The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

For the young Jane Austen, Eliza Hancock was the living incarnation of her favourite character in one of her favourite novels: Charlotte Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Reading Eliza’s real letters is like reading Charlotte’s fictional ones. Temperamentally, Eliza was unsuited to marriage, which she saw as giving up ‘dear Liberty and yet dearer flirtation’. ‘Flirtation’s a charming thing,’ she wrote: ‘it makes the blood circulate!’ Of her first husband, the Count, she remarked, ‘it is too little to say he loves, since he literally adores me’. Of weddings she quipped, ‘I was never but at one wedding in my life and that appeared a very stupid idea to me.’ Of herself she wrote, ‘independence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual … I am more and more convinced that She is not at all calculated for sober Matrimony.’22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Her liveliness mesmerized the Austens. She played piano for them every day, and arranged impromptu dances in the parlour. She told stories of Paris and of Marie Antoinette. She complained of French theatre that ‘it is still the fashion to translate or rather murder, Shakespear’.23 (#litres_trial_promo) She gave Jane for her birthday a twelve-volume set of Arnaud de Berquin’s stories L’Ami des enfants.

Jane and Cassandra, who had been at boarding school for the previous eighteen months, were now home for good. In Steventon rectory Eliza also encountered Henry Austen, no longer a child but a tall handsome man about to go up to Oxford. He soon made a point of visiting her when she went back to London, and arranging for her to visit him at college. At St John’s in Oxford, Eliza ‘longed to be a Fellow that I might walk [in the garden] every day’. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I was delighted with the Black Gown and thought the Square Cap mighty becoming.’24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Eliza had confessed to Philadelphia (‘Phylly’) Walter, cousin to the Austens, that she was no longer in love with her husband. While he was in France she led, according to this cousin, a ‘very dissipated life’ in London.25 (#litres_trial_promo) To judge from Eliza’s surviving letters, her life was full of socializing and adventure. She narrowly misses being robbed and attacked by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath. She takes her little boy Hastings to Hastings and other seaside resorts for the benefit of sea-bathing. She attends balls and the opera and moves back and forth between England and France.

Following the success of her visit to Steventon in 1786 she was keen to go down to Hampshire again, though her uncle had told her that he was able to entertain only at midsummer and Christmas. She made plans to return to Steventon for the following Christmas and she encouraged her cousins in their plans to put on private theatricals. As will be seen, Eliza led the way in choosing the plays and it is no surprise that those she chose featured spirited heroines who refuse to be cowed by men.

Both James and Henry Austen were ‘fascinated’ by the flirtatious Eliza, according to James’s son, who wrote the first memoir of Jane. One of Jane Austen’s comic stories written before the end of the 1780s was called ‘Henry and Eliza’. Eliza is a beautiful little foundling girl discovered in a ‘Haycock’, rather as Austen’s cousin was a beautiful little girl of uncertain origin called Eliza Hancock. The action turns on an elopement by the titular characters, who run off to France leaving only a curt note: ‘Madam, we are married and gone.’ With the real Eliza anything could happen and the young Jane Austen seems to have found it both exciting and amusing to imagine her eloping with Henry. Little did she know how the story of the real Eliza and Henry would end.

Eliza returned to Steventon in the summer of 1792, in much darker circumstances. She brought with her a fund of true tales as shocking as anything in the Gothic novels that young women were devouring at the time. Eliza, her mother and little Hastings had fled from France as trouble brewed in the months leading up to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. They were in London when news of the revolution broke. From then on, they were forced to stay in England.

By January 1791 Eliza’s husband Jean-François, now no doubt regretting his title of ‘Comte’, had fled to Turin with the King’s brother and other royalist émigrés. Eliza wrote from London to the Austen family at Steventon telling them the news and also giving bulletins of her mother’s declining health. She comforted herself with gossip about her Steventon cousins, especially Jane and Cassandra: ‘I hear they are perfect beauties and of course gain hearts by dozens.’26 (#litres_trial_promo)

After a long battle with breast cancer, Phila Hancock died in 1792. Eliza’s husband managed, via a circuitous route, to join her in England to provide some comfort in her bereavement. They went to Bath for a period of recuperation and she became pregnant. The Count decided, however, to return to France for fear of having his land confiscated. As Eliza reported,

