The Jane Austen Handbook (19 page)

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, where her father was the parson. The seventh of eight children, and the younger of two girls, she showed an early talent for invention, writing short tales full of broad, violent humor as early as age twelve. She briefly attended two different girls’ boarding schools, but she received most of her education at home, with her father and brothers directing her reading from the volumes in the parsonage library. She was not denied “unladylike” material; she mentioned
Henry Fielding’s bawdy novel
Tom Jones
in one of her letters and wrote that the Austen family were “great novel readers and not ashamed of being so.”
Anne Lefroy, the wife of the rector of Ashe, a neighboring parish, was a mentor to young Jane. Madam Lefroy, as she was known, was a well-bred,
educated woman and the social leader of the neighborhood.

Surviving letters show that the 20-year-old Jane enjoyed the usual interests of a young woman: clothes, men, and dancing at balls. She engaged in a brief but apparently intense flirtation with law student Thomas Langlois Lefroy, Madam Lefroy’s nephew, in December 1795. Austen biographers disagree on the significance of this romance in Jane’s life. In a memoir by her nephew, the romance with Tom Lefroy was dismissed as unimportant except as proof that, like her heroines, Jane had felt the pangs of young love. Later biographers, however, considered it a watershed moment in her life. Lefroy family members recalled that Madam Lefroy sent Tom away, fearing that he had raised expectations in Jane that he had no intention of fulfilling. Tom married an heiress in 1799 and later became lord chief justice of Ireland.

Jane’s closest relationship throughout her life was with her sister Cassandra. Mrs. Austen told one of her granddaughters that “if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have hers cut off too.” In 1796, Cassandra’s fiancé,
Tom Fowle, went to the West Indies as a ship’s chaplain and died there of yellow fever. Cassandra took on the dress of a spinster, indicating her disinterest in marrying, and Jane followed her example.

Jane continued writing throughout her teens and early twenties.
Lady Susan
, a remarkable novella in letters with an ambitious and amoral title character, was composed in about 1795, and Jane also began her first full-length work that year, an epistolary novel that she titled
Elinor and Marianne
. The next year, she began another long work, called
First Impressions
. Mr. Austen thought so well of
First Impressions
that he wrote to offer it to the publisher
Thomas Cadell; the offer was declined. Jane set to work rewriting
Elinor and Marianne
in narrative form, and in 1798 began a novel she called
Susan
.

In 1801, Mr. Austen retired, and he and his wife and daughters moved to Bath. Legend has it that Jane fainted when she was told of the decision to move. Her letters show that she put on a brave face, but it is generally accepted among Austen scholars that she was unhappy in Bath.

During a visit to her friends Catherine and
Alethea Bigg at their father’s estate, Manydown Park, in December 1802, Jane received a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, the heir to the estate. Jane was not in love with Harris, nor he with her, but if she accepted him, Jane eventually would become the mistress of Manydown and could offer a home and security to her mother and sister. Jane accepted Harris’s proposal, but then rescinded her acceptance the next morning. A few months later, Jane made her first literary sale: the copyright of
Susan
to the publisher
Richard Crosby and Son for the princely sum of ten pounds (in modern amounts, about $750).

The Austens traveled to the seaside in the summer, and many years after Jane’s death, Cassandra Austen told her niece
Caroline Austen that Jane had attracted the admiration of a fine young man on one of these summer trips. He had inquired where they might be spending the next summer, and may have intended to renew the acquaintance and his attentions to Jane, which Cassandra hinted would have been successful. But they later heard the news of the young man’s sudden death. His name and the exact date and place of this romance by the sea are unfortunately lost.

In 1804, Jane began a novel that she called
The Watsons
, but she abandoned it around the time of her father’s death in 1805.
James Austen took over Mr. Austen’s position as the rector of Steventon, and, left with very little income, the Austen ladies were in difficult straits. The brothers each chipped in what they could afford for their support; nonetheless, the women were obliged to move several times within Bath in search of affordable lodgings until
Francis Austen and
his wife offered to share their house in Southampton. Martha Lloyd, one of Jane’s closest friends, came to live with them, having been left with no home and little money after the death of her mother. In 1808,
Edward Austen offered his mother a cottage in the Hampshire village of Chawton, part of one of the estates that he had inherited from a rich cousin. The ladies eagerly accepted and moved for the final time.

