Jane Austen (22 page)

Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald de Courcy, hearing that the

notorious Lady Susan is at Churchill, invites himself for a visit out of curiosity to see so finished a specimen of an adventuress. It is on the arrival of Reginald de Courcy, gay, self-confident and twenty-three, that the emotional interest of the story begins; he is rapidly and completely vanquished by Lady Susan, denounces all that he has heard against her as baseless calumny, and finally, notwithstanding the difference of their years, implores her to marry him. Though full of glee at her success, Lady Susan is always secretly annoyed at the sincerity of the young man who, even in the toils, will try to prove to himself that she is worthy of his devotion. She says in a letter to her friend Alicia Johnson: "There is a sort of ridiculous delicacy about him which requires the fullest explanation of whatever he may have heard to my disadvantage, and is never satisfied till he thinks he has ascertained the beginning and end of everything. This is
one
sort of love, but I confess it does not particularly recommend

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itself to me. I infinitely prefer the tender and liberal spirit of Mainwaring, which, impressed with the deepest conviction of my merit, is satisfied that whatever I do must be right."

The letters in which the story is carried on are written chiefly between Mrs. Vernon and her mother, Lady de Courcy, expressing their helpless fury at Reginald's gullibility, and between Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson, who lives in London with an elderly husband who has become soured by his disillusionment about his wife. The

correspondence of Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson is Jane Austen's only contribution to the description of Regency society, beyond what can be gathered in
Mansfield Park
of the past life of Mary Crawford when she was living in the set of Lady Stornaway and Mrs. Fraser.

1805, the year of the story, was that of Lady Caroline Ponsonby's marriage to William Lamb, when the Prince Regent was living at Carlton House, known on that account as "Nero's Hotel." The first decade of the nineteenth century showed that renaissance of classical forms in architecture, decoration and dress which gives to the Regency its distinctive charm; classical porches on English house fronts had long been familiar to the eye, and Grecian temples closing vistas of English trees, but in 1805 interior decoration showed the Grecian influence. Urns and mirrors framed between fluted columns adorned the walls, while furniture was designed to imitate the lines, exquisitely spare, of an altar or a tripod, and a procession of pallid nymphs and shepherds, heroes and deities, wound its way across marble mantelpieces, cameo necklaces, and the blue and black china services of Wedgwood. Female dress became violently Greek, with a waist beneath the breasts, heelless slippers and such headdresses as the Psyche knot with several fillets across the head, and the Minerva bonnet, modeled

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on a helmet with its plumes. It was not in shape alone that the first-rates imitated Grecian dress; the transparency of their robes was also ascribed to a classical origin. In 1806, a gentleman, calling himself Modestus, wrote from Bath on the topic (
La Belle Assemblée, 1806)
,

recalling the fact that Grecian ladies had worn a drapery, transparent as glass, and with something of its texture, invented by the courtesan Pamphilia, of whom Pliny said: "This woman ought not to be deprived of the glory which is due to her, that of having invented a dress which exhibits women perfectly naked." The gauzes and muslins of 1806, worn over a pair of blush-colored silk stockings in the form of tights and a single, sleeveless petticoat, damped so as to cling revealingly to the figure, seemed to Modestus to answer very much the same purpose as Pamphilia's drapery of glass. The number of women who could dress in such a manner was of course

exceedingly small, but a much larger number approached the

ethereal ideal as nearly as they could.

The revealing nature of Regency dress had in it something peculiarly expressive of the spirit of the age; whether lewd or innocent it was characteristic of a boldness, a classical simplicity, a shamelessness which was either bad or good according to its possessor.

Lady Susan would not have worn transparent robes when staying at Churchill, nor discussed, like Byron's Lady Oxford, the more risqué portions of Greek literature, even supposing her to have known any Greek, and indeed she had something else to do; but the unvarnished character of her letters to Alicia Johnson is typical of the background against which we see her; had she lived thirty years later, her character would have been the same, but it would have expressed itself with a less refreshing openness.