M. de F proposed remaining here some time, but he soon received Accounts from France which informed him that having already exceeded his Leave of Absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such Advices were not to be neglected and M. de F was obliged to depart for Paris.27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Within days of his departure, Eliza’s nerves, already frayed, were shattered when she was caught up in serious riots in London. On 4 June 1792, the King’s birthday, a group of forty servants had been invited to a dance and dinner at a pub, the Pitts Head. There was no disturbance until the High Constable of Westminster along with his watchmen entered the pub, made trouble and arrested all the servants, taking them to the Watchhouse in Mount Street. The next morning a mob arrived at the Watchhouse and soldiers were called to read the Riot Act. Eliza’s coach was attacked and her driver was injured, terrifying her out of her wits and causing her to miscarry the baby she had conceived on her husband’s visit to England. She wrote a graphic account of the events:

The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my Coachman, the firing at one end of the street which was already begun, altogether in short alarmed me so much, that I really have never been well since. The Confusion continued all that day and Night and the following Day, and for these eight and forty Hours, I have seen nothing but large parties of Soldiers parading up and down in this Street, to which Mount Street is very near, there being only Grosvenor Square between. My apprehensions have been that they would have set fire to the houses they were so bent on demolishing, and think if that was to be the case how soon in such a City as this a Fire very trifling in the beginning might be productive of the most serious Consequences.28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Parallels were instantly drawn with recent history in France. A caricature of the Mount Street riots, published two days later, showed a French manservant arguing with a violent watchman and saying ‘Ah, Sacre Dieu! I did tink it vas all Dance in de land of Liberté!’ On the back wall is a print of the Storming of the Bastille, with cannons and decapitated heads on pikes. The implication is clear: like Paris, London was in danger of being swept into revolution.29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Eliza immediately made plans to escape to Steventon. But as a result of her miscarriage and then a severe case of chickenpox, she didn’t get there until August. So it was that she arrived at the Austen rectory with her head full of English riots and anxieties about her husband back in Paris. Weakened by miscarriage and illness, she cried when she saw the uncle whose features so resembled those of the beloved mother whom she had recently lost.

She noted how tall her cousin Jane had grown and assured Phylly Walter, who disliked Jane, that she ‘was greatly improved in manners as in person’. Eliza also expressed her own sense of loyalty to the younger sister: ‘My Heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me, indeed requires a return of the same nature.’30 (#litres_trial_promo)

She may have felt safe in rural Hampshire, sharing stories and books with her cousins, but news from France reached her in private letters from Jean-François and also via the English press: ‘My private Letters confirm the Intelligence afforded by the public Prints,’ she wrote to Phylly Walter, ‘and assure me that nothing we read there is exaggerated.’31 (#litres_trial_promo) She was referring to the September Massacres, that wave of mob violence which began with the storming of the Tuileries Palace and culminated in the massacre of fourteen thousand people, including priests, political prisoners, women and children as young as eight. William Wordsworth would witness the aftermath as he passed through Paris soon afterwards. The unthinkable had happened: France abolished its monarchy and formally established the Republic.

The atrocities were reported in gruesome detail in the English press. The royal family were imprisoned and the London papers focused on the fate of the Queen’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe. On 3 September she was killed by the mob, decapitated, her innards and her head carried away on pikes. The head was taken to a barber who dressed the hair with its striking blonde curls so as to render it instantly recognizable to Marie Antoinette when it bobbed up and down outside the window where she was incarcerated. Caricatures of decapitated heads being carried along the streets of Paris on pikes filled the windows of the London print shops.

Eliza must have been terrified for Jean-François as the English press reported that even those said to sound like an aristocrat or resemble one in the slightest way would be ‘run through the body with a pike’. The Times reported that ‘A ring, a watch chain, a handsome pair of buckles, a new coat, or a good pair of boots in a word, every thing which marked the appearance of a gentleman, and which the mob fancied, was sure to cost the owner his life. EQUALITY was the pistol, and PLUNDER the object.’32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Eliza was comforted by the calm and practical Austens. They fussed over her, soothed her worries and, most importantly, paid attention to her little son, Hastings – ‘very fair’, ‘very fat’ and ‘very pretty’, according to Mrs Austen.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Earlier, Eliza had worried that he had no teeth. And when he did begin teething, he started having convulsions. As he became a toddler and failed to start walking or talking properly it grew clear that something was wrong. Comparisons with little George Austen were inevitable. Cousin Phylly Walter wrote to her brother to tell him that Hastings had fits, was unable to walk or talk but made continuous ‘great noise’: ‘many people says he has the appearance of a weak head; that his eyes are particular is very certain; our fears are of his being like poor George Austen’.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Later, she wrote, ‘I’m afraid he is already quite an idiot.’35 (#litres_trial_promo)

