Jane Austen (48 page)

deficient in propriety. Jane Austen said: "He and I should not in the least agree of course in our ideas of novels and heroines;--pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked--but there is some very good sense in what he says, . . . and he deserves better treatment than to be obliged to read any more of my works."

She spoke now of
Persuasion
: "You will not like it, so you need not be impatient," and added her remark about Fanny's
perhaps
liking the heroine, as she was almost too good for herself.

"Many thanks," she said, "for your kindness of my health. I certainly have not been well for many weeks, and about a week ago I was

very poorly, I have had a good deal of fever at times and indifferent nights, but am considerably better now, and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every

wrong color. I must not depend upon being ever very blooming

again. Sickness is a

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dangerous indulgence at my time of life." In a small letter to Caroline she said: "I am a poor honey at present. I will be better when you can come and see us."

They had had a saddle made for her to ride on one of the donkeys, as she was longing for fresh air and could not walk without becoming so very much tired. She told Fanny on March 23rd that she had been for her first ride the day before and liked it very much. Edward had come over from Steventon, and he walked on one side of her and Cassandra on the other. They went up Mounters Lane and round by where some new cottages were to be, and Jane enjoyed it all --air, exercise and agreeable companions. "Aunt Cass is such an excellent nurse," she said, "so assiduous and unwearied! But you know that already."

Though by the middle of March she was feeling too weak to walk, for the previous three months she had thought herself so much better as to be able to begin another novel. To the thirteen-year-old manuscript of
Northanger Abbey
, when it was once more in her hands, she did nothing, except to write a preface, in which she apologized for such parts of the story as might have become obsolete during the time which had elapsed since its composition, and in which she could not forbear to say: "That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think worth while to publish, seems extraordinary." But she had by no means determined the book should be published now. On March 17th, 1817, she wrote to Fanny--"Miss Catherine is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out." But she had begun a work in January, and continued it for three months, till she was obliged to put it by. This fragment, to which her family attached the name of
Sanditon
, was referred to at length by Mr. Edward Austen Leigh in the memoirs, but not published in full till

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1925. Few people, probably, would see in
Sanditon
the promise of a novel such as we see promised by
The Watsons
. There is no character in
Sanditon
, although the first twelve chapters introduce two heroines, in whom we feel such a degree of interest as we feel for Emma Watson. But the work is precious and important, because of its character as a whole, coming as it does immediately after the composition of
Persuasion
. People who are fond of deducing a novelist's experience from the characters of his work have always, in the case of Jane Austen, pinned their theories upon
Persuasion
.

Coming, as was supposed, at the end of Jane Austen's career as a writer,
Persuasion
offered a ground for theorizing too tempting to be ignored. The fact that it showed, besides its new, pensive sensibility, a fuller use of the adornment of landscape, and that landscape under the sweet sadness of autumn, and a tendency to dwell on scenes she herself had visited in the past, seemed to make the book a most appropriate close to the full and brilliant period of her novel writing, and people said confidently that had she lived, her next novels would have showed a marked change from those written before 1816, and been altogether more on the lines suggested by
Persuasion
. With regard to the probable character of the final fragment, such critics had not only
Persuasion
from which to argue, but the undoubted fact that when she wrote it, Jane Austen was not ill only, but dying. It was most disconcerting of her to have written
Sanditon
.

For
Sanditon
is so brilliantly comic that were it not for the fact that, as ever, her characters are real men and women inhabiting a real world, one would describe it as a farce. Its mainspring, so far as the twelve chapters allow one to judge, is a case of
idée fixe
, dominating two members of the Parker family: Mr. Parker, a married man with four children, and his sister Diana. In Mr. Parker's case the ruling passion has

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found an outlet in the projection of a small watering-place on the immediate coastline, in front of the old village of Sanditon, which is to perpetuate the name, and to be a rival not only to every other speculator's mushroom of the kind, but to the established Sussex watering-places of Brighton and Eastbourne. The scheme had

become the motive for Mr. Parker's existence; he saw everything in terms of Sanditon, and the opening of the story establishes, not only the connection of one of the heroines with Sanditon, but the whole bent of Mr. Parker's mentality.

He and Mrs. Parker invite the eldest Miss Heywood to visit them at their house in Sanditon. In this young lady Jane Austen redeemed the promise she had lightly made to Cassandra, when she heard how

thorough-going Miss Charlotte Williams had been in her admiration of Chawton Cottage, of calling a heroine after her. Charlotte

Heywood, a sensible, attractive girl of twenty-two, is the character.

through whose eyes we have the first view of Sanditon and its

inhabitants.

On the way thither the carriage passes the old home of the Parkers, now let to another family, while the Parkers have established

themselves right up on the cliff in a new house, called Trafalgar House, "which by the by," said Mr. Parker, "I almost wish I had not named Trafalgar--for Waterloo is more the thing now. However,

Waterloo is in reserve--and if we have enough encouragement this year for a little crescent to be ventured on--(as I trust we shall) then we shall be able to call it Waterloo Crescent--and the name joined to the form of the buildings which always takes, will give us the command of lodgers.--In a good season, we should have more

applications than we could attend to."

Mr. Parker looks now with scorn on the old house, surrounded by trees and sheltered by a hill. "Our ancestors, you

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know, always built in a hole," he said; and when Mrs. Parker says wistfully that all the same they had been exceedingly happy there, and had never felt the high winds which in their new house almost rock their beds, her husband replies eagerly: "
We
have all the grandeur of the storm, with less real danger, because the wind, meeting with nothing to oppose or confine it around our house, simply rages and passes on--while down in this gutter--nothing is known of the state of the air below the tops of the trees--and the inhabitants may be taken totally unawares by one of those dreadful currents, which do more mischief in a valley when they
do
arise than an open country ever experiences in the heaviest gale."

