The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra in October 1798, ‘Your letter was chaperoned here by one from Mrs Cooke, in which she says that Battleridge is not to come out before January; and she is so little satisfied with Cawthorn’s dilatoriness that she never means to employ him again.’22 (#litres_trial_promo) Cawthorn, of Cawthorn and Hutt in Cockspur Street, London, was Mrs Cooke’s publisher. Here, Jane Austen shows her interest in her cousin’s publishing problems. Cassandra Cooke’s openness in discussing such matters suggests that the Austens were supportive of her attempts to be a published novelist. Later, as we will see, Jane experienced similar frustrations with her first publisher.

Jane and her Leigh cousins had loyal Cavalier ancestors during the Civil War. In 1642, Sir Thomas Leigh had entertained King Charles I at Stoneleigh for three days when the gates of Coventry were shut against him. The Leighs were heavily fined by Cromwell’s government but held on to their lands and their royalist sympathies.

Cooke’s preface to Battleridge: An Historical Tale claims that the novel was based on a true story set in the interregnum. The chief character is the historical figure Doctor Scott, who was a favourite of Charles I but manages to earn the admiration of Oliver Cromwell (who appears as a character in volume one). Battleridge actually tells two different tales, both allegedly based on ‘facts’. The main story concerns the abduction and imprisonment of a young girl whose family fortunes are restored by the recovery of a lost deed which has been locked into the false bottom of a cedar chest. It has typically Gothic features: madness, old castles, lost documents, cruel fathers and sons, beautiful but crazed maidens, wise divines. In her preface, Cooke acknowledges the novels of Goldsmith, Richardson and Burney as exemplars for not representing their heroines as ‘angels’, and Mrs Radcliffe as the ‘Queen of the tremendous’. Cooke also writes that she was advised by friends to enlarge her book by adding a second ‘Scottish story founded on fact’. Battleridge is the type of Gothic novel parodied in Northanger Abbey. Austen certainly seems to make teasing use of it at various points. For example, Catherine Morland’s tomboyish taste for baseball and cricket is a playful echo of a male character’s complaint on the second page of Battleridge: ‘No more cricket, no more base-ball, they are sending me to Geneva.’ The novel’s pro-Stuart sympathies would, nevertheless, have appealed to Jane Austen, as they would to Mary Leigh, Cassandra Cooke’s sister, who wrote a history depicting the Leigh family’s connections with and support for the Stuarts.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Jane Austen also had another cousin novelist on the Leigh side of the family. She was Cassandra Hawke, who wrote the well-reviewed sentimental novel Julia de Gramont (1788)24 (#litres_trial_promo) and boasted of it, much to the irritation of Fanny Burney, who described it as ‘love, love, love, unmixed and unadulterated with any more worldly materials’.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Cassandra Hawke’s sister Elizabeth described her as being ‘never without a pen in her hand; she can’t help writing for her life’.26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Fanny Burney met these sisters, Elizabeth and Cassandra, at a party in 1782 and wrote a lengthy, satirical account in her journals. Burney was half amused and half irritated by Elizabeth, Jane Austen’s rattle of a cousin, who insisted on introducing her to Cassandra Hawke as a ‘sister authoress’. The account reads like a scene in a play, with the young Burney seated beside the two ‘Ladyships’. Elizabeth talks non-stop of writing, of the ‘hundreds of novels’ she has read, of plays and authoresses. Did Burney know any of the authoresses? Was not Evelina ‘the most elegant novel’ ever written? ‘Such a style … there’s a vast deal of invention in it! And you’ve got so much humour, too! Now my sister has no humour – hers is all sentiment.’ Was Burney, she enquired, ‘writing another novel’? ‘No, ma’am.’ ‘Oh, I daresay you are. I daresay you are writing one at this very minute!’

Burney, with typical sharp powers of observation, noted that, in contrast to her loud-mouthed sister, the pretty Cassandra was ‘extremely languishing, delicate, and pathetic; apparently accustomed to be reckoned the genius of her family, and well contented to be looked upon as a creature dropped from the clouds’.27 (#litres_trial_promo) Little did the Leighs know that the real genius of the family would be a humble Hampshire cousin.

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Presentation copy sent by Jane Austen to Maria Edgeworth

Jane Austen greatly admired the novelist Maria Edgeworth. When Emma was published, Austen asked John Murray to send a presentation copy to Edgeworth in Ireland. Maria knew Jane Austen’s aunt and uncle Mr and Mrs James Leigh-Perrot,28 (#litres_trial_promo) but it is not clear that she made the connection, saying, ‘The authoress of Pride and Prejudice has been so good as to send me a new novel just published, Emma.’29 (#litres_trial_promo) Edgeworth was not impressed with the novel, judging by the comments she made to her half-brother: ‘There was no story to it, except that Miss Emma found that the man whom she designed for Harriet’s lover was an admirer of her own – and he was affronted at being refused by Emma … and smooth, thin water-gruel is according to Emma’s father’s opinion a very good thing and it is very difficult to make a cook understand what you mean by smooth thin water gruel.’30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Edgeworth was a prolific writer of novels, essays and children’s fiction. Several of her novels, including the highly successful Castle Rackrent (1800), were set in Ireland, where she was brought up. Her novels of London society were Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806), Tales of Fashionable Life (1809–12) and Patronage (1814). Walter Scott claimed that he turned from poetry to fiction as a result of her influence.

Belinda, the novel that Jane Austen singled out for special praise through its mention in Northanger Abbey, was a controversial book. It depicted an opium-addicted (anti-)heroine and featured an inter-racial marriage between a farm-girl called Lucy and a Jamaican servant called Juba. By the third edition, Edgeworth removed this plot-line. Belinda herself comes close to marrying a rich West Indian Creole. The novel also depicts a character called Harriet Freke, who is closely based on the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Harriet dresses like a man, is sexually aroused by Belinda and repelled by men. ‘I am a champion for the Rights of Woman,’ she tells the astonished hero, Clarence Hervey.31 (#litres_trial_promo)