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 JOHN M. OlM 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell Universrty Library 
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 Personal aspects o* Ja"^ Aus|en, 
 
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PERSONAL ASPECTS OF JANE AUSTEN 
 
Frontispiece] 
 
 \J. Zoffany, R.A., pinxii 
 
 Jane Austen. 
 
PERSONAL ASPECTS 
 
 OF 
 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 BY 
 MARY AUGUSTA AUSTEN-LEIGH 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ^:<'.'~'^'^ y 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 
TO ALL 
 TRUE LOVERS OF 
 JANE AUSTEN AND HER WORKS 
 THIS BOOK IS 
 
 DEDICATED - 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 I. 
 
 Introduction 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 Position 
 
 
 10 
 
 III. 
 
 Education— I 
 
 
 
 21 
 
 IV. 
 
 Education— II 
 
 
 
 41 
 
 V, 
 
 MOEALITY 
 
 
 
 63 
 
 VI. 
 
 ' Lady Susan ' 
 
 
 
 98 
 
 VII. 
 
 Parents and Children 
 
 
 
 III 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Appendix 
 
 
 
 133 
 
 IX. 
 
 Charades . 
 
 
 
 157 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Jane Austen (by J. Zoffany) . 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Steventon Rectory (front) 
 
 . to face page 12 
 
 Steventon Rectory (back) 
 
 24 
 
 Autographs .... 
 
 30 
 
 Chawton House 
 
 56 
 
 Chawton Cottage . 
 
 112 
 
 The Watch .... 
 
 161 
 
 The Young Girl of Spirit 
 
 167 
 
PERSONAL ASPECTS OF 
 JANE AUSTEN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Jane Austen was born at Steventon Rectory 
 in Hampshire on Saturday, December i6, 1775, 
 and died in Mrs. David's lodgings, College 
 Street, Winchester, on Friday, July 18, 1817, 
 in her forty-second year. 
 
 Little was known by the world in general 
 either of herself or of her surroundings for 
 many years after the latter date. She had 
 named her brother Henry as her literary 
 executor, and in six months' time he published 
 the two novels she had left in manuscript, 
 ' Northanger Abbey ' and * Persuasion ' (to 
 which he himself gave these titles), prefixing 
 to the former a short sketch of their author, 
 called a ' Biographical Notice of Jane Austen.' 
 
2 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The same 'Notice,' enlarged by a few addi- 
 tional paragraphs, appeared again in 1833, 
 when Mr. R. Bentley, who had acquired the 
 copyright of all her works, brought out a 
 complete edition of the novels, no other 
 edition being published during the first sixty- 
 four years that elapsed after her death. The 
 smallness of the print employed, ill-suited to 
 any but young and strong eyes, may in part 
 account for the slowness with which her fame 
 grew during that period. But though a 
 slow it was a sure growth, and with an 
 increase in the number of her readers came 
 an increased desire to know more details con- 
 cerning herself. 
 
 As curiosity on these points became 
 stronger, while the family remained silent, 
 it was not unnatural that in the absence of 
 definite information certain erroneous ideas 
 should be entertained, and some mistaken 
 statements made respecting herself, her home, 
 and her position and opportunities in life. 
 Reviewers were inclined to assume that her 
 outlook upon the world at large must have 
 been narrow and restricted to a small circle, 
 though chiefly, as it would seem, because they 
 themselves knew little about her beyond 
 
' MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN ' 3 
 
 the facts that she had been a daughter of the 
 Rector of Steventon, that she had lived in 
 the country, had never mixed in hterary 
 circles, and had died almost before reaching 
 middle age. Surprise would sometimes be 
 expressed as to how, under these disadvan- 
 tageous circumstances, it should have been 
 possible for her to paint the varied pictures 
 of human nature and give the accurate 
 descriptions of contemporary manners with 
 which her books were filled. Again, con- 
 jectures were made that these dealt with 
 one class of life only, that of the English 
 gentry, not from choice but from necessity, 
 because she had no knowledge of anything 
 beyond it. It was also reported that ' Jane 
 Austen was not fond of children ' — ^it was 
 left to a modem foreign critic to add that 
 ' She was not fond of animals.' 
 
 To some degree, though not entirely, these 
 mistaken ideas were dispelled when, in i86g, 
 the first ' Memoir of Jane Austen ' was 
 published by her nephew, the Rev. J. E. 
 Austen-Leigh. He had been the youngest 
 of the mourners at her funeral fifty years 
 earlier, and many friends, knowing how well 
 fitted he was to write a memoir of his aunt. 
 
4 INTRODUCTION 
 
 had in after years often begged him to under- 
 take this labour of love, which he for long 
 declined on the score that he had so little to 
 relate. In sa5ring this he was referring to his 
 own recollections of the aunt who died when 
 he himself had hardly reached manhood, and 
 to the scantiness of the records he possessed 
 concerning her. At last, however, he con- 
 sented to make an attempt, and, being much 
 assisted by the excellent memories of his two 
 sisters, Mrs. Lefroy and Miss Austen, he found 
 it possible to complete a ' Memoir of Jane 
 Austen.' This work must always hold a 
 unique position as containing the testimony 
 of those who well knew its subject and of 
 being absolutely authentic and faithful so far 
 as the biographer's memory, which was admir- 
 able, and those of his sisters could ensure 
 its perfect accuracy. It could not relate 
 that which none of them knew> respecting 
 the details of her earlier Ufe, nor could it 
 describe many facts given in letters not then 
 before him, to which later writers have had 
 access. 
 
 The book was rightfully named a ' Memoir,' 
 as his chief object was to record that which 
 he himself remembered. Readers would on 
 
ERRORS OF REVIEWERS 5 
 
 their side do well to bear in mind that his 
 recoUeetions ranged only from childhood- to 
 very early manhood, and that his Aunt Jane 
 could never have appeared to him as a 
 young person. When, therefore, he speaks of 
 her life as ' domestic ' or ' uneventful,' his 
 thoughts were going back only to the quiet 
 years she spent towards its close in her 
 home at Chawton. Of her earlier and gayer 
 experiences, he probably knew nothing, 
 and still less likely was it that, in spite 
 of their strong mutual affection, he should 
 haye any knowledge of the intimate and 
 private feelings of an aunt whose years, at 
 the time of her death, numbered more than 
 twice his own. 
 
 It is, perhaps, not surprising that con- 
 temporary reviewers of the ' Memoir ' should, 
 without sufficiently considering these cir- 
 cumstances, have caught up some of his 
 expressions and dwelt upon them, as though 
 they described the whole of her lifetime, 
 and not the latter part only. These writers 
 speak of her life as being ' uniform ' and 
 the circle of her experience ' narrow.' They 
 say ' her lifeworld presented a Umited ex- 
 perience.' ' It was a simple and uneventful, 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 monotonous life,' while one critic also gives 
 it as his opinion that ' the range of her 
 sympathies was narrow.' ' Miss Austen 
 lacks the breadth and depth of f eehng which 
 distinguished her great successor, George 
 Eliot.' Another says, ' a neat, natty, little 
 artist was Jane Austen,' and yet another, 
 ' When we compare her to George EUot the 
 reader will see at once the eminence on 
 which we place her.' 
 
 Such were some of the judgments passed 
 on Jane Austen half a century ago. 
 
 But a considerable amount of additional 
 information concerning her earlier Ufe and 
 its surroundings has now been acquired, of 
 which later biographers were able to avail 
 themselves. First in order came the ' Letters 
 of Jane Austen,' ^ published in 1884 by Lord 
 Braboume. The existence of these letters 
 was known to the writer of the ' Memoir,' 
 but he could not examine them, as their 
 owner, his cousin, was then too infirm to 
 undertake the labour of looking through 
 them and, without having done so, she did 
 not wish to place them in any other hands. 
 
 * Letters by Jane Austen, edited by Lord Braboume. 
 (Bentley & Son, 1884.) 
 
LETTERS TO HER FAMILY 7 
 
 They had been written by Jane to Cassandra, 
 and though of high value in supplying a 
 biographer with many facts, are yet a 
 peculiarly restricted selection, which should 
 never be taken as a specimen of her general 
 correspondence, having been spared by 
 Cassandra only in the full belief that they 
 contained nothing sufl&ciently interesting to 
 induce any future generation to give them 
 to the world. Since the publication of these 
 letters by Lord Braboume, other letters, 
 written by more distant branches of the 
 Austen family, have been recovered, which 
 bear upon the life at Steventon Rectory in 
 old days, and consequently upon that of 
 Jane herself. 
 