The scene of Sanditon itself is more fully described than most of Jane Austen's localities. The old village stood at the foot of a hill,

"whose side was covered with the woods and enclosures of Sanditon House and whose height ended in an open down where the new

buildings might soon be looked for." The village "contained little more than cottages, but the spirit of the day had been caught, as Mr.

Parker observed with delight to Charlotte, and two or three of the best of them were smartened up with white curtains and 'Lodgings to Let'--and farther on, in the little green court of an old farm house, two females in elegant white were actually to be seen with their books and camp stools-and in turning the corner of the baker's shop, the sound of a harp might be heard through the upper casement."

Mr. Parker was delighted by all this, because if the village were attracting holiday-makers, what might not be expected from the hill?

"He anticipated an amazing season. At the same time last year (late in July), there had not been a single lodger in the village!--nor did he remember any during the whole summer, excepting one family of

children who

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came from London for sea air after the whooping cough, and whose mother would not let them be nearer the shore for fear of their tumbling in." As they ascend the hill, Jane Austen's curious aptitude for suggesting the atmosphere of the sea, which she had displayed in
Mansfield Park
and
Persuasion
, is exercised again. When they reached the top of the down, there appeared Trafalgar House, "a light, elegant building, standing on a small lawn with a very young plantation round it, about an hundred yards from the brow of a steep, but not very lofty cliff, and the nearest to it of every building, excepting one short row of smart-looking houses, called the Terrace, with a broad walk in front, aspiring to be the mall of the place. In this row were the best milliner's shop and the library--a little detached from it, the hotel and billiard-room.--Here began the descent to the beach, and to the bathing machines"; and when the travelers had been set down at Trafalgar House, and Mr. and Mrs.

Parker were being welcomed by their children, Charlotte, having been shown to her room, "found amusement enough in standing at her ample, Venetian window, and looking over the miscellaneous foreground of unfinished buildings, waving linen, and tops of

houses, to the sea, dancing and sparkling in sunshine and freshness."

There are many short passages where, with a sentence here and a reference there, Jane Austen calls up a vision of the concrete scene: the Devonshire valley of Barton, the Park at Rosings, the villages of Highbury and Uppercross, the bare fields about Winthrop; but

nowhere, not even in her descriptions of Portsmouth and Lyme

Regis, has she given so full-length a picture of visible surroundings.

This one is of particular interest historically, because, composed in 1817, it was an utterance of the time which regarded even

Brighthelmstone as of comparatively recent origin, and to those who

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know the olive-grey turf that is meant by Sussex Downs and who, from the Regency buildings of Brighton, white or butter-yellow, or the color of clotted cream, can visualize Trafalgar House and its neighboring terrace above that dancing, sparkling sea, the

description calls up a view startling in its bare elegance and fresh clarity.

It may have been that Jane Austen's correpondence with Mr. Clarke, the last of whose letters had been addressed to her from the Pavilion, had turned her thoughts towards Brighton and the speculating in seaside resorts. There is no actual record of her having been to one of the new watering places, or even to Brighton, Folkstone or

Eastbourne; she was of course familiar with Ramsgate, which,

prospering definitely as a seaside resort, would have been much nearer to the character at which Sanditon aimed than either

Southampton or Lyme Regis; it may be that the conception of

"projecting" a seaside resort had its origin in something she heard or saw between the years 1806 and 1809, when she was living at

Southampton.

The enthusiasm which made the really pleasant, guileless Mr. Parker transfer his house, his family, his custom and all his interests to Sanditon, in the attempt to nourish and force the plan into success, shows itself in the great Lady of the neighborhood, Lady Denham,

"born to wealth but not to education." She is the patron of a young niece and nephew, Sir Edward and Miss Denham, who live near her at Denham House, and has living with her on a visit of undefined length the girl whom we recognize as the other heroine, an

exceedingly impoverished but reserved and beautiful creature, tall, elegant and blue-eyed, called Clara Brereton. Lady Denham is far from being without goodness; she was, apparently, very kind to Clara; but with a mixture of vulgarity and shrewdness, she entirely saw through every attempt to

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court her because of her money, and at the same time enjoyed the power and influence her money enabled her to exert. She takes an immediate fancy to Charlotte, and after the latter has had a slight introduction to Lady Denham's nephew and niece, Lady Denham,

walking about the Terrace with her, begins to relate family matters to her, "with the excuse of one who felt that any notice from her was an honor, and communicative from the influence of the same conscious importance or a natural love of talking." Among other instances of her own sagacity and benevolence, she told Charlotte that when her husband had died, she had given Sir Edward his gold watch. "She said this with a look at her companion which implied its right to produce a great impression, and seeing no rapturous astonishment in Charlotte's countenance, added quickly: 'He did not bequeath it to his nephew, my dear--It was no bequest. It was not in the will. He only told me, and
that
but once, that he should wish his nephew to have his watch; but it need not have been binding if I had not chose it.'"

Lady Denham's designs were of a much more personal nature than Mr. Parker's, and when it was understood that two parties of visitors, a boarding school from Camberwell and a lady with a West Indian heiress under her care, were expected in Sanditon, she at once designed the heiress for her impecunious nephew, and of the pupils of the former she said: "Out of such a number, who knows but some may be consumptive and want asses' milk--and I have two milch

asses at this present time." When the West Indian young lady arrived, Lady Denham "made the acquaintance for Sir Edward's sake and the sake of her milch asses. How it might answer with regard to the baronet remained to be proved, but as to the animals, she soon found that all her calculations of profit would be vain." The young lady's guardian, Mrs. Griffiths, "would not allow Miss