend who’d died in a riding accident exactly four years earlier. Maybe she stopped writing prose altogether. Maybe she was working on pre-existing drafts, or on pieces which were later incorporated into the other novels. Maybe she was writing something she later destroyed. We simply don’t know.

We do have a list of composition dates for Jane’s novels, but it was written by Cassandra, not Jane, and we have no idea when it was drawn up. Writers on Jane have tended to treat this document as if it were completely reliable; they really shouldn’t.

One thing we do know for sure is that in April 1809, only a week or two before Jane was due to leave Southampton for a lengthy visit to her brother Edward at Godmersham, she wrote to the publishing firm which had bought Susan. We have a draft of Jane’s letter, written on a sheet of paper that had originally served as an envelope, with the words ‘Miss Austen’ written on the other side. Jane wrote in pencil initially, inking over the words afterwards, when she also changed the signature from ‘J. Austen’ to ‘M.A.D.’ We have Crosby’s disobligingly businesslike reply, crammed with quasi-legal terms (‘full consideration’, ‘stamped receipt’, ‘stipulated’, ‘bound’), offering to sell her Susan for £10, and threatening that he will ‘take proceedings’ to stop the novel being published anywhere else.

But what effect this letter had on Jane is unclear. We don’t find another reference to Susan/Northanger Abbey until 1817 and – as we’ll see in the next chapter – she continued to view the book very negatively. But she soon had other projects in hand.

Sense and Sensibility was the first of Jane’s novels to make it all the way through the publication process. It appeared in October 1811, and must have been completed some time before the end of 1810, as by April 1811 Jane was busy correcting the proofs. Later in her career, when she had a regular publisher, Jane worked on the assumption that a year would intervene between her finishing a novel and that novel appearing. The gap between Jane finishing writing Sense and Sensibility and copies being put on sale may well have been longer.

Before Jane could think about sending a novel off, she would have had to copy it out by hand, which would have taken a number of weeks, perhaps a couple of months. Then she had to send the package off, wait for the publisher to read the novel, respond, and negotiate terms. Jane may already have been working on Sense and Sensibility before she wrote to Crosby to enquire about Susan.

In the summer of 1809 Jane’s writing is full of an unaccustomed exuberance, very similar to the bubbling enthusiasm that appears in her letters of 1813 when she receives Pride and Prejudice from the printers. Frank’s wife Mary had given birth to a boy in the second week of July, and a fortnight later Jane sent her brother a rather lovely piece of writing which can only properly be described as a letter-poem; part congratulation, part affectionate remembrance of their childhood, and part description of her happiness in the house at Chawton. She addresses him warmly as ‘My dearest Frank’, and expresses the wish that the baby will resemble his father even in his faults – the ‘insolence of spirit’, and ‘saucy words & fiery ways’ which the grown-up Frank had worked so hard to correct. ‘Ourselves’, she assures him, ‘are very well’, and ‘Cassandra’s pen’ will explain in ‘unaffected prose’ how much they like their ‘Chawton home—’

—how much we find

Already in it to our mind,

And how convinced that when complete,

It will all other Houses beat,

That ever have been made or mended,

With rooms concise or rooms distended.

The poem also offers the rarest of insights into the Austen family nursery, in a charming image of Frank as a naughty little boy with ‘curley Locks’ poking his head around a door and assuring someone named ‘Bet’ that ‘me be not come to bide’. There’s an eagerness and a warmth here which is rare in Jane’s other letters to her family, an easy flow to her words which is very different to the rather stiff and formal mourning poem she had written six months earlier, in remembrance of her friend. It’s tempting to conclude that something had shifted, that she had started to write again.

Too tempting, perhaps. We don’t know what Jane was thinking in the spring and summer of 1809. Having waited for six long years, why write to Crosby then, when she was just about to move? Why the punning initials of the pen name? Why not simply change a few details and publish the novel elsewhere, without alerting him? Why not enlist the help of her brother Henry, who had presumably been involved in selling the manuscript in the first place?

We know so little about Jane’s life, and that little is so difficult to interpret accurately, that we can’t afford to dismiss what’s revealed in her fiction. At least it speaks, and at least it was written by her. As for the rest, there are so many gaps, so many silences, so much that has been left vague, or imprecise, or reported at second or third hand, that the task of filling everything in is very far from being the ‘short and easy’ one that her brother Henry – the first of her many biographers – claimed in his Biographical Notice of the Author.

Of course, if Henry is to be believed, Jane barely thought at all.