 Another book, giving some authentic 
 details of the same, deaUng principally with 
 the careers of her sailor brothers,^ was 
 published in 1916 by a great nephew and 
 niece. AH the fresh knowledge thus ac- 
 quired has been embodied in the latest ' Life 
 of Jane Austen,'" which was pubUshed in 
 
 1 Jftne Austen's Sailor Brothers, by J. H. Hubback 
 and Edith C. Hubback. (John Lane Co.) 
 
 2 Life and Letters of Jane Austen, by W. Austen-Leigh 
 and R. A. Austen-Leigh. (Smith, Elder & Co.) 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 1913 by a great nephew and a great, great 
 
 nephew. 
 
 So much fresh information having been 
 given to the world respecting Jane Austen's 
 youthful years since the publication of the 
 original ' Memoir,' which dealt almost wholly 
 with her later life, it certainly occasions 
 some surprise to find critics of the present 
 day apparently disregarding these later 
 biographies and reverting to the standpoint 
 of those writers who knew only the earUest, 
 Yet so it is. In a recently published book 
 we again hear of her ' narrow experience,' 
 and are told that she ' Uved aside from the 
 world,' also that ' concerning her personal 
 character and private interests we know 
 remarkably Uttle,' and that ' her life provided 
 even less variety of incident than she 
 discovered at Longboum or Uppercross,' 
 while the same writer states, in spite of all 
 evidence to the contrary, that ' her father 
 was not very much better educated and 
 scarcely more strenuous than his neighbours 
 — nor were there granted to her any of the 
 consolations of cultiure.' 
 
 Since it is still possible for an earnest and 
 acute student of her works to offer, as 
 
NEW INFORMATION "^9 
 
 ascertained facts, views of his own concerning 
 their writer which contain so many mis- 
 apprehensions, it may be well once more to 
 record a few simple truths about Jane 
 Austen's position, in life, her education, and 
 her choice of subjects as an author. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 POSITION 
 
 That Jane Austen should take as her field 
 of work one which, though far from bemg 
 narrow, was certainly definite, the fife, namely, 
 of the English gentry, was so natural as 
 hardly to require either remark or explana- 
 tion. It was the class to which her ancestors 
 had for some centuries belonged and with 
 which she had always associated. The 
 Austens of Steventon Rectory were descended 
 from many generations of Kentish Austens 
 who, arising Uke other county f amiUes from 
 the powerful clan of Clothiers, known in the 
 Middle Ages as the 'Gray coats of Kent,' 
 were, in the sixteenth century, settled as 
 landowners in two smaU and picturesque 
 old manor houses, Grovehurst and Broad- 
 ford, which still form part of the Austen 
 property, though the heads of the family 
 removed long ago to larger habitations and 
 
FAMILY HISTORY ii 
 
 increased possessions in the parish of Hors- 
 monden, near Sevenoaks, a neighbourhood 
 where the name of Austen has long been 
 known and held in honour. They were a 
 purely English family. No admixture of 
 Scottish, Irish, or foreign blood appears in 
 the pedigree of the Austens of Broadford, 
 which runs back to the close of the sixteenth 
 Century. 
 
 They were also a race accustomed to 
 prize both reUgion and education. On the 
 tomb of the wife of the first John Austen, 
 of Broadford (Joan Berry), in Horsmonden 
 Church, dated a.d. 1604, it is recorded that 
 she met her death ' often utteringe these 
 speeches, " Let neither husband nor children 
 nor lands nor goods separate me from my 
 God." ' A hundred years later another Mrs. 
 John Austen existed, whose name (Elizabeth 
 Weller) deserves to be held in perpetual 
 respect and esteem by her descendants. In 
 her portrait, taken when she was a blooming 
 young woman, she appears in brocade and 
 pearls, suitable to the wife of the heir to the 
 estate, and future Lady of the Manor. But 
 the latter position she never held, as her 
 husband died before his father, who, Uke 
 
12 POSITION 
 
 ' the old Gentleman ' in ' Sense and Sensi- 
 bility,' showed an exclusive care fou- his' 
 eldest grandson and heir, and, soon Ajdng 
 himself, left to his daughter-in-law the task 
 of bringing up on small means her remaining 
 five sons and a daughter. Without repining 
 at her want of fortune, she quickly set to 
 work to give them that which she thought 
 would best supply its absence, namely, 
 learning, and that they might receive a 
 sound classical education, she removed to 
 Sevenoaks, to send them as day-boys to its 
 old Grammar School, and to take some of 
 its masters as lodgers into her own house 
 as an assistance towards defraying the 
 expenses of her large family. She had her 
 reward in hving to see her daughter married 
 and all her sons estabhshed in difierent 
 professions. This brave woman was Jane 
 Austen's great grandmother, as her fourth 
 son, William, a surgeon in Tonbridge, became 
 the father of George Austen — ^he being the 
 first of the race to leave his native county 
 and make a home in Hampshire.^ 
 
 ' Cf. Chawton Manor and its Owners, by William 
 Austen-Leigh and Montagu George Knight, Chap. I. 
 (Smith, Elder & Co.) 
 
THE KENTISH AUSTENS 13 
 
 When he was s.ettled at Steventon, regular 
 communications with the relations he had 
 quitted in Kent were kept up. The Kentish 
 Austens had, naturally, formed many con- 
 nections by marriage with f amihes in their own 
 county, and when Jane, at the age of twelve, 
 had for the first time the deUght of going with 
 her parents and her sister into Kent, she 
 would make acquaintance with a number of 
 relations hitherto unknown to her excepting 
 <^y name— an epoch in hf e to a girl of that age, 
 gifted with strong family instincts and quick 
 power of observation. It is due to the corre- 
 spondence maintained between the Hampshire 
 and the Kentish cousins that various facts 
 relating to the period of Jane Austen's girl- 
 hood were not long ago discovered by one 
 of the authors of * Life and Letters.' 
 
 None of these early letters were written 
 by Jane herself, but in later hfe it Was her 
 custom to write many to relations at a 
 distance, thus acting up to a remark she 
 once made to a niece, * I like cousins to be 
 cousins, and interested in one another.' 
 
 This hereditary interest was also felt 
 to the full towards the maternal side of 
 the house, where the young George Austens' 
 
14 POSITION 
 
 descent was of an interesting and varied 
 character. Mrs. George Austen had been 
 Cassandra Leigh, one of the Leighs of Addle- 
 strop in Gloucestershire, an elder branch of 
 the Leighs of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, 
 to which property they succeeded when the 
 junior Une died out. AU came from the 
 family of Leighs, who were settled at High- 
 leigh in Cheshire from the date of the Norman 
 Conquest. Early in the reign of Henry VIII 
 one of these, Thomeis Leigh, came when a 
 lad to seek his fortune in London. In this 
 quest he was highly successful and was 
 knighted by Queen Elizabeth, being Lord 
 Mayor of London in the year of- her accession, 
 1557. As such he had the honour of 
 receiving her and preceding her, carrying 
 the sceptre before her Grace when she first 
 entered the City to take up her residence 
 at the Tower. He also bore a leading part 
 in the ceremonies of her Coronation in the 
 following year. Romantic incidents and 
 stirring events belong to the history of Sir 
 Thomas Leigh's descendants, who must have 
 possessed much determination, strength of 
 character, and keen sense of humour. They 
 were also noted for inflexible loyalty to the 
 
TH^E • LQYAL LEIGHS ' 15 
 
 House of Stuart through every change of 
 fortune that befell its monarchs. When 
 Charles I was on his inarch to Nottingham, 
 there to set up the Royal "Standard, he found 
 DU reaching Coventry that the gates of that 
 city were closed against him by order of the 
 Mayor. On this he rode off to Stoneleigh 
 A.bbey, where he and his escort were hospitably 
 received by the reigning Sir Thomas Leigh, a 
 grandson of the original Sir Thomas. Again, 
 in 1745 apartments were prepared in the 
 A.bbey which, it was hoped, that Charles 
 Edward would occupy for at least one night ; 
 but he was not destined to enjoy such com- 
 fortable quarters in England, and very for- 
 tunate beyond a doubt was it for the Leighs 
 that he retreated without reaching the mid- 
 land counties. To Jane Austen, who was, 
 is will be shown fiurther on, a most worthy 
 iescendant of the ' loyal Leighs,' every story 
 3r relic connected with these historic 
 nemories of the Stuarts must have been 
 ieeply interesting, when she spent some 
 :ime at Stoneleigh Abbey in August 1804 ; 
 md greatly indeed would her delight have 
 been increased could she have beheld a 
 remarkable family treasure which the house 
 
i6 POSITION 
 
 then contained, the very existence of which 
 was at that time unknown, and so remained 
 for another twenty years. It was in 1827 
 that Sir George Beaumont, well known as a 
 connoisseur in art, when examining a flower- 
 piece in oils at Stoneleigh Abbey, detected 
 what appeared to be a human eye looking 
 at him from amongst the flowers. On further 
 examination it was ascertained that these 
 had been thinly painted over another picture, 
 and whenthey were removed a fine portrait 
 of Charles I by Vandyke came to light. 
 This method of concealment, adopted no 
 doubt to save the picture from the thrust 
 of some Parliamentary pikestaff, had proved 
 so effectual that not even a tradition of the 
 portrait had survived. It must have lain 
 hidden for nearly two centuries until chance, 
 as in the case of ' The Bride of the Mistletoe 
 Bough,' revealed the long-kept secret, and 
 the fine painting, happier in fortune than 
 the ill-fated bride, emerged again in all its 
 pristine beauty. Stuart monarchs have been 
 accused of ingratitude towards their followers, 
 but here, on the contrary, it is, a pleasant, 
 as well as a probable, theory that the portrait 
 was sent to Sir Thomas Leigh in token of 
 
BATH 17 
 
 the gratitude felt by a King who had beeti 
 sheltered by him in a time of need. 
 