For a long time, Eliza refused to believe that anything was wrong with her beloved ‘son and Heir’. Her letters are full of references to him, as she took pleasure in his every tiny accomplishment: ‘he doubles his prodigious fists and boxes quite in the English style’. There is something very touching in her attempt to convince herself that her boy was completely normal, despite his bad epilepsy, his strange noises and his struggle with speech and movement. She insisted on keeping him at home with her. There was no question of sending him away to join his similarly disabled Austen cousin at Monk Sherborne. Eliza devoted herself to teaching him his letters and to gabble in French and English. From all accounts, ‘little Hastings’ was a sweet-tempered child, who would offer people his ‘half muncht apple or cakes’. When a doctor recommended sea-bathing, Eliza was happy to oblige and spent months at seaside resorts, insisting on their efficacious effect on his health. She ‘breeched’ him early (taking him out of ‘petticoats’ and into jacket and trousers) in order to ease his difficulties in walking. She fondly called him ‘as great a pickle as any who ever deserved that appellation’. She would have never described him as an idiot, as cousin Phylly Walter was wont to do. His Austen cousins adored him and he often spent time in Steventon. He was, in Eliza’s words, ‘the Play Thing of the whole Family’.36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Eliza’s adventurous and difficult life had a great impact on the vivid imagination of the teenage Jane Austen. This close familial connection to the reign of terror brought her much closer to the French Revolution than most of her English contemporaries. According to family tradition, Jane’s dislike of the French never left her from this moment.

Eliza stayed at Steventon probably until the spring of 1793. On 1 February, the new French Republic declared war on Britain and Holland. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars would continue for another twenty years. There is an uncorroborated, probably apocryphal, family tradition that Eliza went back to France and then escaped, heavily pregnant once again, in company with a maidservant (perhaps the Madame Bigeon who would become her housekeeper in later years). She was certainly back in London by March 1794. At one o’clock on a very wet Saturday, Warren Hastings called on her, by request, and she read out to him a paragraph in the émigré newspaper giving the very worst possible news: ‘that on the 22nd February – Jean Capote Feuillide was condemned to death’.37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Jean was guillotined the day after he had been found guilty. Listed in the official record as ‘Prisoner No. 396’, he was bundled into a tumbrel and taken to the scaffold on the fifth day of the newly created month of ventôse in Year 2, according to the revolutionary calendar.38 (#litres_trial_promo) The revolutionary tribunal had found him guilty of two charges. First, for complicity with Nicolas Mangin, who was executed the same day, in conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic and the sovereignty of the French people. And secondly, for being ‘the accomplice of the Marboeuf woman in trying to seduce, by means of a bribe, one of the secretaries of the Committee for Public Safety in an attempt to persuade this public official to steal or burn documents related to the said Marboeuf’.39 (#litres_trial_promo) The family had no doubt that these were trumped-up charges. From Eliza’s point of view, her husband had nobly helped an elderly friend, the Marquise de Marbeouf, by trying to buy off her false accusers (she was executed a few weeks earlier for the crime of ‘desiring the arrival of the Prussians and the Austrians’,40 (#litres_trial_promo) enemies of the Republic). He had been betrayed and guillotined. There was a family tradition that he tried to save himself by claiming to be a valet impersonating his master, though no evidence of this fruitless plot came out in his trial.

There are no surviving letters of Jane Austen until 1796, so there is no way of knowing how the execution of prisoner 396 affected her, but her closeness to her cousin and little Hastings must have brought home the full horror of the guillotine. Eliza noted in her letters that the Austen children were rather special, each of them endowed with ‘Uncommon abilities’. Jane, her clear favourite, returned Eliza’s interest by dedicating stories to her, and by using her as a model for her clever coquettes. The notion that Jane Austen was somehow oblivious to the violent events of her time is belied by the fact that Eliza was with her and her family at the Steventon rectory in September 1792, one of the bloodiest and most dramatic months of that bloody and dramatic age, and that they remained in close contact at the time of the guillotining of Eliza’s husband.

