A Companion to Jane Austen provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary Austen studies while covering the full breadth of the novelist’s work and career. Focusing on changing contexts and cultures of reception, the text provides groundbreaking new interpretations in more than forty essays by a distinguished team of influential literary critics and Austen scholars. Sections include: The Life and the Texts; Reading the Texts; Literary Genres and Genealogies; Political, Social and Cultural Worlds; and Reception and Reinvention. As a scholarly reference and comprehensive survey of the most innovative speculative developments in the field, A Companion to Jane Austen illuminates the power of Austen’s novels to enchant readers.

Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and now serves as Department Chair. She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel. Her books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988), Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002), along with editions of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (Norton, 1998), Sense and Sensibility (Norton, 2002), and Northanger Abbey (Oxford, 2003). Her research has been supported by major fellowships such as the NEH and the Guggenheim. She is now finishing a book about author-love called Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, which traces permutations of “Jane mania” from 1817 to the present, and also working on another called Raising the Novel, which explores modern efforts to create a novelistic canon by elevating novels to keystones of high culture.

Clara Tuite is Senior Lecturer in English, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge, 2002, 2008), as well as several essays on Austen, and the co-editor, with Gillian Russell, of Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840 (Cambridge, 2002, 2006).
Cover image: The Modern Living Room, from Humphry Repton’s ‘Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening’, 1816, colour lithograph. Private Collection, The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

A Companion to Jane Austen

By Claudia L. Johnson Clara Tuite

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Claudia L. Johnson, Clara Tuite
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-4909-9

Chapter One

Jane Austen’s Life and Letters

Kathryn Sutherland

Jane Austen’s life, as a recoverable narrative, is almost exclusively a matter of family construction, with authority drawn either from the teller having known her or, more tenuously, claiming family relationship to her. Such a narrowly deduced documentary basis for any life is inevitably problematic regardless of how rich the surviving evidence might be; and in Jane Austen’s case the evidence is also scarce. She was surrounded by family, at every waking and almost every sleeping moment, yet apparently they saw so little. Family makes, inherits, and transmits what we know as her life; it is only familial. Refracted through the prism of family, her life is also their lives: her relationships, variously perceived, to them; and their relationships, variously perceived, to each other. Through her they live; through them what we imagine as her life is shaped and circumscribed, even as it is revealed. The trickle of nonfamily biographies, which became a torrent in the final years of the twentieth century, derives, as it must, from these early accounts. Here’s the problem: how is it possible to recognize in their carefully fashioned portrait of a conformable family member the writer of such startlingly original novels: novels, moreover, that point up the difficulties and constrictions of family identity? Looked at from the other end, no one would now be interested in the life of Jane Austen if it were not for what she wrote. Though we know we must not, under pain of the crassest navet, read the novels into the life/the life out of the novels, nonetheless we seek to connect them: the fiction must have a plausible psychogenesis. It does not; and not only does it fail in this respect, it is disconcerting to discover how little in the early family accounts sought to make the connection.

In the absence of diaries, which were either destroyed or never existed, the letters are the only evidence we have of a personal Jane Austen speaking/writing in her own voice, unmediated by fictional form. But they, too, are almost exclusively predicated on family communication and survive through family management. Her sister Cassandra can claim a unique role in channeling our thoughts about Jane Austen along certain lines. What we recover from the letters, as details of a life lived, what we conjecture as imagined possibility, are both derivable from the evidence preserved and the gaps created in the correspondence as Cassandra stewarded and selectively transmitted it. In this sense Cassandra is Jane Austen’s primary biographer, her relationship to the early sources that of an editor. Editing is choice, and until fairly recently, it tended in its critical methodology to submit the allowable variability of its materials to the service of a single “correct” text. Jane Austen, by Cassandra’s critical editorial act, is unsurprisingly unheterogeneous – a sister, a daughter, only a family member.

There is the suggestive comment made by Caroline Austen, Jane Austen’s niece, who spent extended periods of time with the elderly Cassandra, that Cassandra wanted the younger generation of Austens to remember Aunt Jane, but made sure none of them individually remembered or could reassemble too much: “it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generat[ion]” (Austen-Leigh 2002: 186-7). It is Caroline who describes how some time in the 1840s Aunt Cassandra “looked over and burnt” the bulk of her correspondence from her sister. “She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces – but of those that I have seen, several had portions cut out” (Austen-Leigh 2002: 174). Cassandra’s intervention – whether of destruction or dissemination – fragmented the textual record at the same time as it safeguarded and preserved her sister’s memory for the next generation of Austens. But the inevitable consequence of her actions was to fuel speculation. By an inexorable logic, as Caroline’s words concede, once we know something has been destroyed (“buried out of our sight”) it becomes far more significant than any available knowledge. Cassandra’s culling and distribution of family mementos may have been no more than an old woman’s final act of housekeeping, but it has been viewed suspiciously ever after, within and beyond the family, as an act of censorship and suppression. Whatever her motives, she created a record with deliberate holes in it.