 It was through her Leigh relations that 
 Jane became, while still young, well ac- 
 quainted with Bath. Cassandra Austen's 
 brother, James Leigh (Perrot), himself a 
 man of good fortime, had married a well- 
 endowed lady, Miss Cholmeley, from Lincoln- 
 shire. They possessed a country home in 
 Berkshire, and had also, as a winter residence, 
 a house in Bath, No. i. Paragon, commanding 
 a lovely and extensive view. There they 
 lived as people of fashion and fortune in the 
 later years of the eighteenth century, and parts 
 of beautiful old costumes worn by them 
 still exist to show how brilliant must have 
 been the scenes then presented by the gay 
 world of Bath. The Leigh Perrots, who 
 were childless, received their Steventon 
 relations as visitors, and the eldest of Cas- 
 sandra's sons was generally looked upon as 
 his uncle's natural heir. 
 
 Through circumstances which befel her 
 next brother, Edward (Knight), Jane had 
 again a fresh and a wide view of English 
 society opened to her observation, Edward 
 had been adopted, while still a young boy, 
 
i8 POSITION 
 
 by another childless couple, Mr. and Mrs. 
 Thomas Knight, who were cousins on the 
 Austen side of the house, and possessors of 
 large properties both in Hampshire and in 
 East Kent. It was in the latter neighbour- 
 hood that Edward married and settled, at 
 first in a home of his own, whence he removed 
 after Mr. Knight's death to the large house 
 and beautiful estate of Godmersham Park, 
 near Canterbury, and in East Kent, Jane, as 
 a young woman, began to visit her brother 
 Edward and his family. Visits, like the 
 journeys that led to them, were in those 
 days long affairs, and hers must have afforded 
 ample time as well as opportunity to mix 
 in the society of that neighbourhood, 
 where she could observe EngUsh county life 
 from a fresh point of view, and could compare 
 it with the corresponding class of society 
 she already knew weU in Hampshire around 
 St event on. The share taken in the latter 
 by the George Austens has been thus described 
 by the author of the original ' Memoir.' 
 He says : ' Their situation had some pecuhar 
 advantages beyond those of ordinary 
 rectories. St event on was a family living. 
 Mr. Knight, the patron, was also proprietor 
 
LIFE AT STEVENTON 19 
 
 )f nearly the whole parish. He never resided 
 ;here and, consequently, the rector and his 
 children came to be regarded in the neigh- 
 jourhood as a kind of representatives of the 
 amily. They shared with the principal 
 :enant the command of an excellent manor 
 md enjoyed, in this reflected way, some of 
 :he consideration usually awarded to landed 
 jroprietors. They were not rich, but, aided 
 3y Mr. Austen's powers of teaching, they 
 lad enough to afford a good education to 
 :heir sons and daughters, to mix in the best 
 jociety in the neighbourhood, and to exercise 
 I Uberal hospitality to their own relations and 
 xiends. A carriage and pair of horses were 
 sept. . . . The horses probably, like Mr. 
 Bennet's, were often employed in farm work.' 
 From the foregoing account it will be 
 evident that to place, as has been done by 
 I recent critic, Jane Austen and Charlotte 
 Bronte together in one sentence, as both 
 living aside from the world,' is entirely 
 wide of the mark. Beyond the facts that 
 their fathers were clergymen and that both 
 ived in* the country, no resemblance what- 
 ever can be discovered in their situations, 
 ivhich were as unlike as were their several 
 
20 POSITION 
 
 characters. No counterpart to the isolation 
 and sadness of Haworth Rectory could be 
 found in the happy and sociable atmosphere 
 of the Rectory at Steventon. Her nephew, 
 who well knew those of whom he wrote, 
 says in his original ' Memoir ' : ' There can 
 be no doubt that the general colouring of 
 Jane Austen's early Ufe was bright. She 
 lived with indulgent parents in a cheerful 
 home, which afforded an agreeable variety 
 of society.' Jane, like most young girls, 
 thoroughly enjoyed the gaieties of the neigh- 
 bourhood around her, of which dancing 
 formed a great" feature. Her brother Heniy 
 says : ' She was fond of dancing and excelled 
 in it.' It may be remembered that nearly 
 all her heroines shared in this taste — even 
 the timid Fanny feeling that a ball ' was 
 indeed delightful.' That Jane Austen was 
 in every way well fitted to write of the Uves 
 and feelings of EngHsh gentle-people is not 
 to be questioned, nor that this would be a 
 determining factor in directing her imagina- 
 tion towards such a field of work. It is 
 not, however, a pro6f, as may be shown later, 
 that there was none other at her command 
 had she thought well to choose it. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 EDUCATION— I 
 
 Cassandra and Jane Austen, while still 
 children, must have had a larger acquaintance 
 with the world than can usually fall to the 
 lot of such young girls. Space was probably 
 needed within their own home for the 
 reception of George Austen's pupils, and his 
 little daughters, at the ages of nine and 
 six, were sent to be educated elsewhere, not, 
 as we are told, because it was supposed that 
 Jane at six years old required very much 
 education, but because it would haVe broken 
 her heart to be separated from Cassandra. 
 The sisters, therefore, went together to 
 Oxford, there to be placed under the care 
 of Mrs. Cawley, who was a connection of 
 their mother and the widow of a Principal 
 of Brasenose College ; a lady of whom no 
 record remains beyond the fact that she was 
 a stiff - mannered person. Mrs. Cawley 
 
22 EDUCATION 
 
 removed after a time to Southampton,^ and 
 by so doing very nearly put an end to Jane's 
 short existence, for in that town both she 
 and Cassandra fell very ill of what was then 
 called ' putrid fever,' and Jane's life was at 
 one time despaired of. Mrs. Cawley would 
 not at first write word of this iUness to 
 Steventon Rectory, but Jane Cooper, the 
 Uttle girls' cousin, who was one of the party, 
 thought it right to do so, an action which 
 was probably instrumental in saving the life 
 of Jane. Mrs. Austen at once set off for 
 Southampton together with her sister, Mrs. 
 Cooper, and they brought with them a 
 remedy, to the use of which Jane's recovery 
 was ascribed. But a heavy price had to be 
 paid for this blessing. Poor Mrs. Cooper 
 took the infection herself and died at Bath, 
 whither she went on quitting Southampton. 
 Such a tragical time must have remained 
 fixed in any child's memory, and in the 
 delirium and distress of Marianne Dashwood, 
 when lying dangerously ill at Cleveland, 
 also of a ' putrid fever,' and also awaiting 
 the arrival of a mother, we probably hear 
 an echo of poor little Jane's delirious 
 entreaties for her own mother, when lying 
 
AT SCHOOL AT READING 23 
 
 equally ill in the strange world of South- 
 ampton. 
 
 The next experience of the sisters was of 
 a happier nature. They and their cousin, 
 Jane Cooper, spent two years in the kindly 
 Abbey School at Reading, with its beautiful 
 garden and picturesque old buildings. From 
 all accounts, discipline here was not of a 
 rigid order, for when their brother and 
 cousin, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper, 
 were passing through Reading Cassandra 
 and the two Janes were allowed to dine with 
 them at an inn in the town. A charming 
 fancy drawing of this happy young party 
 has been made by Miss Ellen Hill.^ When, 
 therefore, these early adventures in search 
 of education came to an end and the sisters 
 returned to continue their lessons at home, 
 it must have been with imaginations already 
 enriched by some acquaintance with the 
 three old towns of Oxford, Southampton, and 
 Reading. 
 