On Henry’s telling, his sister’s books sprang into life fully-formed – painlessly, effortlessly. According to him, Jane’s composition was ‘rapid and correct’, a flow of words which ‘cost her nothing’, washing through her to appear, as everything she wrote appeared, ‘finished from her pen’. We are to imagine no labour, no dedication, no ambition, no intellect or skill, but simply a ‘gift’, a ‘genius’, an ‘intuitive’ power of invention. For modern-day readers, schooled on the image of Jane’s near-contemporary, the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, hopped up on vast quantities of opium, writing down his famous poem of Xanadu and Kubla Khan while still in an inspired dream, this is an attractive idea. It allows us to imagine Jane’s novels, not as pieces of deliberate, considered art, but instead as whatever we like – a wrestling with her own repressed desires, a rewriting of her own unhappy love affairs, even an accidental tapping into a wellspring of culture and language. Jane’s novels have been read in all these ways, and others besides.

The problem with any of these imaginings is that what Henry said was wrong. We don’t have very many of Jane’s manuscripts, but enough exist to tell us that she worked at her writing. The draft fragment we know as The Watsons is dotted with crossings-out, additions, and alterations. We even have an earlier attempt at an ending to Persuasion which Jane was dissatisfied with, and rewrote. You can see her, choosing one word over another, checking that the sentence balances, that she’s picked the right phrase, and put it in the right place.

Henry’s Biographical Notice of the Author appeared in the first, joint edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which was hurried through the print presses a scant five months after Jane died. The Notice is short, but crammed with what might politely be called inconsistencies. Having assured his readers that Jane’s novels appeared almost without effort, Henry includes in a postscript Jane’s own famous description of her work as akin to miniature painting – a ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. In the Notice, Henry says that Jane never thought of having a book published before Sense and Sensibility – even though he was well aware that Susan/Northanger Abbey had been accepted for publication in 1803. He claims that Jane never ‘trusted herself to comment with unkindness’, when it’s obvious to even the most uncritical of readers that Persuasion contains one exceptionally vicious passage, in which the feelings of a bereaved mother are mocked as ‘large fat sighings’ simply because the character happens to be ‘of a comfortable substantial size’.

A charitable assessment of Henry’s comments, noting that he must have begun his biography very soon after Jane died, might call these errors or misreadings, and attribute them to grief. It might be right to do so, if it weren’t for the fact that Henry sets out to create an entirely false image of his sister. He does all he can to convince his readers that Jane wasn’t a proper author, and never considered herself one. She had, he says, very little opinion of her work, and no thought of obtaining an audience. He tells his readers that, having at last yielded to the persuasions of her family and sent Sense and Sensibility to a publisher, she was ‘astonished’ at its success. This Jane could never have been persuaded to put her name to her novels; indeed, Henry insinuates, they should not be considered as solely her work, since she was ‘thankful for praise, open to remark, and submissive to criticism’ from her family.

Henry, in short, was lying, and his lies were deliberate ones. In part his aim was to protect himself and his siblings from the damaging idea that their sister may have wanted – or even needed – to write for money. He insists that ‘neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives’. In his world, gentlewomen didn’t work and would never have dreamed of looking for public acclaim. We should bear in mind, too, the context of Henry’s remarks – a ‘biographical notice’ intended to help the sale of two novels, neither of which Jane herself had seen fit to have published.

But then again, his motives may have been fundamentally sound enough. He would have known how very unsympathetically female authors were treated. As a writer called Mary Hays explained in 1801, ‘the penalties and discouragements attending the profession of an author fall upon women with a double weight’. They are, she continued, tried in the court of public opinion, ‘not merely as writers, but as women, their characters, their conduct’ searched into, while ‘malignant ingenuity’ is ‘active and unwearied’ in finding out ‘their errors and exposing their foibles’.

The reputation of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft had been dragged through the mud after her death in 1797. Rumours circulated that Ann Radcliffe, the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho – Catherine Morland’s favourite novel in Northanger Abbey – had gone insane. Charlotte Smith, whose writing Jane read and enjoyed, anticipated that some people would find the ‘political remarks’ in her 1792 novel Desmond ‘displeasing’. And she was right: her forthright defence of the principles of the French Revolution saw the novel rejected by her usual publishers and, we are told, ‘lost her some friends’. Even Maria Edgeworth, the most successful novelist of the period, was forced to rewrite her 1801 novel Belinda in order to remove a marriage which critics thought ‘disgusting’ and morally dangerous because one character was white and the other black.

