Jane Austen (4 page)

Mr. Lloyd; on his death she and her daughters came to Deane, and, after a few years, moved some twenty miles away to Ibthorp. On the occasion of this move, Jane made Mary a parting present, which is still in existence. It is described as a very small chintz housewife, furnished with the finest possible variety of needles and thread, the whole rolled up and protected by a little gingham bag. In the

housewife "a tiny pocket" contains a scrap of paper, on which is written with a crow quill:

This little bag I hope will prove To be not vainly made,

- 26 -

For should you thread and needle want It will afford you aid.

One of the aspects of Jane Austen's character most frequently dwelt on with surprise and admiration by people who knew her as a

woman in the height of her achievement, was her unpretending,

exquisite simplicity; but though the simplicity was artless, it was a development, a quality that grew with the growth of her perfect taste.

A child, conscious of unusual powers, cannot but be a little awkward with them; it has not discovered the natural outlet for its energy, and will amuse itself with the mere stuff of daily life: will be now one person and now another. Jane was apt to be disconcerting in her behavior at these years, and it was unfortunate that it was just now she should make the first acquaintance with her cousin Phila Walter.

Jane and Cassandra, with Mr. and Mrs. Austen, stayed a few days with the Walters on their way home from a visit in Kent. Phila thought Cassandra very agreeable; she "kept up" the conversation in a very pleasant manner, and they all thought her very pretty. Jane, said Phila decidedly, was not pretty at all, very much like her brother Henry. (So the likeness noticed by her father the night she was born still persisted.) But as most people thought Henry a very handsome man, this might not, in eyes less severely critical than Phila's, have been a disadvantage. Jane was far from making a good impression altogether; Phila said first that she was "very prim; unlike a girl of twelve"; but in a letter written the next day she said, "Jane is whimsical and affected." In short, one is forced to conclude that on this visit she did not behave as she should. But how much reason she had to appear unlike a girl of twelve may be judged from a glance at something she was writing two years later. Writing was, indeed, her

- 27 -

favorite amusement. Cassandra drew and painted, Jane wrote. She practiced the art with such unremitting enthusiasm that, on looking back, she said she wished she had written less and read more

between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Of what she read, not many titles are known, though a good deal may be gathered as to the type.

She read simple works in Italian and French as she was learning both those languages, and had a copy of Berquin Ami des Enfants: a

collection of moral tales for children told in vigorous outline and perspicuous style, of which the one most familiar in English

translation is "The Three Cakes," in which the characters of three schoolboys are displayed by the way in which each treated the

present of a large, frosted plum cake. Her bent of mind showed itself in her fondness for history, taught as it then was with the emphasis laid upon the doings of men and women, their characters and

influence, rather than upon its economic aspects, but a copy of Goldsmith
History of England
is preserved in which, on the page where he tells of a man and his wife driven to suicide by the horrors of destitution, she has written in the margin: "How much the poor are to be pitied and the Rich to be Blamed."

Besides these serious studies there went on in the Rectory a quantity of play- and novel-reading; nor was this confined to the masterpieces of the age.

The best known of her childish works, and the one which is

frequently considered the best, is a satire on a popular type of novel, written when she was fourteen years old, entitled
Love and
Friendship
. Since novels began, there has always existed, in a highly thriving state, that kind of novel which is responsible for the idea held by so many people, that novel-reading is a pernicious waste of time. It varies in outward form from generation to generation, but its fundamental characteristics are always the same, and writers of it

- 28 -

exist in heretofore unequalled numbers at the present time, though politeness and discretion forbid our pointing any of them out. The surface differences between these books and their eighteenth-century counterparts are great, but the qualities of grotesque and feeble character-drawing, futile conversation and, above all, a pretentious earnestness in the author are strikingly common to both.

Jane Austen had taken the measure of such writers before she could spell, and she fell upon them with an enthusiastic delight, and with a command of language, an ear for the balance of a sentence, an

incisive clarity of expression, of such an order that they invest the child's exercise books with a touch of immortality.

The tearing high spirits which sweep through this sketch of the Adventures of Laura and Sophia, and their lovers Edward and

Augustus, communicate the writer's enjoyment to the reader in an intoxicating manner: "'My father,' said Edward, 'seduced by the false glare of Fortune and the Deluding Pomp of Title, insisted on my giving my hand to Lady Dorothea. No, never exclaimed I. Lady

Dorothea is lovely and Engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know, Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your Wishes.

No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father!'" The heroine's friend Sophia died from the results of a chill caught by fainting too continuously on damp grass, and expired with the parting caution:

"One fatal swoon has cost me my Life. . . . Beware of swoons, dear Laura . . . a frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I daresay, conducive to health in its consequences--Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint----"

Eliza had said, in describing the attractiveness of Cassandra and Jane: "My heart still gives the preference to Jane,

- 29 -

whose kind partiality to me indeed requires a return of the same nature," and this brilliant piece of nonsense is inscribed: "To Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide."

In the published collection of fragments written between the ages of fourteen and sixteen are the first scenes of two comedies, one of them dedicated to The Reverend George Austen, and
Lesley Castle
, an unfinished novel in letters, dedicated to Henry; underneath this dedication is a note: Messrs. Demand and Co.--please to pay Jane Austen Spinster the sum of one hundred guineas on account of your humble Servant. H. T. Austen.

Love and Friendship
is perhaps the most remarkable of the extremely youthful pieces; but for sheer wit the first place is held by
The History of England, from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death
of Charles the 1st, by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian;
the historian being aged fifteen. This work was dedicated to

Cassandra and illustrated by her with water-color sketches.