 At Steventon they would not suffer from 
 any want of competent teachers. Basing- 
 stoke was near enough to furnish whatever 
 
 1 Jane Austen : her Homes and her Friends, by 
 Constance Hill. (J. Lane,) 
 
24 EDUCATION 
 
 occasional instructions might be needed 
 from masters, such as Elizabeth Bennet told 
 Lady Catherine could always be had at 
 Longboum for those who desired them. 
 But the most valuable and solid part of their 
 mental training they must have received in 
 their own home, where they would find 
 excellent opportunities for studying English 
 literature and language under their father, 
 who ceased by degrees to take private pupils 
 into his house, and would, therefore, have 
 sufficient leisure for teaching his own 
 cluldfen. The recent critic who spoke of 
 him £LS being probably ' not very much 
 better educated, and scarcely more strenuous 
 than his neighbours ' makes an entire 
 mistake. George Austen had won an open 
 scholarship and fellowship at St. John's 
 College, Oxford, and had been for a time a 
 master at his own former school, Tonbridge, 
 before returning again to reside at St. John's 
 as an Oxford Don. In later Ufe he prepared 
 two of his sons for matriculation at the same 
 College, and one of these has thus written of 
 him, with especial reference to the. education 
 he gave to Jane. ' Being not only a profound 
 Scholar, but possessing an exquisite taste in 
 every species of Literature, it is not wonderful 
 

 i 
 
 p 
 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 O 
 U 
 
 C/1 
 
GEORGE AUSTEK 25 
 
 that his daughter Jane should at a very early 
 age have become sensible of the charms of 
 style and enthusiastic in the cultivation of 
 her own language.' We may, perhaps, allow 
 for a little fiUal exaggeration here, but we 
 should also remember that it is first-hand 
 evidence, coming from one of George Austen's 
 own pupils. That he would be a kind and 
 welcome instructor is certain from the way 
 in which Jane afterwards recalls his strong 
 affection for his family, his ' indescribable 
 tenderness as a father,' and * the sweet, 
 benevolent smile which always distinguished 
 him.' To learn of such a teacher must have 
 been a constant pleasure, and she had 
 another assistant at hand in her eldest 
 brother James, himself a classical scholar 
 and a cultivated man, of whom his son, the 
 author of the original ' Memoir,' thus writes : 
 ' He was well read in English Uterature, had 
 a correct taste, and wrote readily and happily 
 both in prose and verse. He was more than 
 ten years older than Jane and had, I believe, 
 a large share in directing her reading and 
 forming her taste.' He was also a good 
 French scholar, spending some months in 
 France to perfect himself in the language. 
 
26 EDUCATION 
 
 Perhaps Jane remembered this brother's 
 assistance when she made Edmund Bertram 
 perform the same kind offices for his Httle 
 cousin, Fanny Price. 
 
 One ghmpse of Jane at her lessons has 
 been spared to us by time and may be found 
 in her own handwriting in an old copy of 
 Oliver Goldsmith's ' History of England.' 
 From internal evidence, she must have been 
 reading it for the first time, with an excited 
 interest that would recall Marianne Dash- 
 wood's enthusiastic soul rather than Catherine 
 Morland's indifference to history, where she 
 found ' the men all so bad, and hardly any 
 women at all.' Jane's age can only be 
 guessed at, but from the nature of the remarks 
 she inscribes on the margin of. this work, 
 twelve or thirteen years seems a probable 
 time of life for her to have then reached. It 
 was the History of the Rebellion that stirred 
 her loyal soul to its depths. At first she 
 contents herself with these short interjections 
 on the behaviour of Cromwell's party — 
 
 ' Oh ! Oh ! The Wretches ! ' 
 but she grows eloquent when Goldsmith 
 deUvers his verdict against the whole family 
 of Stuart, and cries out in answer — 
 
JANE AUSTEN AS A CRITIC 27 
 
 ' A family who were always ill-used, BE- 
 TRAYED OR NEGLECTED, whose virtues 
 are seldom allowed, while their errors are never 
 forgotten.' 
 
 It is perhaps fortunate— in case some 
 destructive critic should arise in the future 
 to declare the improbabiUty of Jane Austen 
 having written any such words — that a 
 postscript has been added to this note by a 
 sympathetic young nephew, into whose pos- 
 session the book afterwards passed : ' Bravo, 
 Aunt Jane ! Just my opinion of the case.' 
 
 At the conclusion of Walpole's speech her 
 remark is slightly ironical — 
 
 ' Nobly said ! Spoken like a Tory ! ' 
 And, again, when Goldsmith refers to the King 
 as a Master unworthy of faithful followers, 
 come these words — 
 
 ' Unworthy, because he was a Stuart, I 
 suppose — unhappy family ! ' 
 
 Lord Balmerino's execution in 1745 is thus 
 lamented — 
 
 ' Dear Balmerino ! I cannot express what 
 I feel for you ! ' 
 
 On the subsequent change in the dress of 
 the Highlanders she writes — 
 
 ' / do not like this. Every ancient custom 
 
28 EDUCATION 
 
 ought to he Sacred, unless it is prejudicial to 
 Happiness.' 
 
 Next comes a very sapient announcement. 
 Goldsmith having condemned those who were 
 ' Stunning mankind with a cry of Freedom,' 
 Jane thus addresses him— 
 
 ' My Dear Mr. G — , / have lived long enough 
 in the world to know that it is always so.' 
 
 Here she was probably thinking of the 
 French Revolution, in which all at Steventon 
 had a special reason for taking very deep 
 interest. 
 
 She did not approve of Anne leaving her 
 father's cause to side with her brother-in-law, 
 and, being unwilling to blame any Stuart, finds 
 her own way out of the dilemma — 
 
 ' Anne should not have done so, indeed I 
 do not believe she did.' 
 
 In writing of James II's obstinate adhe- 
 rence to his own poUcy, Goldsmith refers it to 
 this King's conviction that ' nothing could in- 
 jure schemes calculated to promote the cause 
 of heaven,' on which Jane observes — 
 
 ' Since he acted upon such motives he ought 
 not to be blamed.' 
 
 It must be left to those critics who have 
 described Jane Austen's disposition as ' calm'. 
 
MUSIC AND ART 29 
 
 as ' unemotional,' ' unsentimental,' ' passion- 
 less,' to reconcile such epithets with these 
 eager outpourings, which are given here for 
 the benefit of aU who may care to form some 
 truer conception of the real Jane than the 
 tame and colourless personality, devoid of 
 aU enthusiasm and ardour, which has at times 
 been set before the public as hers, though 
 something better than this might, one would 
 think, have been divined from the characters 
 of her favourite heroines, Emma Woodhouse 
 and Elizabeth Bennet, neither of whom can 
 well be decried as wanting in high spirit or 
 liveliness of nature. 
 
 Of Jane's accomplishments in music and 
 drawing we know little more than can be 
 found in her brother's notice. He says : 
 ' She had not only an excellent taste for 
 drawing, but in her earlier days evinced 
 great power of hand in the management of 
 the pencil.- She was a warm and judicious 
 admirer of landscape, both in nature and 
 on canvas. At a very early age she was 
 enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque, 
 and she seldom changed her opinion either 
 on books or men.' None of her efforts 
 in drawing have survived, though a few of 
 
30 EDUCATION 
 
 Cassandra's slight water-colour portraits stUl 
 exist, and also some pencil sketches taken 
 by others of the family, showing that a 
 general love of drawing existed amongst them, 
 in which Jane very probably shared. Her 
 delight in beautiful scenery was so great 
 that she thought it must hereafter form one 
 of the joys of heaven. As regards music, 
 her brother says she 'held her own musical 
 attainments extremely cheap.' They were, 
 of course, not remarkable, but she was the 
 most musical of an unmusical family, and 
 a niece, when writing of her, says she had a 
 natural taste for music. A manuscript music 
 book of hers is stiU preserved at Chawton, 
 containing, in exquisitely fine writing, some 
 of the songs she used to sing. 
 
 How large a share Mrs. Austen may 
 have taken in the intellectual part of her 
 daughters' education we do not know, but she 
 may no doubt be credited with the charge 
 of two important departments — writing and 
 needlework. She herself wrote an admirable 
 hand, both powerful and interesting, rivalling, 
 though not much resembling, that of her 
 daughter Jane, the beauty of whose writing 
 many of her readers know. Jane herself 
 
,r„^,^/,. Aa.,-/^Y ■'/ '^''■'■•'■^"■■ ■'■^'' -^ 'l ///^/^r^rr/ 
 
 r 
 
 -t--- K- Z/^.y /fv/yf/-. 
 