We have to remember, too, that the Austen family lived in a country in which any criticism of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous. Britain and France were at war from 1793 to 1815, with only two brief pauses – in 1802–3, and from summer 1814 to February 1815, when Napoleon was temporarily confined on the island of Elba. From 1812 to 1815, Britain was also at war with America, the colony it had lost in 1776, the year after Jane Austen was born. Revolutionary ideas had travelled from America to France, but the infection had its roots in England, in particular in the writing of Thomas Paine, who’d left his native Norfolk to spread his radical ideas across the globe. In 1792 Paine was convicted in his absence of seditious libel – essentially, of writing down ideas dangerous to the state – but he continued to write, if anything more dangerously than before, questioning the very notion of private property, of organised religion, even.

Saddled with a monarch who was periodically insane, and an heir to the throne who was not only dissolute and expensive to run but had also illegally married a Catholic widow, the British state was under an enormous strain even before the war with France began. The war, for many years, went badly for Britain. French armies marched through Europe, French ships menaced Britain’s trade; the fear of invasion was constant. People who criticised the behaviour of the royal family, or complained about corrupt parliamentary elections; who turned away from the Church of England or asked whether those in power should really keep it, were perceived as betraying their country in her hour of need. To question one aspect of the way society worked was to attempt to undermine the whole.

Throughout Jane’s late teens and twenties the government built coastal batteries and forts to defend Britain against invasion from France, and it brought in a number of measures designed to protect the country against the spread of danger from within. In the process, Britain began to look more and more like a totalitarian state, with the unpleasant habits that totalitarian states acquire. Habeas corpus – the centuries-old requirement that any detention had to be publicly justified – was suspended. Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading. Prosecutions were directed not just against avowedly political figures, such as Paine, the radical politician Horne Tooke, or the theologian Gilbert Wakefield, but against their publishers. A schoolmaster was convicted for distributing leaflets. A man was prosecuted for putting up posters. The proprietors of the newspaper The Morning Chronicle were brought into court. Booksellers were threatened. Words were dangerous – reciting a piece of doggerel saw one Hampshire carpenter imprisoned for three years. There can hardly have been a thinking person in Britain who didn’t understand what was intended – to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves.

In a letter of 1795 the well-connected Whig politician Charles James Fox pondered ‘how any prudent tradesman can venture to publish anything that can in any way be disagreeable to the ministers’. William Wordsworth’s brother Richard urged him to ‘be cautious in writing or expressing your political opinions’, warning him that ‘the ministers have great powers’. It was expected that letters would be opened and read by the authorities; it was accepted that publishers would shy away from anything which challenged or questioned societal norms too openly. Conservative writers flourished. The response from writers of a less reactionary frame of mind was to turn to nature and emotion – as the Romantic poets did – or to the relative safety of the past or foreign settings. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, is often described as the first historical novel, but in fact dozens were published in the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century. Almost every Gothic novel is set in the past, usually in the 1400s or 1500s. Writers were wary of writing about the present, and they were right to be. This is the atmosphere that Henry – and Jane – had lived through; this is the context in which Jane Austen wrote.

Of course, Henry’s insistence that Jane shouldn’t be considered an author, that she hardly intended to publish her work, that she bowed to the superior knowledge of her family – of her brothers, pillars of the establishment, clergymen, naval officers, a landowner – might make us think that he was protesting quite a lot too much. Why, after all, would he be so anxious to assure Jane’s readers that she was ‘thoroughly religious and devout’ and that her opinions ‘accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’, unless he knew that her novels could easily be read as being critical of the Church of England?

Think of Jane’s landowners, of her soldiers, her clergymen, her aristocrats. In Sense and Sensibility John Dashwood feels that generosity to his impoverished sisters would demean him; in Mansfield Park Henry Crawford elopes with a married woman, the cousin of the very woman he has proposed marriage to. In Pride and Prejudice, the militia officers spend their time socialising, flirting, and – on one occasion – cross-dressing, rather than defending the realm. The Reverend Mr Collins is laughable. None of Jane’s clergymen characters has a vocation, or even seems to care very much about the well-being – spiritual or physical – of their parishioners.c Does Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a character designed to justify the aristocracy? Or Persuasion’s vain and wasteful Sir Walter Elliot?

Think, too, about the fact that Jane was the only novelist of this period to write novels which were set more or less in the present day, and more or less in the real world – or at any rate a world recognisable to her readers as the one in which they actually lived. Jane doesn’t offer us wicked villains and perfect heroines. She doesn’t give us storms, or miraculously reappearing heirs. She invents villages and towns (Meryton, Highbury), but locates them within the known landscape – Highbury is in Surrey, exactly sixteen miles from London. Often she has her characters walk along real streets in real places. In Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe saunter together through the streets of Bath. You can follow in their footsteps even now. It’s still possible to stand on the harbour wall at Lyme and see where Louisa Musgrove fell in Persuasion.

