CHAPTER 1
"Authors Too Ourselves"
IN 1869, JANE AUSTEN'S FIRST BIOGRAPHER, JAMES EDWARD Austen-Leigh, expressed surprise at how his aunt had managed to write so much in the last five years of her life, living in the close quarters of Chawton Cottage with her mother, sister, friend Martha Lloyd, and a couple of servants. "She had no separate study to retire to," said James Edward, with evident pity, "and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all sorts of casual interruptions." He described how, careful to conceal her occupation from "servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party,"1 she wrote "upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper." A squeaking swing door elsewhere in the cottage gave her warning whenever someone was approaching and time to hide the latest sheet of Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, or "Sanditon."
Quite where this famous story originated is a puzzle, as James Edward goes on to say that neither he nor his sisters (the main sources of all anecdotage about Austen) were ever aware of disturbing their aunt at her writing, and he makes it clear that there was no attempt at concealment "within her own family party." But secrecy about her workbecame a cornerstone of the Austen myth; the image conjured up was of the endlessly patient genius putting the demands of family life, however petty, before her work, writing, when she could, in guarded but modest isolation in a corner of a shared sitting room.
The truth is that Jane Austen never exhibited self-consciousness or shame about her writing and never needed to. Unlike many women writers of her generation--or stories about them--she had no struggle for permission to write, no lack of access to books, paper, and ink; no frowning paterfamilias to face down or from whom to conceal her scribbling. Her ease and pleasure in writing as an occupation are evident from the very beginning, as is the full encouragement of her family, and if there was little space in her various homes, that was more a simple fact of life and square footage in relatively cramped households than a metaphor for creative limitations.
What James Edward Austen-Leigh's testimony really reveals is not the author's lack of vanity but how much her writing was accepted, and even overlooked, within her family. Austen is now such a towering figure in literature and myth that it is hard to reinsert her in her home environment and not still see a genius; even James Edward was blinded by the awe factor by the time he came to write her biography, fifty years after his aunt's death. A generation younger than her, he was one of the last to find out that Aunt Jane was the anonymous "Author of 'Sense & Sensibility', 'Pride & Prejudice' etc." His surprise at this news, and his subsequent interest in his aunt, mark him out as not of the inner circle. They were not so susceptible to awe.
This is not to say that Austen's closest family members were indifferent to her ambitions and achievements as a writer or callously withholding of praise, but that the home context of genius is, by definition, utterly unlike any other. According to the theorist Leo Braudy, fame can be thought of as having four elements: a person, an accomplishment, their immediate publicity, and what posterity makes of them.2 The "immediate publicity" of Jane Austen's fame is interesting not so much in how and where her books were reviewed or what her contemporaries thought of them, but in how she was treated in her own circle and what sort of climate that provided. And the reason that Jane Austen did not require, or receive, any special treatment withinher family was that she was by no means the only writer among them.
JANE WAS THE SECOND youngest of the Austen children, ten years younger than her eldest brother, James, and two years younger than her only sister, Cassandra. She was born and lived the first twenty-six years of her life at Steventon, on the northeasterly edges of Hampshire. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a clever, gentle man; her mother, Cassandra Leigh, a highly articulate woman with aristocratic ancestors, the niece of a famous Oxford scholar and wit. The family was only modestly well-off, and Jane's lively, good-looking, and accomplished brothers had to make their own ways in the world; James and Henry, both Oxford graduates, joined the church and the army, Francis and Charles joined the navy, and lucky Edward was adopted by childless relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Knight of Godmersham, sent on the grand tour, and made heir to their estates in Kent and Hampshire. Only George, the second son, did not share the family's health and success; disabled in some way, he spent his life being cared for elsewhere and hardly appears in the family records at all.
Jane and her beloved elder sister Cassandra grew up surrounded by boys, for the Reverend Austen supplemented his clerical income by taking in pupils, running, in effect, a small school for the sons of the local gentry. Though the girls were later sent away to school briefly in Oxford, Reading, and Southampton, they spent most of their childhood in the more challenging intellectual atmosphere of their own home. At the rectory, there was a well-stocked library that included works of history, poetry, topography, the great essayists of the century, and plenty of fiction, for the Austens were "great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so"3 and subscribed to the local circulating library, which held copies of all the recent best sellers. Jane was a fan of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Elizabeth Inchbald, and a host of less memorable eighteenth-century romancers, lapping up their stories and lampooning their more absurd conventions with equal glee. "From an early age," the critic Isobel Grundy has noted, "she read like a potential author. She lookedfor what she could use--not by quietly absorbing and reflecting it, but by actively engaging, rewriting, often mocking it."4
Like the eponymous heroine of her early work, "Catharine, or The Bower," the teenage Jane was "well-read in Modern History" and left more than a hundred marginal notes in a schoolroom copy of Oliver Goldsmith's 1771 History of England, still in the possession of the Austen family. Her cheeky ripostes, mostly in defense of her favorites, the Stuarts, give a strong impression of her intellectual confidence, as well as of her pleasure in acting as the classroom wit. In the same irreverent spirit, Austen wrote her own pro-Stuart "History of England" in 1791, for recital and circulation among the family. Her section on Henry VIII begins like this: "It would be an affront to my Readers were I to suppose that they were not as well acquainted with the particulars of this King's reign as I am myself. It will therefore be saving them the task of reading again what they have read before, and myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign."5
When "The History of England" was eventually published, in 1922, Virginia Woolf characterized the girlish author as "laughing, in her corner, at the world," but the writer of such a brilliant comic party piece was hardly the shrinking (or smirking) violet Woolf imagines, but a quick-witted, praise-hungry teenager, competing for attention in a close, loving, intellectually competitive household. With people outside her immediate circle, whose approval she didn't seek or value, Austen was likely to fall silent; hence her cousin Philadelphia's description of Jane in 1788 as "whimsical & affected ... not at all pretty & very prim, unlike a girl of twelve."6 The family, especially those she was closest to--Cassandra, Henry, Frank, Charles, and her father--would have known very well how "unlike a girl of twelve" Jane was, how fanciful, and how funny. But she didn't always choose to perform.
In the years between 1788 and 1792, that is, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Jane copied out her skits, plays, and stories into three notebooks titled humorously "Volume the First," "Volume the Second," and "Volume the Third," named as if they were installments of a conventional three-part novel. There was a habit among the Austens of using high-quality quarto notebooks (and one's best handwriting) tomake, in effect, manuscript books to be passed around and enjoyed in the family; editions of one, but still editions. Much later, in 1812, Jane made a reference in a letter to a comic quatrain she had written and sent to her brother James for his comments, being added to "the Steventon Edition."7 As with so many of Austen's familiar references, it's not clear exactly what she meant by this, but the phrase and its context suggest an album in which the family verses were collected. James Austen's own poems and verse prologues have survived largely because his three children made copies of them in similar quarto volumes.8
Almost every item in Jane Austen's juvenilia has an elaborate, mock-serious dedication to one or another member of the family circle: her brothers, both parents, her cousins Eliza de Feuillide and Jane Cooper, and friends Martha and Mary Lloyd. Cassandra, who had provided Jane with thirteen charming watercolor vignettes as illustrations to "The History of England," received this dedication to "Catharine, or The Bower," Jane's unfinished but ambitious early novel:
Madam
Encouraged by your warm patronage of The beautiful Cassandra, and The History of England, which through your generous support, have obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, and run through threescore Editions, I take the liberty of begging the same Exertions in favour of the following Novel, which I humbly flatter myself, possesses Merit beyond any already published, or any that will ever in future...