 ~T~ 
 
 f^-- ■■ t^''if ' ^ti 
 
 ^y^^'r-'.'^^.^ Ay i^.cjl.tt_jy.cs^ .jgS^^-^ ^ ' ' -/ay r'- ^^, <>^<^ 
 
 ,.>^. 
 
 
 -l^-Jt 
 
 /a,,. , i..r--Z^ 
 
 .£.Z^^^.„-' ^^^t//': 
 
 
 1 *^ // ^ ~ " — ^ ** f-' 
 
 'I 
 
 
 30] From the Steventon Register. 
 
 1. Written out by Jane Austen and signed by laer Father, 1800. 
 
 2. Written out and signed by her Father, 1776. 
 
WRITING AND NEEDLEWORK 31 
 
 looked upon good handwriting as an art to 
 be carefully cultivated. She alludes to it 
 more than once in her notes to a Httle niece, 
 Caroline Austen, and of her nephew Edward 
 Austen's writing she says : ' I am quite happy 
 to see how his hand is improving. I am 
 convinced that it will end in a very gentle- 
 manlike hand, much above Par. ' Good writing 
 was general in Jane's home, and those who 
 study caligraphy as a key to character might 
 be interested by finding signs of imagination, 
 grace of mind, and other pleasant qualities 
 repeated in the various scripts. 
 
 Good needlework was in their time an 
 accomplishment of great importance in every 
 household, and this their mother would 
 certainly teach them, for she was herself 
 a proficient in it even to the close of a 
 very long life, and her daughters were 
 her imitators. The only time Jane ever 
 bestows serious ^praise upon a performance 
 of her own is when she writes word from 
 Rowling, her brother Edward's first home 
 in Kent, that they are ' all very busy making 
 shirts, and I am proud to say that I am the 
 neatest worker of the party.' No one who 
 has seen the specimens of her needlework 
 
32 EDUCATION 
 
 which still exist can doubt that the praise 
 was well deserved. One of these, which 
 looks as if it were fashioned by fairy fingers, 
 is a tiny housewife containing needles an 
 inch in length, made for a friend by Jane 
 at the age of seventeen. Another, belonging 
 to later years, is a scarf of Indian muslin, 
 two and a half yards long, embroidered 
 throughout in white satin stitch, its delicate 
 beauty being unmarred by a single fault.^ 
 Equally industrious was she in humbler 
 tasks. Her niece Anna has written of her 
 aunts as constantly sitting together, making 
 clothes for the poor, and varying their occu- 
 pation by here and there teaching a boy or 
 girl to read, Jane very probably instructing 
 a god-daughter of her own, whose father was 
 coachman to her brother James Austen.^ 
 
 Let those who have done the same declare 
 whether this shows any interest in their 
 poorer neighbours or not! Yet a foreign 
 
 ^ The pattern of this scarf has been produced on the 
 covers of Miss HUl's book, and also been carved on 
 the oaken margin surrounding the tablet which was 
 erected through their exertions on the wall of Chawton 
 Cottage, in 1917, to commemorate the Centenary of 
 Jane Austen's death. 
 
 ^ See Miss HiU's book, Chap. I. 
 
SYMPATHY WITH THE POOR 33 
 
 admirer of her works has not hesitated to 
 charge her with indifference to the needs 
 of the poor, with visiting them as seldom 
 as possible, and with never doubting that 
 they had been created in order that they 
 might serve and respect ' their betters,' 
 adding ' Grief and poverty shock her, as 
 offensive to her taste, things which she 
 forgets as quickly as possible,' and ' she 
 always turns away from suffering, sadness, 
 and ugliness.' Of such a character could 
 it ever have been said that ' to know her 
 was to love her ? ' The only train of thought 
 in this critic's mind appears to be, ' She did 
 not write of the poor, and therefore she did 
 not care for them.' Jane has, however, left 
 an unconscious contradiction of such imputa- 
 tions on the margin of her Goldsmith, who 
 in one place has described the extreme 
 destitution of the poorer classes after th^ 
 Revolution, in consequence of which a man 
 and his wife committed suicide. On this 
 her comment is ready — 
 
 ' How much are the poor to he pitied, and 
 the Rich to be Blamed ! ' 
 
 The baseless accusation that she always 
 turned away from whatever was sad, 
 
34 EDUCATION 
 
 unpleaisant, or painful, cannot be allowed to 
 pass unnoticed. One simple instance to the con- 
 trary (among many) is described in a family 
 letter. During their residence at Chawton 
 Cottage a general outbreak of measles took 
 place among the Frank Austens, who were 
 at the time inhabiting the Great House. As 
 some rehef to the overworked nurses at 
 the House, Miss Gibson, a sister of Mrs. 
 Frank Austen, who was one of the party, 
 was invited over to the Cottage to have 
 her attack of measles there, and Mrs. Austen, 
 in a letter to her grand-daughter Anna, thus 
 smns up the result : ' She wanted a great 
 deal of good nursing, and a great deal of 
 good nursing she had,' the nurses being 
 Cassandra, Jane, and their friend Martha 
 Lloyd. Anna, when recording this incident 
 merely adds : ' It was their quiet way of 
 doing great kindnesses.' Jane's powers as 
 a nurse were more severely tried some years 
 later when for many weeks she attended on 
 her brother Henry in an illness in London 
 of which he nearly died. 
 
 In returning to the question of early 
 education, it must be pointed out that in 
 the acquisition ot foreign languages the 
 
FOREIGN LANGUAGES 35 
 
 daughters of Steventon Rectory were un- 
 usually fortunate, often having an excellent 
 teacher of the same resident for long periods 
 together under its hospitable roof. This 
 was their own first cousin on the paternal 
 side, the Comtesse de FeuilUde, Elizabeth 
 Hancock by birth, who in later Ufe became 
 theif-sister-in-law. She was grQatly attached 
 to the faiiiily at Steventon, especially to 
 her Uncle George, and she with her mother 
 spent much time at the Rectory before she 
 was taken by the latter to finish her educa- 
 tion in Paris, where in 1781 she married a 
 French nobleman, Jean Capotte Comte de 
 FeuUlide. She was a lovely and accom- 
 pUshed young woman, who went out much 
 into gay and high society both in Paris and 
 in London. Her husband's estates were 
 situated in the south of France, and thither 
 she at one time travelled, making in the 
 course of the summer an expedition across 
 the Pyrenees to take part in the gaieties of 
 the beautiful watering place, Bagneres de 
 Bigorre, on their further side. The affec- 
 tionate .and regular correspondence she main- 
 tained with her EngUsh relations does not 
 seem to have been diminished by these 
 
36 EDUCATION 
 
 foreign experiences, and when politiceil 
 thunderclouds gathered over France the 
 Comte dispatched her, with her infant son, 
 to England, to find a safe refuge in Steventon 
 Rectory, where she frequently resided in 
 the dark days that were to follow, both 
 before and after the unfortunate Comte 
 perished on the scaffold in February, 1794. 
 
 It was probably in part to Elizabeth that 
 her younger cousins owed their easy 
 famiharity with the French language, and 
 also some knowledge of Italian ; as much, 
 we may suppose, as Anne Elliot owns to in 
 ' Persuasion.' Whatever the amount may 
 have been, Jane was tolera;bly certain, like 
 Anne, to have decried, as far as possible, 
 her own personal share in it. But when 
 she describes herself, long afterwards, to 
 Mr. Clarke, the Regent's Librarian, as one 
 who ' knows only her mother tongue and 
 has read httle in that,' and as 'the most 
 unlearned and uninformed female who ever 
 dared to be an authoress,' she is indulging 
 in a flight of fancy and self-depreciation 
 unusual even for her. It may have formed 
 the foundation for a strange statement made 
 by a modem critic that ' if she was fond of 
 
KNOWLEDGE OF LITERATURE 37 
 
 reading, she knew nothing about literature. 
 Her letters do not suggest the uneasiness 
 attached to the possession of a soul — as we 
 modems understand it.' The connection of 
 these sentences is not very easy to follow, as 
 a large number of persons who certainly 
 know nothing of hterature still beUeve them- 
 selves to possess ' a sotil,' as that word is 
 usually tmderstood. But the ' modem soul ' 
 appears to belong to some distinct order of 
 its own, and .thankfid may we be that Jane 
 Austen did not possess its ' imeasiness,' 
 for had she done so, we could never have 
 possessed works such as those she has left 
 to the world. Once more, respecting her 
 knowledge of literature, neither here, nor 
 on any similar occasion, is she to be taJcen 
 at her own valuation. Not only was this 
 honestly a low one, but it suited her playful 
 turn of mind to describe her attainments 
 (excepting in needlework) as even lower 
 than she beUeved them to be. Thus, when 
 assuring Mr. Clarke of her inabihty to produce 
 a romance on the whole House of Coburg, 
 the spirit of nonsense evidently rose up 
 within her at the idea, making her add that 
 if, on pain of death, she were forbidden to 
 
38 EDUCATION 
 
 laugh at herself or- other people, she would 
 certainly be hung before she had finished the 
 first chapter. Mr. Clarke may or may not 
 have been capable of a smile here — it must 
 remain doubtful — for there have evidently 
 been other persons of a later date quite 
 unable to perceive when the writer is in- 
 dulging in the welcome luxury of a pleasant 
 Uttle jest against herself. Her brother's 
 account is altogether different. He says: 
 ' Her reading was very extensive in history 
 and belles-lettres, and her memory extremely 
 tenacious. HeY favourite moral writers were 
 Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse. It 
 is difficult to say at what age she was not 
 intimately acquainted with the merits and 
 defects of the best essa3rs and novels in 
 the EngHsh language.' 
 