There are at the latest count 160 letters (161 when Austen’s will is included) extant from an original correspondence calculated by Deirdre Le Faye, using patterns established in the more prolific periods of communication, at around 3,000. The letters from Jane to Cassandra, by general consent the focus of the correspondence, are represented by 94 surviving specimens. Of those she may have written to her six brothers, Francis (Frank) is represented by eight, and Charles by only one. No letters survive from Jane to her eldest brother James, nor to Edward, adopted in 1783 by his father’s distant cousin, Thomas Knight of Godmersham, Kent; nor to Henry, purportedly her favorite brother. Of George, her handicapped second brother, there is no mention, and he is only rarely glimpsed in the family record. The family friend and fellow inmate of the cottage at Chawton, Martha Lloyd, later Frank’s second wife, has four letters; Jane’s cousin Philadelphia Walter has one. In the next generation, James’s daughters Anna and Caroline have 16 and 10 letters each; his son, James Edward, has three. Fanny Knight, Edward’s eldest daughter, has six, and Charles’s daughter Cassandra (Cassy) has one. The extended private world of friends and acquaintances is represented by only six letters: one to her old friend Alethea Bigg; one to Charles Haden, Henry Austen’s sociable doctor; a formal note to Lady Morley, to whom an early copy of Emma was sent; a letter to Catherine Prowting, a Chawton neighbor; another to Ann Sharp, former governess to Edward’s children at Godmersham; and one to Frances Tilson, wife of Henry’s banking partner. The public world is represented by six letters to the publisher John Murray, each one no more than a brief note; by one famously indignant letter to Richard Crosby, who bought and failed to publish the manuscript of “Susan” (Northanger Abbey); and by a short correspondence of three letters to James Stanier Clarke, pompous librarian to the Prince Regent.

The proportions, which are undoubtedly skewed by accidents of survival unconnected to Cassandra’s editorial decision, weigh heavily in favor of a predominantly female domestic correspondence, extended in later years to the elder of Austen’s nieces and nephews. Its chief function is to maintain family connections and to share news, where news can be as trivial as the cost of a hair cut or as momentous as birth, death, or a brother’s promotion. Where the addressee is Cassandra, the letters invoke a reader whose sympathy, on almost any topic, can be taken for granted. Theirs is an implicit intimacy which is difficult to decode because it is inevitably understated, by design “unyielding” (Favret 1993: 133) to other eyes, and drawing upon a deep reserve of shared (that is, known to each other though not necessarily identical) feelings and responses to books, to family members, and neighbors, and to the world in general. “[T]o strangers,” Caroline Austen wrote, the letters “could be no transcript of her mind – they would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them” (Austen-Leigh 2002: 174). Which leaves hanging the question of what the letters might reveal to those who did know Jane Austen.

As the daughters of the house, Cassandra and Jane would by convention be delegated to write letters whose contents would then circulate within a further family group or among friends and neighbors: “Your letter gave pleasure to all of us, we had all the reading of it of course, I three times – as I undertook … to read it to Sackree, & afterwards to Louisa” (Letters: 233). These letters are records of social events and are themselves social events whose reach and interpretation the writer soon loses power to calculate or control, as Austen observes writing from Lyme Regis, on Friday September 14, 1804, to Cassandra in Hampshire:

My Mother is at this moment reading a letter from my Aunt. Yours to Miss Irvine, of which she had had the perusal – (which by the bye, in your place I should not like) has thrown them into a quandary about Charles & his prospects. The case is, that my Mother had previously told my Aunt, without restriction, that a sloop (which my Aunt calls a Frigate) was reserved in the East for Charles; whereas you had replied to Miss Irvine’s enquiries on the subject with less explicitness & more caution. – Never mind – let them puzzle on together. (Letters: 93)

Austen summarizes with cool amusement the little drama of miscommunication that the multiple reading of Cassandra’s letter raises among its female audience, teasing out its capacity to reinflect the same news as represented in other letters. Instructions for reading, in the form of explicit advice on how to edit their contents for wider consumption or for reading aloud, are a feature of her own letters: share this, suppress that, and keep this to yourself (e.g., Letters: 126). And in a late letter to her niece Fanny, whose tangled love life is submitted to her aunt’s advice: “I shall be most glad to hear from you again my dearest Fanny … and write something that may do to be read or told” (Letters: 287). Where “the true art of letter-writing … is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth” (Letters: 68), the potential for misunderstanding in the wrong hands (or eyes) is considerable. This is only one of the ways in which the open family letter, filled with a mix of news, gossip, and opinion, addressed to the taste and capacities of one reader but shared by many, can without great violence be recast into the material of fiction. It is easy too to imagine that, read aloud, the staccato revelations of the letters would act as prompts to conversational development and misinterpretation among a knowing circle, as they do in the subtle epistolary subplot of Emma. (Volume 2, chapter 1 offers an extreme example.)