***

For Eliza: Austen’s affection for her cousin is apparent from her decision to dedicate the early novella ‘Love and Freindship’ to her

It was in the late summer of 1792, exactly at the time when Eliza arrived in Steventon with news from revolutionary France, that Jane Austen began the short novel, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, which includes the story of Cecilia Wynne heading out on the fishing fleet to India. One of the other characters, Mr Stanley, ‘never cares about anything but Politics’,41 (#litres_trial_promo) while another, Mrs Percival, has fashionable disdain for the horrors of the modern world:

After Supper, the Conversation turning on the State of Affairs in the political World, Mrs P, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she beleived was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World … Depravity never was so general before.42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Catherine,43 (#litres_trial_promo) the heroine, is a clever girl who is interested in politics and is shocked when her feather-brained friend, Camilla, professes, ‘I know nothing of Politics, and cannot bear to hear them mentioned.’

Catherine finds succour in a garden bower that she has built. When Edward Stanley, recently returned from France, kisses Catherine’s hand in the arbour, her aunt, Mrs Percival, is horrified: ‘Profligate as I knew you to be, I was not prepared for such a sight … I plainly see that every thing is going to sixes and sevens and all order will soon be at an end throughout the Kingdom.’ Catherine is dismayed by her aunt’s rebuke: ‘Not however Ma’am the sooner, I hope, from any conduct of mine … for upon my honour I have done nothing this evening that can contribute to overthrow the establishment of the kingdom.’ ‘You are mistaken Child,’ replies the older woman, ‘the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s individuals, and any one who offends in so gross a manner against decorum and propriety, is certainly hastening it’s ruin.’44 (#litres_trial_promo)

This is one of Austen’s most explicit references to the French Revolution. There is no mistaking what Mrs Percival means by the overthrow of the establishment of the kingdom. She sees no distinction between radical politics and dangerous sexual impropriety: in her view Edward Stanley has picked up both vices on his French travels. The stability of the state, she suggests, depends on proper behaviour between the sexes. She is horrified that Catherine has been neglecting the improving sermons and catechisms she has foisted upon her.45 (#litres_trial_promo) French influence, inappropriate reading and sexual licence mean only one thing: revolution. The fact that Jane Austen is clearly mocking Aunt Percival’s political paranoia shows that she has no sympathy for mindless conservatism. But, at the same time, the presence of Eliza and her French news in the household at Steventon alerted the young Austen to the high stakes in the current ‘State of Affairs in the political World’.

Later in the turbulent 1790s Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the novel that was eventually published after her death under the title Northanger Abbey. It includes a scene not dissimilar to Catherine’s debate with Mrs Percival. The exchange takes place on Beechen Cliff, the hill above the city of Bath. Henry Tilney has been lecturing another Catherine, Miss Morland, on the picturesque, and then moves on to politics and the ‘state of the nation’:

Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Strikingly, it is Catherine who puts an end to the silence: ‘I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London.’ Catherine is in fact talking about a new Gothic novel that is about to be published, but she is misunderstood by Henry’s sister, Eleanor, to mean mob riots in London: ‘Good Heaven! – Where could you hear of such a thing?’

‘A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday’ [replies Catherine]. ‘It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and every thing of the kind.’

‘You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend’s accounts have been exaggerated; – and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by the government to prevent its coming to effect.’

‘Government,’ said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, ‘neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much.’ …

‘Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; – but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot.’

‘Riot! – what riot?’

The reference to reading about the London horrors in a letter from a friend echoes the real-life detail of Eliza writing to her family about the Mount Street riots. Henry’s reproving speech to his sister blames female imagination for the misunderstanding:

‘My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain … You [Catherine] talked of expected horrors in London – and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the hopes of the nation,) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents.’

Henry’s graphic description recalls a series of violent insurgencies on the streets of London: the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots back in 1780, the Mount Street riots witnessed by Eliza, and also the Bread riots of 1795, when hungry mobs seized flour and bread, damaging mills and bakeries. The threat to the Tower and the image of the streets of London flowing with blood inevitably conjure up the Bastille and the September Massacres.