 The predominance given to Crabbe 
 amongst Jane Austen's favourite writers 
 by various annotators is rather singular. It 
 has been due to her joke against herself, 
 preserved by family tradition, and mentioned 
 in the original ' Memoir,' that ' she thought 
 she could fancy marrying Mr. Crabbe,' and 
 on the certain knowledge that she enjoyed 
 his works. But this was no exclusive enjoy- 
 
THE HOME CIRCLE 39 
 
 ment, and he has no place among the poets, 
 passages from whose works appear in con- 
 nection with her own heroines. Of these 
 there are a considerable number. Cowper 
 was read by Marianne DashAYood and Fanny 
 Price, the former declaring that his ' beauti- 
 ful lines have frequently driven me almost 
 mad.' Anne EUiot studied and discussed 
 Scott and Byron, and in the laughing choice 
 of passages from the poets supposed to have 
 assisted in developing Catherine Moriand's/^' 
 mind. Pope, Gray, Thomson, and Shakespeare 
 have a place. 'Hamlet' was read aloud in 
 Mrs. Dashwood's drawing-room, and Henry 
 Crawford assumes that a knowledge of 
 Shcikespeaxe is instinctively imbibed from 
 the atmosphere of every educated household. 
 A fairly wide acquaintance with EngUsh 
 poets is thus incidentally shown by her 
 writings, but of Crabbe we only hear that 
 his ' Tales ' lay among the books on Fanny 
 Price's table. 
 
 A pleasant picture of the home circle 
 to which Jane belonged while still a child, 
 as it appeared to a visitor in the house, 
 exists in a family manuscript, written by a 
 Mrs. Thomas Leigh, who speaks of her cousin 
 
40 EDUCATION 
 
 Cassandra as being the wife of ' the truly 
 respectable Mr. Austen,' and says : ' With 
 his sons (all promising to make figures in 
 life) Mr. Austen educates a few youths of 
 chosen friends and acquaintances. When 
 among this Liberal Society, the simplicity, 
 hospitaUty, and taste which commonly prevail 
 in different famiUes among the dehghtful 
 valleys of Switzerland ever occurs to my 
 memory.' ^ 
 
 ^ An Old Family History, by the Hon. Agnes Leigh,' 
 National Review, April, 1907. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EDUCATION— II 
 
 The general love of literature that prevailed 
 in Steventon Rectory is a sufficient security 
 that Jane could not suffer from any in- 
 tellectual poverty in her home. In the 
 broader aspects of the word ' education,' she 
 was also fortunately placed. The thoughts 
 of her family were bounded by no narrow 
 horizon. They had private as well as public 
 reasons for taking a deep interest in im- 
 portant matters then agitating the nation 
 at large. While Jane was still quite young 
 the elders of the family could not, if they 
 would, have refrained from following with 
 close attention the great poHtical drama 
 being played out at that time in another 
 hemisphere. The then very far off land of 
 India was brought near to them, and they 
 were familiarised with many details of Indian 
 life through the marriage of George Austen's 
 
 41 
 
42 EDUCATION 
 
 only surviving sister, Philadelphia, to Saul 
 Tysoe Hancock. Mr. Hancock had been 
 a companion and early friend of Warren 
 Hastings before his own marriage took place 
 at Calcutta, and after that event he and 
 Philadelphia Uved on terms of close intimacy 
 with Hastings, who became god-father to 
 their only child, Elizabeth. His own only 
 child had been placed with the George 
 Austens, and to their great grief had died 
 as a young boy when stiU imder their care. 
 Intercourse between Steventon and Calcutta 
 remained, nevertheless, unbroken ; the trial 
 of Warren Hastings was followed with the 
 deepest interest at the Rectory, and when 
 the impeachment of the latter (begun in 
 1788) was concluded by an acquittal in 1795, 
 great were the joy and exultation felt by 
 his friends in Hampshire. 
 
 Of the letters that must have passed 
 on the occasion only one is extant, coming 
 from the fluent pen of yoimg Henry Austen, 
 who addresses Hastings with respectful 
 devotion and celebrates the great event in 
 many magnificent phrases. Jane, who was 
 twenty years old in December, 1795, would 
 have heard much of Warren Hastings all 
 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 43 
 
 her life, and cannot have failed to take a 
 part in the excitement and enthusiasm felt 
 by the whole family. Neither was India 
 the only foreign land with which the George 
 Austens were personally concerned. The 
 troubles already arising in distracted France 
 must have claimed an even greater share 
 of their anxious attention, since they so 
 closely affected their own nearest relations. 
 Many must have been the stories, both gay 
 and grievous, told by the young Comtesse 
 and her mother on their return to Steventon, 
 of Ufe in the French capital at that thrilhng 
 crisis, mixed with descriptions of French 
 chiteau Ufe in the south, and accounts of 
 the gaieties of the fashionable world of . 
 Paris at the court of Louis XVI . Another 
 view of foreign society would also reach 
 the George Austens through their son, 
 Edward, who, having been when a young 
 man entirely adopted by the Thomas Knights, 
 was sent by them, not to a University, but 
 to make the then fashionable * Grand Tour 
 of Europe.' In his case this included a year 
 spent ~ in Dresden, where he was kindly 
 received at the Saxon court. Many years 
 afterwards, when his two eldest sons had 
 
44 EDUCATION 
 
 spent some time in that city and had, Uke 
 their father, received marks of attention from 
 the Royal Family, there was a pleasant ex- 
 change of letters and presents between Prince 
 Maximilian of Saxony and ' Edward Knight, 
 ci-devant Austen.' The educational tour 
 of the latter was afterwards extended to 
 Rome.^ Its date was probably 1786-88, 
 and it comprehended a view of that old 
 Europe soon to be changed by the con- 
 vulsion of wars and revolutions. Edward, 
 on his return home, would have much to 
 relate of deep interest at Godmersham and 
 Steventon ; Jane being at this period twelve 
 or thirteen years old. 
 
 Nor should it be forgotten that while 
 every intelligent and patriotic EngUshman 
 must have been following the events in the 
 British fleet with imbroken interest, the 
 Steventon party had a double reason for so 
 doing, since two of George Austen's sons were 
 beginning their careers and hazarding their 
 hves in those naval actions upon the success of 
 which the safety of the whole nation depended. 
 
 We see, then, that at Steventon Rectory 
 an ample supply of food for the mind, the 
 
 * Cf. Chawton Manor and its Owners, Chap. VTI, p. 158. 
 