Critics of Jane’s own generation praised her for her unparalleled ability to accurately reproduce what she saw around her. ‘Her merit consists altogether in her remarkable talent for observation’, pronounced Richard Whateley, the Archbishop of Dublin in 1821, in a lengthy review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. For Whateley, what made Jane great was her ‘accurate and unexaggerated delineation of events and characters’. He was the first to suggest that she was as great as Shakespeare, repeatedly comparing the two. Robert Southey, friend to William Wordsworth, brother-in-law to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and one-time revolutionary, was by this point snug in the bosom of the establishment as Poet Laureate, the official poet to royalty. In future years he would strongly discourage Charlotte Brontë from writing, but he admired Jane’s novels and thought them ‘more true to nature … than any other of this age’. The American writer Henry Longfellow admitted that Jane’s writings were ‘a capital picture of real life’, but complained that ‘she explains and fills out too much’. In 1830 an unsigned essay in the Edinburgh Review called Jane ‘too natural’. There was clearly an agreement that Jane’s novels were realistic, and it was this which made them unique.

With a shift of generation, though, readers began to struggle a little more. Serious literary critics such as Thomas Macaulay and George Henry Lewes (both born the year Jane died) repeated and strengthened the comparison to Shakespeare, a comparison which concentrated on Jane’s depiction of character to the exclusion of anything else in her novels, and consigned her, not unlike Shakespeare, to the status of genius – inexplicable, mysterious, timeless. Popular opinion echoed, obediently. An early American textbook on literature, published in 1849, claimed that Jane’s novels ‘may be considered as models of perfection’. An article in an English magazine series on ‘Female Novelists’ which appeared in 1852 asserted that Jane was the ‘perfect mistress of all she touches’.

Few mid-Victorian readers questioned Jane’s greatness but often they seemed bemused by her writing. They wondered why Jane should have chosen to depict a society ‘which … presents the fewest salient points of interest and singularity to the novelist’. Charlotte Brontë admitted to finding Jane’s novels unengaging, though she thought it was probably ‘heresy’ to criticise. ‘Miss Austen’, she announced in a letter to a literary correspondent in 1850, is ‘a rather insensible woman’. She may do ‘her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well’, but she ‘ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her’.

But Charlotte had such a very definite idea of what Jane’s writing consists of that, finding it confirmed in the one novel, Emma, which she’s discussing in this letter, she didn’t think it necessary to consider anything else that Jane might have written. As the century went on, increasingly readers appeared to pay more attention to what they already ‘knew’ about Jane’s novels – that is, to what was already said about them – than to the texts themselves. Increasingly, too, there was a hunger not for novels, but for novelists.

Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, and a biography of her appeared two years later. G.H. Lewes, writing about Jane in 1859, complained that so little was known of Jane’s life in comparison to Charlotte’s. He was, he said, baffled at the spectacle of ‘a fine artist whose works are widely known and enjoyed, being all but unknown to the English public, and quite unknown abroad’. This isn’t quite true. In 1852 an American fan – the daughter of a former President of Harvard University, no less – had written to Jane’s brother Frank, begging for a letter or even a sample of Jane’s handwriting. What was still true, though, was that nothing more was known of Jane’s life than what Henry had written in 1817.

In the late 1860s, Jane’s nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh – the son of her eldest brother James – started to collect material from his sisters and cousins and published the result in 1869 as A Memoir of Jane Austen. Two years later a second edition appeared. Born in 1798, James-Edward had lived through enough of the war period – and absorbed enough of its caution in literary matters – to remain tight-lipped on the subject of his aunt’s personal beliefs. He explained that she never wrote about subjects she didn’t understand, and paid ‘very little’ attention to political questions – or only enough to agree with whatever the rest of the family thought. She lived a life ‘singularly barren … of events’. She was ‘sweet’, ‘loving’, her personality ‘remarkably calm and even’. So entirely devoid of interest is this Jane, in fact, that James-Edward had to pad out his memoir with other material: his own memories of growing up in the rectory at Steventon; some ponderous history lessons on the manners of the late eighteenth century; a letter sent by an aristocratic great-great-grandmother. The second edition of the Memoir includes, as well, quite a lot of previously unpublished material by Jane. Notable by its absence – for James-Edward certainly had access to it – is Jane’s teenage History of England, a hilarious piece of writing which delights in upsetting religious and political sensitivities. At one point the authoress even declares herself ‘partial to the roman catholic religion’.

The Memoir