‘Catharine, or the Bower’ ends abruptly with Edward Stanley’s return to France. The events that winter, culminating in the execution of Louis XVI and later Marie Antoinette, perhaps contributed to Jane’s decision to leave it unfinished, though she continued making adjustments to the fragment until at least 1809. Many critics have complained that she ignored the historical events of her times. In 1913, the historian Frederick Harrison described her to his friend Thomas Hardy as ‘a heartless little cynic … penning satirettes about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces, and consigning millions to their graves’.47 (#litres_trial_promo) This kind of accusation ignores the evidence of ‘Catharine’ and Northanger Abbey, where anxiety about revolution is clearly part of the narrative. And it neglects the fact that, because of her cousin Eliza, Jane Austen was brought exceptionally close to the events of revolutionary France. Why do Austen’s novels not engage more frequently and directly with ‘the Dynasts tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves’? Could it have been not so much because she knew and cared little about it all, but because she knew too much and cared all too deeply? Loving Eliza as she did, it would have been too painful to let her pen dwell on the guilt and misery of revolutionary Paris.

3 (#ulink_222fdd3e-b966-5204-be85-57c31f603772)

The Vellum Notebooks (#ulink_222fdd3e-b966-5204-be85-57c31f603772)

There are three of them. Each is inscribed on the cover in careful handwriting, in imitation of a three-decker novel or a set of complete works: Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third. The first – a collection of little stories, plays, poems and satires – ends with the date 3 June 1793, but it is clear that some of the pieces were written much earlier, at the age of as little as eleven or twelve, and then transcribed in a fair hand when the author was in her eighteenth year. The notebook, purchased ready-made from a stationer, is bound in tanned sheepskin over marbled boards. It is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Volume the Second, illustrated here, is another miscellany, including two epistolary novelettes, a parodic ‘History of England’ and various ‘Scraps’, all probably composed when the author was in her mid-teens. It is another stationer’s notebook, this time headed with the acknowledgement, in Latin, ‘a gift from my father’. In small quarto format, it is bound in full parchment – vellum – pasted on to millboard. It is now in the British Library, London. So is Volume the Third, which is very similar in size and also covered in vellum, the front disfigured by a water-stained splodge. This final volume contains only two works: a fragmentary story called ‘Evelyn’ and the much longer, though still unfinished, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’. The first page is signed and dated ‘Jane Austen – May 6th 1792’. A pencil note on the inside of the board opposite, in her father’s hand, sounds a note of paternal pride: ‘Effusions of Fancy by a Very Young Lady consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new’.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

These are the earliest works of Jane Austen, copied in her best hand and preserved by her. Why did she write them out in this way? First and foremost, for the amusement of her family. Pasted to the inside front board of Volume the First, the most worn of the three, is a note penned by Cassandra after her sister’s death: ‘For my brother Charles. I think I recollect that a few of the trifles in this Vol. were written expressively for his amusement.’ But Jane Austen also took the trouble of creating these books, which involved much labour with goose quill and inkwell, so as to present herself, at least in her own imagination, as a professional author. Though written by hand, the volumes have the accoutrements of proper published books: contents lists, dedications, chapter divisions. Even as a teenager, Jane Austen knew what she wanted from life: to be a writer.

Her literary career began in 1787, the year that she turned twelve. One could almost say that, like Mozart, she was a child prodigy. Throughout her teens she continued to write stories and plays, sketches and histories, burlesques and parodies. Their original manuscripts are lost, but the fair copies in the vellum notebooks amount to some ninety thousand words. This body of work has become known as her ‘juvenilia’. Though the contents of the vellum notebooks are now well known to scholars, they are still often neglected by readers and even biographers. Yet these early works provide extraordinary insight into the vivid and often wild imagination of the real Jane Austen.

Virginia Woolf was the first to observe that Jane Austen’s juvenile writings were ‘meant to outlast the Christmas holidays’. That, at the tender age of fifteen, she was writing ‘for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own’. Woolf’s admiration for the sheer exhilaration and breathless energy of Austen’s earliest comic sketches expresses itself in the adjectives ‘astonishing’ and ‘unchildish’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) What do we make of a sentence such as this from Austen’s first ‘novel’, which has an endearingly youthful spelling mistake in its title, ‘Love and Freindship’? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her – she was only an Object of Contempt.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) Good girls the object of contempt? Not exactly the image of Austen that her family members sought to establish in the memoirs of her that they wrote after her death. ‘The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world,’ observed Woolf. ‘Girls of fifteen are always laughing,’ she adds – to which we might add: especially when like Austen and Woolf herself they are one of a pair of sisters in a household full of boys.