LOVE OF ENGLAND 45 
 
 heart, and the imagination was furnished 
 both by public events and by private 
 interests, and some expressions used by 
 Jane in later years show that the girl of 
 twelve or thirteen, whose comments on the 
 course of English history, occurring a century 
 or more before her own birth, we have been 
 reading, remained to t^e end of her life 
 a firm patriot and a strong believer in the 
 superiority in the ways and the merits of 
 her native country over those of other lands. 
 In a letter written to an old friend a few 
 months before her death, she says : ' I hope 
 your letters from abroad are satisfactory. 
 They would not be satisfactory to me I 
 confess, unless they breathed a strong spirit 
 of regret for not being in England.' ' Yet 
 critics have arisen, ready to accuse her of 
 possessing only narrow sympathies and little 
 patriotism, on the sole ground that no dis- 
 cussions on public affairs, or on the war 
 with France, appear in her private, intimate 
 correspondence with her sister Cassandra. 
 Here we have once more the old cry ' She 
 did not write of them, therefore she did not 
 care for them.' The falseness of such an 
 argument, when it attacks a belief in the 
 
46 EDUCATION 
 
 kindness of Jane Austen's heart has, it is 
 hoped, been already shown — but the second 
 charge, if somewhat less offensive, stands 
 on no securer foundation than the first. 
 Why should she write of public affairs unless 
 their sailor brothers' personal histories were 
 at the moment affected by them ? Then 
 indeed her pen is always active ; but on 
 public issues let us judge her by ourselves. 
 Our war of five years' duration is just over ; 
 how many sisters, when a lapse of two or 
 three years had familiarised them with the 
 thought of its existence would have dis- 
 cussed it, in its public bearings, in letters 
 to each other devoted to home details ? 
 Yet might they not justly resent an imputa- 
 tion that the absence of such discussions 
 proved any want of ardent patriotism on 
 their own parts ? But to Jane Austen, war, 
 far from being a new and unheard of horror, 
 was an almost normal state of things. Her 
 England had during a large portion of her 
 short life been constantly at war. The 
 gravity of the situation could never be for- 
 gotten, but the recent excitement of our 
 own country, fed as it has been by telegrams 
 and journalists, did not exist a hundred years 
 
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 47 
 
 earlier, when intelligence of great battles was 
 often long in reaching England. Such news 
 might take weeks on its journey, and private 
 information was still longer on the passage 
 home. Francis Austen was made a post 
 captain in consequence of gallantry shewn in 
 a naval action in the Mediterranean, but he did 
 not hear of his promotion until six months 
 after the action had been fought, the necessary 
 details having taken three months to travel 
 home to England, while another period of 
 three months was required to bring news 
 of such promotion back to himself. 
 
 Nor is it accurate to say that Jane makes 
 no mention of the war to Cassandra ; it is 
 referred to more than once, even in the few 
 fragments of her letters that we possess. 
 One passage may be cited, and also inter- 
 preted, to exculpate the writer from any ap- 
 parent want of feeling on account of the words 
 she employs : ' May 21, 1811. How horrible 
 to have so many people killed ! And what 
 a blessing that one cares for none of them ! ' 
 The action here alluded to is no doubt 
 Albuera — a very bloody battle, and among 
 the regiments which suffered most was that 
 of the ' Buffs ' from East Kent. It is prob- 
 
48 EDUCATION 
 
 able that this contained some Godmersham 
 friends and that the object of her remark 
 was to express satisfaction that none of 
 them were among the dead. 
 
 Considerations such as these may, perhaps, 
 have some weight in causing critics to hesitate 
 before accusing Jane Austen, on negative 
 evidence only, of narrow sympathies, or any 
 other deficiency. There is also a further reflec- 
 tion which might have checked any writer in 
 drawing conclusions from such of her letters 
 as have been published, but it is one from 
 which the bulk of her commentators turn 
 away, being apparently reluctant to accept 
 the plain account given by a member of 
 her own family, to whom all the attendant 
 circumstances of the occurrence he relates 
 were perfectly well known. Once more 
 let a most important fact, already referred 
 to in a previous chapter, be stated ; this 
 being, not merely that the great mass of 
 Jane's letters were destroyed by Cassandra, 
 but that she kept only those which she con- 
 sidered so totally devoid of general interest 
 that it was impossible anyone should, at 
 any time, contemplate their publication. 
 These she bequeathed to her niece, Lady 
 
JANE AUSTEN'S FATHER 49 
 
 Knatchbull, whose attachment to her Aunt 
 Jane had, she knew, been so intense that 
 letters however trifling would be loved by 
 her even for the sake of the handwriting 
 alone. Not only, therefore, in quantity, but 
 — ^which is far more impoitant — ^in quality, 
 these letters are entirely unworthy specimens 
 of her correspondence in general. They are 
 but ' a gleaning of grapes when the vintage 
 is done ' — when all that was precious had 
 been safely gathered up, and garnered in 
 Cassandra's faithful memory, and nothing 
 had been left behind excepting that which 
 even she deemed to be altogether negligible. 
 How vain, then, must be any attempt to 
 extract from this unvalued remainder that 
 wine of the spirit with which all the spon- 
 taneous and uncensored works of Jane 
 Austen's imaginative soul are richly filled ! 
 
 The mistake already referred to made 
 by a recent writer, relating rather to her 
 family than herself, must be once more 
 noticed, as it concerns the subject of her 
 education. Being, as it would seem, unaware 
 of the considerable amount of learning 
 possessed by Jane's father, and passed on by 
 him to his children, he pities her for a want 
 
50 EDUCATION 
 
 of ' culture ' in her own home, together 
 with the lack of opportunities by which 
 she might have ' sought for its consolations ' 
 in some larger sphere. He asserts without 
 hesitation that her life must have been 'in 
 a measure isolated, from superiority. She 
 gave more than she received. Nor can we 
 believe her entirely unconscious of what life 
 might have 5n.elded her in more equal com- 
 panionship.' That ' the highest mounted 
 minds ' are compelled to fulfil their separate 
 missions in noble soHtude, is no doubt true. 
 Eminent pioneers of abstract intellectual 
 effort must necessarily be in advance of othar 
 minds — 
 
 ' Voyaging through strange seas of thought 
 Alone for ever.' 
 
 So is it also in the world of imagination. 
 Every possessor of true creative genius, 
 having received his separate inspiration, must 
 as an artist dwell alone with his work, in 
 which no other human being can claim a 
 share. But this is a totally distinct thing 
 from the isolation here declared to have been 
 experienced by Jane Austen in daily Ufe, 
 because she had an unavoidable sense of 
 
JANE'S MODEST ASPIRATIONS 51 
 
 mental superiority to all her companions. 
 Nothing can be more opposed to every family 
 record and all inherited knowledge than 
 such a conjecture as this. Far from deeming 
 herself to be the intellectual superior of those 
 around her, she sincerely believed to the 
 end of her days that her sister was much 
 wiser and better informed than herself. Her 
 brother Henry writes : ' She had an in- 
 vincible distrust of her own judgment.' ' She 
 shrank from notoriety.' ' No accumulation of 
 fame would have induced her had she lived 
 to affix her name to any productions of her 
 pen.' To imagine Jane Austen appearing 
 as an authoress in any literary circle, in 
 ' search of the consolations of culture ' is 
 indeed a strange idea, as unimaginable to 
 later generations of her family as it would 
 have been to her own. To live quietly at 
 home and remain unknown as a writer of 
 fiction, was her great wish, and the secret 
 was carefully kept by all her relations until 
 it was at length revealed by the irrepressible 
 Henry himself. Her thoughts and words 
 on this occurrence are already recorded, 
 and they are like herself.^ So also are the 
 
 » Life and Letters, Chap. XVI, p. 281. 
 
52 EDUCATION 
 
 only regrets she ever expressed regarding 
 shortcomings in education to be found in 
 her home, these being directed entirely 
 against herself, and not at all against other 
 people. She ' wished she had written less 
 and read more before the age of sixteen.' 
 Her father's library must have contained 
 books amply sufficient for the purpose, as, 
 when quitting Steventon, he left five hundred 
 volumes to be sold, in addition to those he 
 may have taken away with him. Jane also 
 had to dispose of her own modest collection 
 of books, which was sold for eleven pounds. 
 In respect to her own characteristic self- 
 criticism, we may remember that book- 
 learning does not form the whole of educa- 
 tion, and that the facility for writing clear 
 English, which by a constant use of the pen 
 she acquired very early in life, together with 
 the formation of a humorous style, were to 
 prove in her case invaluable attainments. 
 AU the family could write light, amusing 
 trifles in verse, ^ some of which had consider- 
 able merit, and Jane's childish absurdities 
 with their solemn dedications to one or other 
 of the party would, no doubt, be well received 
 
 * Cf. Appendix, ' Charades.' 
 
' AUNT CASSANDRA ' 53 
 
 as the kind of productions naturally to be 
 expected from a droll and merry little 
 sister. When the character of her writings 
 changed with advancing years, and they 
 became secrets not lightly to be revealed 
 to critics downstairs, she was equally for- 
 tunate in the possession of one favourite 
 and favoured listener. A genial atmo- 
 sphere of warm and encouraging sympathy 
 is much needed to foster the developing 
 shoots of romantic authorship, and of this 
 she was secure in the companionship of 
 Cassandra, who, while able to form and main- 
 tain opinions of her own, felt the strongest 
 possible admiration and enthusiasm for her 
 sister's works. One of their nieces, writing 
 in 1856, speaks of having met ' a most ardent 
 and enthusiastic lover of Aunt Jane's novels,' 
 and adds : ' Aunt Cassandra herself would he 
 satisfied at her appreciation of them ; nothing 
 ever like them, before or since.' This niece's 
 brother, the first Lord Brabourne, who was 
 sixteen when Cassandra Austen died in 1845, 
 has thus written of her : ' From my recol- 
 lections of " Great Aunt Cassandra," in her 
 latter days, she must have been a very 
 sensible, charming, and agreeable person.' 
 