After Cassandra’s death in 1845, the bulk of her own preserved letters went by bequest to Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull), presumably because so many were written either to or from Fanny’s childhood home of Godmersham, Kent, during the extended, usually separate, visits each sister made there. This fact makes Godmersham (like Cassandra) a steady though not constant frame of representation for the news, events, and revelations the letters provide. How will their communications be received in the grander Godmersham circle? How might the reality or idea of Godmersham impress itself upon the writer’s style? Though the sisters wrote personally to each other, they also wrote as denizens of the households they happened to inhabit, keeping in view, however discreetly, the importance of family networking and mutual assistance. As Austen put it to Cassandra from Godmersham on June 30, 1808, “… it is pleasant to be among people who know one’s connections & care about them” (Letters: 137-8). After 1805, the financial assistance of the prosperous, landowning Edward Austen (he took the name of Knight officially in 1812) became indispensable to the domestic well-being of the Austen women. When in 1884 Lord Brabourne, Fanny’s son and Jane Austen’s great-nephew, published his mother’s collection of letters, he did not fail to make the case that they offered a counterimage to that provided by James Edward Austen-Leigh in his Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), the first proper biography. Austen-Leigh was the son of Jane’s eldest brother, he had grown up in her childhood home Steventon parsonage, enjoyed his aunt’s conversation and encouragement as a young writer, and attended her coffin to its grave in Winchester Cathedral. In a particular sense, repeated elsewhere in the tightly knit Austen family, his own early life replicated aspects of her life. But the account of Jane Austen that AustenLeigh pieced together in the late 1860s is marked at every turn by half knowledge and the accidents of survival – broken memories, scraps of letters, yawning gaps in the evidence; and by a further defense – middle-class propriety. By contrast, Brabourne exploited the potential offered by Godmersham and its material luxuries, as glimpsed in his mother’s large share of the letters, to fill in some of the gaps and to upstage Austen-Leigh’s confected portrait by one of his own. Where Austen-Leigh worries that the letters may reveal anything at all, Brabourne makes wildly exaggerated claims for their contents.

Austen-Leigh took his cue from his sister Caroline in begging the reader “not to expect too much from” Jane Austen’s letters (Austen-Leigh 2002: 50). Caroline had written a short memoir of her own, in March 1867, to assist her brother, and she states firmly there that “… there is nothing in those letters which I have seen that would be acceptable to the public … they detailed chiefly home and family events: and she seldom committed herself even to an opinion” (Austen-Leigh 2002: 173). Though the revised second edition of the Memoir (1871) reconsidered this dismissal in making use of letters that the nieces and nephew had each received from Aunt Jane, Austen-Leigh guessed correctly that there were further letters which would change the record in unimagined ways, if only he could lay his hands on them. “I have no letters of my aunt, nor any other record of her, during her four years’ residence at Southampton,” he admitted; “and though I now began to know, and, what was the same thing, to love her myself, yet my observations were only those of a young boy, and were not capable of penetrating her character, or estimating her powers” (AustenLeigh 2002: 65-6). From May 1801, when Steventon ceased to be her home, until July 1809, when she settled at Chawton, Jane Austen’s life was, outwardly at least, rootless and impressionable: a series of temporary homes and lodgings in Bath and Southampton; holidays at Lyme Regis and other seaside resorts; extended visits to family in Gloucestershire, Hampshire, and Kent; shifting friendships and acquaintances. For that whole period of change, turmoil, and excitement, Austen-Leigh provides only four letters. Lacking precise information, even his estimate of a “four years’ residence at Southampton” is wrong by about 18 months. Letters for this period, among the sharpest and, in their way, most revealing Austen wrote (nos 49-67 in Le Faye’s edition), were all out of reach at Godmersham. Although this crucial gap was filled somewhat in the next generation, when William and R. A. Austen-Leigh’s enlarged biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record (1913), absorbed Brabourne’s major collection, it has retained its symbolic force into the present in the familiar narrative of Jane Austen’s life as two broken but curiously symmetrical parts. Thanks to an uncritical reliance on James Edward Austen-Leigh’s avowedly partial knowledge, the “two-distinct-but-matching-creative-periods” theory has become a biographical truism among Austen scholars: Steventon and Chawton, separated by an eight-year blank during which she was miserable and depressed (that is, not in the Hampshire countryside), and in a sense nonexistent.

(Continues…)

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