Jane’s genius flourished in the tranquil setting of Chawton. Mrs. Austen tended the garden, Cassandra kept house, and Martha oversaw the cooking, freeing Jane to spend most of her time writing. She revised
Elinor and Marianne
, retitling it
Sense and Sensibility
, and it was published by
Thomas Egerton in 1811. It was the current custom that if a book did not sell enough copies to cover the expense of publication, the author was responsible for repaying the publisher’s losses. Jane put away a little money in anticipation of such an expense, but her concern was unnecessary—the book sold well and received good reviews, and Jane was delighted to receive £140 in royalties (about $12,000 today). All of her novels were published anonymously;
Sense and Sensibility
carried only the information that it was written “by a lady.” Many of her family members were unaware of Jane’s authorship for several years.

Jane then set about revising
First Impressions
. A book had been published by that title in 1800, so she took a phrase from the final chapter of
Fanny Burney’s novel
Cecilia
for its title:
Pride and Prejudice
. She “lop’t and crop’t” the original manuscript, and based on the success of
Sense and Sensibility
, Egerton purchased the copyright for £110 (about $9,000). Jane embarked on the most creative period in her life as she set about working on an entirely new novel,
Mansfield Park
, in 1812, publishing it in 1814. Jane’s authorial skills had grown, and in
Mansfield Park
she addressed themes of morality and women’s position in society with more ambition and subtlety than in her first two books. She had a falling-out with Egerton
over the second edition, and her next book,
Emma
, was brought out by John Murray, publisher of Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

The increasing fame of Jane’s novels had lessened her anonymity, assisted by her brother Henry: Whenever he heard her novels praised, he proudly revealed the identity of the author, both amusing and exasperating his sister. Frank Austen, a naval officer, pointed out that using the names of some of his former ships in
Mansfield Park
might give away the authoress’s identity, and she seemed resigned to her growing fame, though never completely comfortable with it.

While Jane was in London tending to the proofs of
Emma
in 1815, Henry fell ill. One of the physicians who attended him also attended the Prince Regent and informed His Royal Highness, who was an admirer of Jane’s novels, that the author of
Pride and Prejudice
was in London. The Prince Regent ordered his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, to wait upon Miss Austen. Mr. Clarke not only showed Jane around the Regent’s opulent residence, Carlton House, but offered advice on the type of book she should write—advice that was politely rejected and privately mocked.

In the summer of 1815, Jane began composing her final completed novel,
The Elliots
. Late that year, she began to feel the first symptoms of what would be her fatal illness. Which disease she suffered is not known, though based on details in her letters and from family members, a twentieth-century physician diagnosed it as Addison’s disease, an ailment of the adrenal glands that can be secondary to tuberculosis. The symptoms include weakness and fatigue, weight loss, nausea and vomiting, low blood pressure, and vitiligo; today the disease is controlled with cortisone, but at that time there was no cure. Despite her increasing debility, Jane completed
The Elliots
in the summer of 1816 and wrote a few chapters of a new novel that she called
The Brothers
—now known as
Sanditon
—in early 1817, but abandoned work on it in March.
In May, Jane and Cassandra went to Winchester to seek medical advice. Jane did not respond to the treatment and died early in the morning of July 18, 1817. Henry Austen arranged to have her buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Jane left nearly all her small fortune to Cassandra, whom she made her literary executor. John Murray published the two remaining completed manuscripts, which Henry and Cassandra retitled
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
, as a four-volume set in 1818, including a short biographical notice by Henry naming Jane Austen as the author for the first time. Throughout the nineteenth century, she had admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. Before her death in 1845, Cassandra burnt most of her letters from Jane, keeping some that were bequeathed to various nieces and nephews, along with the notebooks containing the stories that Jane wrote as a young girl (known collectively as the juvenilia),
Lady Susan
, and the unfinished works.

In 1870, James Austen’s son, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published a memoir of his aunt using letters that still remained in the family’s possession and canvassing his sisters and cousins for their memories of Aunt Jane. The memoir is a touching and enjoyable read, and though the author’s esteem for his aunt is obvious, it nonetheless set the standard for the Victorian view of Jane Austen as a quiet spinster living a retired life and writing on her “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory.” In the 1920s, R. W. Chapman edited and annotated the novels and later the juvenilia and unpublished manuscripts, poetry, and other scraps for publication by Oxford University Press, marking the beginning of modern Austen scholarship.

Today, Jane Austen Societies flourish in the UK, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and there is a brisk trade in various editions of the novels, both scholarly and not, as well as fiction inspired by her novels and numerous film and television adaptations. Jane Austen’s
prominence in pop culture rises and falls, but she is always present. In
Mansfield Park
, she wrote that Shakespeare “is a part of an Englishman’s constitution”; today, Jane Austen is herself a cultural icon, and part of the constitution of Janeites everywhere.