The crisis occurs when Lady Susan, having given her

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sixteen-year-old daughter Frederica "a hint" of her intention that Frederica shall marry Sir James Martin, is faced with the news that Frederica has run away from school and that though the mistress has recovered her, she will not take her back. Lady Susan's comment on the escape of her miserable daughter makes one feel for the moment that there was little to choose between her and Mrs. Craven: "Such was the first distinguished exploit of Miss Frederica Susanna

Vernon, and if we consider that it was achieved at the tender age of sixteen, we shall have room for the most flattering prognostics of her future renown." The good-natured Mr. Vernon goes to town to bring her down to Churchill and in the meantime even Mrs. Vernon

sympathizes with Lady Susan in having so rude and obstreperous a daughter. It is only when Frederica arrives, pale and distraught, speechless, her great, dark eyes filled with unhappiness and fright, that something of her mother's treatment begins to be understood.

Lady Susan's previous letter to Alicia Johnson has already made the reader understand it.

"You are very good in taking notice of Frederica, and I am grateful for it as a mark of your friendship . . . but I am far from exacting so heavy a sacrifice. She is a stupid girl and has nothing to recommend her. I would not therefore on any account have you encumber one moment of your precious time by sending for her to Edward St., especially as every visit is so many hours deducted from the grand affair of education, which I really wish to be attended to while she remains with Miss Summers." Not, added Lady Susan, that she wanted Frederica to learn the arts and sciences; it was "throwing time away." French, Italian, German, music, singing and drawing might gain a woman some applause, but were nothing to the purpose in attaching a lover. "Grace

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and manner," said Lady Susan, "are, after all, of the greatest importance. I do not mean therefore that Frederica's acquirements should be more than superficial, and I flatter myself that she will not remain long enough at school to understand anything thoroughly. I hope to see her the wife of Sir James within a twelvemonth. You know on what I ground my hope, and it is certainly a good

foundation, for school must be very humiliating to a girl of

Frederica's age: and by the by, you had better not invite her any more on that account, as I wish her to find her situation as unpleasant as possible."

Frederica is so desperately unhappy at the idea of being married to Sir James Martin that, gauche and timid as she is, she writes a letter to Reginald de Courcy, whom she supposes to be the person in the Churchill household having the most influence with her mother, imploring him to intercede on her behalf. Reginald, touched,

immediately comes to Lady Susan and earnestly points out to her the cruelty of what she is doing; and it is at this point that Jane Austen shows her instinctive grasp of what one might call, without

unjustifiable exaggeration, the criminal mentality, which believes that a course of action, however wrong in the abstract, is right when adopted by its possessor. Lady Susan ultimately turned the occasion into a further triumph for herself in Reginald's good opinion, but to Alicia Johnson she poured out the real state of her mind. "He can have no regard for me, or he would not have listened to her; and she with her little rebellious heart and indelicate feelings, to throw herself into the protection of a young man with whom she had

scarcely ever exchanged two words before. I am equally confounded at
her
impudence and
his
credulity. How dared he believe what she told him in my disfavor! Ought he not to have felt assured that I had unanswerable

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motives for all that I have done! Where was his reliance on my sense or goodness then?"

When Jane Austen began to write again it was not on such subjects as Margaret and Penelope Watson, or Lady Susan; she returned, in the prime of her powers, to that infinite variety comprehended in the normal; but her experiments show that her material was selected from choice, not natural limitation.

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IN THE August of 1806 Mrs. Austen took her daughters to visit a branch of her own family, the Leighs of Adlestrop. The Reverend Thomas Leigh, Rector of Adlestrop, had recently and in a very

unexpected manner come into an immense property, that of

Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire. The late owner, Lord Leigh, had left a curiously worded will, from which it was assumed that the Rev. Thomas Leigh occupied the position of his heir. There were other members of the family with a possible claim upon the estate, among them Mr. Leigh Perrot, who relinquished his for a sum of twenty-four thousand pounds down and an additional two thousand a year. As other claimants still might be found to come forward, the Rev. Thomas Leigh's solicitors advised his taking possession of the Abbey immediately and the decision being arrived at during this identical August, the party at the Rectory, including Mrs. Austen and her daughters, was swept off to Stoneleigh Abbey with its master.

