Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Jane Austen For Dummies (14 page)
This popular image of Jane Austen was first seen in 1870 as the frontispiece for James Edward Austen-Leigh's
Memoir of Jane Austen.
It is actually an engraving by a Mr. Lizars from a portrait that Austen-Leigh commissioned a Mr. Andrews to create, basing it on Cassandra's portrait, with input from Austen-Leigh and his sisters. Thus, the engraving you're looking at is a copy of a copy of Cassandra's work, shown in Figure 3-2. It is perhaps softened for Victorian tastes: A woman who, as a child, saw Jane Austen many times at Chawton, observed that the face shown here was too broad and plump.
Courtesy, A Room of One's Own Press
When her parents unexpectedly announced her father's decision to retire and move with his wife and two unmarried daughters to Bath, it is rumored that Jane promptly fainted. After living in the country and in the same house for 20 years, Jane must have found the idea of moving to Bath, a city that was second only to London in importance and activity, a real shocker! The move also meant condensing to a smaller rental, city property: Her father's 500-volume library and her pianoforte would be sold, along with all the family furniture, except for their beds. But with her cheerful personality and love of the ridiculous, if only to satirize it as she had in her “Juvenilia” and would continue to do in her mature novels, Jane bucked herself up and prepared for the move.
The four Austens â parents and daughters â moved to Bath in May 1801. By the end of September, after much looking, they found a lovely house to lease at No. 4 Sydney Place, just opposite the lovely Sydney Gardens. Today the house bears a plaque that Jane Austen once lived there.
Living in Bath, Austen occupied herself doing what any young lady in Bath would do:
Attended the theater
Accompanied her uncle, James Leigh Perrot (her mother's brother), to the Pump Room (where Bath's mineral water was and is dispensed, and in Austen's day, it was believed to be good for what ailed you â in her uncle's case, gout; the water has a slight metallic flavor)
Took long walks with new acquaintances (none of whom would ever replace her old Steventon friends)
Meandered on drives in the surrounding neighborhood
Enjoyed Bath gossip
But we have no literary composition from this period. Austen scholars vary on the reasons:
Austen was too busy having fun in the city.
Austen was unhappy being out of the country and thrown into the busy streets of Bath.
Austen disliked not having a real home, only leased quarters.
Take your pick. Many things could have kept her uninspired and from writing.
In late November 1802, Jane and Cassandra Austen had the great pleasure of visiting their old Steventon friends, the Biggs sisters, at their beautiful home, Manydown, where as younger women they had enjoyed many balls. Catherine Bigg and her sister Alethea â nearly the same ages as Jane â had long been among Jane's closest friends. So this reunion was to be especially happy for both sets of sisters.
Harris Bigg Wither, who like his father had assumed the additional surname Wither when the father inherited the Manydown estate, was Catherine and Alethea's brother and the heir to Manydown. (For more on inheritance and primogeniture, see Chapter 10.) Poor Harris stuttered badly and was, reportedly, large and clumsy. Because his sisters were good friends with Jane Austen, he knew Jane, too, and must have felt comfortable around her. Imagine Jane's surprise, while staying at Manydown during this Novemberâ December visit, when her friends' brother Harris, six years her junior, proposed to the 27-year-old family friend on the evening of December 2, 1802! And even more surprising, imagine her accepting the offer!
At age 27, Austen was pretty much over the hill when it came to marriage in her day. So to have an offer at age 27 was unusual. Besides, such a proposal would relieve her parents' economic concerns, and she was great friends with the Manydown family. However, although marriage without love wasn't unusual or unsatisfying in Austen's day when women depended on husbands to support them, she still found herself miserable at the thought of being Mrs. Harris Bigg Wither.
Thirteen years later, when she would write to her beloved niece Fanny, then 21, “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection,” she personally knew how true those words were (Letter, November 18â20, 1814). For after accepting Harris's proposal, the next morning, December 3, 1802, she retracted her acceptance and with Cassandra immediately left Manydown for her brother's home in Steventon to rehearse the events of the last 24 hours with her brother and sister-in-law, Cassandra, and friend Madam Lefroy.
Keep in mind Austen's words to her niece and remember that her heroines never marry for money: They marry for love, but being practical young women, they love men who at least have more money than they have and who will be able to support them nicely. In fiction, you
can
have it all.
On January 21, 1805, Jane Austen's father died. While he had been ailing for some time, his death came after a short sickness. In a sweet letter to her brother Frank, Jane wrote, “Our dear father has closed his virtuous & happy life, in a death almost as free from suffering as his Children could have wished” (Letter, January 21, 1805). His death came just a little more than a month after that of Jane's longtime friend, Madam Lefroy, a highly experienced equestrienne who died after being thrown from a horse on Jane's 29th birthday: December 16, 1804.
The shock and pain of the two losses coming so close together may have stopped Jane Austen's writing
The Watsons,
her only work of fiction named for the central family. The fragment certainly contains the makings of a courtship novel, with a lovely and intelligent heroine, Emma Watson, plus Austen's only charming child character in all of her fiction, the dancing 10-year-old Charles Blake.
The grief over Mr. Austen's death was worsened by his family's knowing that his church living (income) died with him. This loss meant that his widow was now down to an annual income of about £140 â an amount that clearly threatened the women's lifestyles and put them in genteel poverty.