Of Henry the 6th, the author observes:

"I cannot say much for this Monarch's sense. Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York, who was on the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very diffuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen
against
, and show my Hatred
to
all those people and persons whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information."

It is not only that she succeeds, where a child almost never succeeds, in being genuinely witty; but besides having acquired a grasp of the subject itself, she shows in these short paragraphs applied to the various reigns a completely disillusioned attitude to the practice of writing history, at a

- 30 -

time when, an ardent schoolgirl, she was passionately interested in the study of it. Henry the 8th's reign might have presented the historian with a tiresome amount of labor, but she says: "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." She asserts that Anne Boleyn's beauty and elegance, taken in conjunction with the King's character, were sufficient proofs of her innocence; and concludes that nothing can be urged in Henry's vindication, except that "his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time, has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in

general."

If one had been asked to say with what Queen Jane Austen would have found herself most in sympathy, one would have hazarded

Queen Elizabeth. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that her heroine was, on the contrary, Mary Queen of Scots. Whether in real life, Jane Austen, even at fifteen, would have had any patience with the lovely but exasperating Mary Stuart, is another question; in imagination, Mary's "beauty and elegance," qualities which always fascinated Jane, and her long-drawn-out distress, made her in Jane's mind an object of devotion, and the passage dealing with her

misfortunes--by far the longest in the History-is extraordinary in the unchild-like combination of emotion and detachment.

"O what must this bewitching Princess whose only friend was then the Duke of Norfolk, and whose only ones now Mr. Whitaker, Mrs.

Lefroy, Mrs. Knight and myself, who was abandoned by her son,

confined by her Cousin, abused,

- 31 -

reproached and vilified by all, what must not her noble mind have suffered when informed that Elizabeth had given orders for her death? Yet she bore it with a most unshaken fortitude, firm in her mind; constant in her Religion; and prepared herself to meet the cruel fate to which she was doomed, with a magnanimity that would alone proceed from conscious Innocence. And yet could you Reader have believed it possible that some hardened and zealous Protestants have even abused her for that steadfastness in the Catholic Religion which reflected on her so much credit? It may not be unnecessary,"

she adds, "before I entirely conclude my account of this ill-fated Queen, to observe that she had been accused of several crimes

during the time of her reigning in Scotland, of which I now most seriously do assure my Reader that she was entirely innocent; having never been guilty of anything more than Imprudencies into which she was betrayed by the openness of her Heart, her Youth and her Education. Having I trust by this assurance entirely done away every Suspicion and every doubt which might have arisen in the Reader's mind, from what other Historians have written of her, I shall proceed to mention the remaining events that marked Elizabeth's reign."

To read these sketches is sometimes to forget that they were written by a child in an exercise book, but one passage recalls the family milieu in which they were produced. In writing of Sir Francis Drake, the sister of Francis Austen observes: "Yet great as he was and justly celebrated as a sailor, I cannot help foreseeing that he will be equalled in this or the next century by one who, tho' now but young, already promises to answer all the ardent and sanguine expectations of his Relations and Friends; among whom I class the amiable lady to whom this work is dedicated and my no less amiable self."

- 32 -

A Collection of Letters
dedicated to Jane Cooper, written at the age of sixteen, contain a "Letter from a Young Lady in Humble Circumstances to her Friend," which though less extraordinarily taking and brilliant in childish charm, shows, naturally enough, the most matured power of anything among the schoolroom pieces, and judged from a purely technical standpoint is perhaps the most

astonishing item of the whole.

The writer of the letter, Maria Williams, living in a humble manner with her mother, is taken to the ball in the coach of the odious Lady Greville, who is not only a brutal snob, but takes a perverse pleasure in unkindness, as is seen by her going out of her way to get Maria to the house by a quite unnecessary invitation, merely that she may continue her baiting of a humble acquaintance. Short as the letter is, it is sufficient to display with trenchant clarity the character of the bloated, brazen Lady Greville, her elder daughter, who took after her, the younger daughter, who was gentle and kind, the sensitive but independent little heroine, and her mother, who sympathized with Maria's sufferings at the hands of Lady Greville, but thought the connection too valuable to be allowed to drop. After describing Lady Greville's treatment of her at the ball, Maria says: "The next day while we were at dinner, Lady Greville's Coach stopped at the door, for that is the time of day she generally contrives it should. She sent in a message by the servant to say that 'she should not get out but that Miss Maria must come to the Coach door as she wanted to speak to her, and that she must make haste and come immediately----'

'What an impertinent Message, Mama!' said I--'Go, Maria,' replied she. Accordingly I went and was obliged to stand there at her

Ladyship's pleasure, though the wind was extremely high and very cold."

- 33 -

"'Why, I think, Miss Maria, you are not quite so smart as you were last night--But I did not come to examine your dress; but to tell you that you may dine with us the day after tomorrow--not tomorrow, remember, do not come tomorrow, for we expect Lord and Lady

Clermont and Sir Thomas Stanley's family--There will be no

occasion for your being very fine, for I shan't send the Carriage. If it rains you may take an umbrella--' I could hardly help laughing at hearing her give me leave to keep myself dry--'And pray remember to be in time, for I shan't wait--I hate my Victuals overdone --But you need not come before the time--How does your Mother do? She is at dinner, is not she?' 'Yes Ma'am, we were in the middle of dinner when your Ladyship came.' 'I am afraid you find it very cold Maria,'