The Austens were familiar with Godmersham, but Stoneleigh was on a scale quite new to them. Mrs. Austen wrote to Frank's wife,

describing some of their experiences in the vast house. The wings and their corridors were so devious

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and extensive that the party were perpetually losing themselves, and Mrs. Austen thought that sign-posts should be erected. The day began with prayers in the chapel, still draped in black for the late Lord Leigh, and next followed breakfast, with "chocolate, coffee, tea, plum cake, pound cake, hot rolls, cold rolls, bread and butter, and," added Mrs. Austen, "dry toast for me." They spent a large part of the day walking in the grounds, for the woods were "impenetrable to the sun, even in the middle of an August day." Mrs. Austen's practical mind delighted in the kitchen garden, where, she said, "the quantity of small fruit exceeds anything you can form an idea of."

The house party were very agreeable and considerate of each other's feelings; the only fly in Mrs. Austen's ointment being the presence of Lady Saye and Sele. This lady had figured already in the diary of Fanny Burney, and what she said to Fanny Burney explains exactly what Mrs. Austen meant by her subsequent comment. "I am very happy to see you; I have longed to see you a great while; I have read your performance and I am quite delighted with it! I think it's the most elegant novel I ever read in my life . . . I must introduce you to my sister: she'll be quite delighted to see you. She has written a novel herself, so you are sister authoresses. A most elegant thing it is, I assure you. It's called
The Mausoleum of Julia
. . . Lord Hawke himself says it's all poetry . . . my sister intends to print her
Mausoleum
just for her own friends and acquaintances."

Mrs. Austen said: "Poor Lady Saye and Sele, to be sure, is rather tormenting, though sometimes amusing, and affords Jane many a

good laugh, but she fatigues me sadly on the whole."

The round of family visits was a long one, but in the new year of 1807 they were in Southampton, superintending the

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progress of their house. To this house, No. 2 Castle Square, a singular interest attaches; when, as an old man, in 1870, Mr. Edward Austen Leigh * wrote the memoir of his aunt, he drew together the facts of her previous life and the family history as he had been told it by other people; so much of his work might have been written by anybody; but when he dealt with the period of her living in Castle Square, he came to the point where his own recollections began, and as we read his description of the house, with its garden bounded by the old city wall, we realize with an indescribable sensation that we are listening to James' son Edward, that child whom Jane had first seen when he was asleep and of whom she had been assured by the nurse that his eyes were large, dark and beautiful.

The house was the property of the "wicked" Lord Lansdowne. The outlook over the city wall to the sea was fine and open, but the windows on the square were curiously obstructed. In the middle of the square Lord Lansdowne had built a miniature castle. Mr. Edward Austen Leigh said it was "a fantastic edifice, too large for the space in which it stood, though too small to accord well with its castellated style"; but what fascinated him in the castle was that in its courtyard he could see putting-to a little carriage for the Marchioness, drawn by pairs of cream-colored ponies of diminishing size. He would watch the harnessing and unharnessing of this "fairy-like equipage"

with the greatest delight.

Southampton had been decided upon largely for the convenience of Frank Austen when on shore, and his presence among the family

brought upon them a burst of society. "Our acquaintance increase too fast," Jane said.

"He was

____________________

* The Leigh was added to his name when he inherited the fortune of Mrs.

Leigh Perrot.

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recognized lately by Admiral Bertie, and a few days since arrived the Admiral and his daughter Catherine to wait on us. There was nothing to like or dislike in either. To the Berties are to be added the Lances, with whose cards we have been endowed, and whose visit Frank and I returned yesterday. . . . We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. She was civil and chatty enough, and offered to introduce us to some acquaintance in Southampton which we gratefully