54 EDUCATION 
 
 Had she been less than this she could hardly 
 have filled Jane's sisterly heart with such 
 absolute satisfaction, respect, and admira- 
 tion as we know to have been the case, and 
 if further testimony to the strength and 
 beauty of Cassandra's character is needed, 
 it may be found in the letters written by 
 Cassandra herself, immediately after Jane's 
 death, to their niece, Fanny Knight.^ 
 
 No sense of isolation or unfulfilled long- 
 ings can have troubled Jane's soul when she 
 had Cassandra beside her, and another and 
 an older friend for whom she felt intense 
 love and reverence was also constantly at 
 hand. This was Mrs. Lefroy, of Ashe Rectory, 
 always known in Ashe parish, which bordered 
 on that of Steventon and Deane, as ' Madam 
 Lefroy.' The author of the original ' Memoir ' 
 thus describes her : * She was a remarkable 
 person. Her rare endowments of goodness, 
 talents, graceful person, and engaging manners 
 were sufficient to secure her a prominent 
 place in any society into which she was 
 thrown ; while her enthusiastic eagerness 
 of disposition rendered her especially attrac- 
 tive to a clever and lively girl.' The notice 
 
 * Life and Letters, Chap XXI. 
 
MRS. LEFROY 55 
 
 and encouragement which Mrs. Lefroy 
 bestowed upon Jane from her childhood 
 shows her to have possessed quick powers 
 of discernment, and great was Jane's grief 
 when this beloved friend died suddenly, in 
 consequence of a fall from her horse, ia 
 1804. With so perfect an example of good 
 breeding alwaj^ before her eyes, and li^•ing 
 continually in the midst of a family whose 
 manners and bearing towards each other 
 always struck the next generation as parti- 
 cularty pleasant and harmonious, with the 
 addition moreover of any information the 
 Comtesse might occasionally impart concern- 
 ing what Sir \^'illiam Lucas would have 
 termed ' the manners of the great,' Jane 
 coiild have no difficulty in learning how to 
 observe and appreciate in the world at large 
 those various shades of good breeding, or of 
 its opposite, which app>ear again and again in 
 characters scattered throughout her books. 
 In one of the most sympathetic and correct 
 of the shorter works dealing with Jane 
 Austen that have been pubhshed in recent 
 years, the author has inserted all the corre- 
 spondence that passed between Mrs. Thomas 
 Knight and young Edward Austen who was 
 
56 EDUCATION 
 
 to succeed her late husband at Godmersham 
 Park. A portion of this appears in ' Life 
 and Letters/ Chap. VI, while the whole of it 
 is of so charming a character that every letter 
 would repay perusal.^ 
 
 On these letters Mr. Pollock makes the 
 following remarks : ' Comment has often 
 been made, and most justly made, on the 
 perfect breeding and manners of those people 
 in Miss Austen's novels who are supposed 
 and intended to be weU bred. The object 
 in quoting these letters is to show in what 
 a perfect atmosphere of dignity and good 
 feeling Miss Austen passed her life. There 
 is surely something singularly touching in 
 the sincere affection and the delightful 
 courtesy of this correspondence, and it is 
 certainly most characteristic of the race to 
 which Miss Austen belonged.' The writer, 
 as a resident at Chawton, had enjoyed the 
 friendship of the late owner of Chawton 
 House, Montagu George Knight, Squire of 
 Chawton Manor, and no one who was so happy 
 as to know him can ever have doubted that 
 in courtesy, in charm of personality and 
 
 '■ Jane Austen : Her Contemporaries and Herself, by 
 Walter Hemes Pollock. (Longmans & Green.) 
 
LOVE OF SPORT 57 
 
 manner, combined with an unfailing kind- 
 ness of heart, he might well have served as 
 a model for the highest ideals of his great 
 aunt, Jane Austen. 
 
 In returning to the subject of Jane's edu- 
 cation, and taking that word in an extended 
 sense, one characteristic of the family life 
 around her ought not to be overlooked, 
 namely, the strong hereditary love of sport 
 to be found among its members. George 
 Austen must have received it from his 
 Kentish ancestors, for he certainly trans- 
 mitted it to his descendants, even of a third 
 and fourth generation. All his own boys 
 hunted at an early age on anything they 
 could get hold of, and Jane when five or six 
 must often have gazed with admiring, if 
 not envious, eyes at her next oldest brother, 
 Frank, setting off for the hunting field at 
 the ripe age of seven, on his bright chestnut 
 pony Squirrel (bought by himself for £1 12s.), 
 dressed in the suit of scarlet cloth made for 
 him from a riding habit which had formed 
 part of his mother's wedding outfit. Such 
 early remembrances would be of real advant- 
 age to a future novehst, and in the cursory 
 references to sport occurring in her books we 
 
58 EDUCATION 
 
 feel that she is perfectly at home in all branches 
 of the subject, and could readily enter into 
 the feelings of Sir John Middleton and Charles 
 Musgrove towards the precious fox or the 
 pernicious rat. Nor is it impossible that she 
 was indulging in a secret smile, bom of 
 remembrance, when Mrs. Jennings exclaims, 
 ' 'Tis a sad thing for sportsmen to lose a day's 
 pleasure, poor souls ! I always pity them 
 when they do — they seem to take it so much 
 to heart.' 
 
 When the foregoing statements as to 
 Jane Austen's home, education, and inter- 
 course with society are considered, they will, 
 it is hoped, put an end to any surprise that 
 she was so well able to paint the Uves of 
 the English gentry, as well as to every surmise 
 that she took this class for her subject because 
 she had no knowledge of anything beyond 
 it. So far as varied reading, first-hand 
 evidence, and strong personal interest can 
 teach us, she was probably better acquainted 
 with other interesting phases of life than 
 many young English women of the same 
 period, age, and station. That any surprise 
 at her choice of this, for her, most natural 
 field of work should be felt, is itself the 
 
HER IDEAL IN FICTION 59 
 
 surprising thing. No one wonders that Miss 
 Edgeworth wrote of Ireland, or Sir Walter 
 Scott of Scotland. Jane Austen was in- 
 tensely English, by birth and by S5anpathies. 
 England she loved and of England she 
 wrote ; finding her happiness and interest x 
 in the lives of those around her. She might, 
 no doubt, have indulged in romantic flights f 
 of fancy with India or France for a back- ) 
 ground, and fiUed them with fictitious deHghts / 
 such as were to be found in the fairy tales'^ 
 with which she enchanted her Httle nieces 
 during their happy visits to Chawton Cottage, 
 but this would have been play work — and 
 her books were to be soUd pieces of real 
 work, carefuUy designed and constructed, 
 polished also with the utmost skill and 
 patience before they could reach the high 
 standard of original invention joined to 
 entire accuracy in minute particulars, which 
 she appears always to have set before herself. 
 In no foreign field of work could she have 
 exhibited that intimate acquaintance with 
 every aspect and detail which her own 
 scrupulous judgment demanded. Vagueness 
 of method, or inaccuracy in particulars, her 
 taste would have condemned as destructive 
 
6o EDUCATION 
 
 of the true object to be aimed at in fiction. 
 Never having left England herself, she never 
 attempts to convey her characters across the 
 sea, and in one of her letters she warns a 
 young niece who was beginning to compose 
 stories against committing this mistake. 
 Her standard as to the right method by 
 which to captivate the reader's attention 
 and transport him to another world, at 
 once imaginary and real, remains firmly 
 fixed, and the manner in which she attained 
 it affords, as has been well said in another 
 connection, ' an instance of that patient 
 elaboration to which the highest effects in 
 art are due.' Such results can only be 
 obtained where a complete knowledge of 
 the actual goes hand-in-hand with a clear 
 vision of the ideal. Nothing less than first- 
 hand, personal knowledge could satisfy the 
 thoroughness of Jane Austen's nature, or 
 enable her to fulfil, to the utmost of her 
 ability, the imperative requirements of her 
 creative art. 
 
 Another highly valuable, and only too 
 rare gift, which she possessed must not be 
 left unmentioned, as it was one in which 
 education bore a share, for ' Nature and 
 
READING ALOUD 6i 
 
 Art both joined ' to make her a delightful 
 and accomplished reader aloud. Her brother 
 Henry writes : ' Her voice was extremely- 
 sweet. She read aloud with very great 
 taste and effect. Her own works were 
 probably never heard to so much advantage 
 as from her own mouth, for she partook 
 largely in all the best gifts of the comic 
 muse.' It may be remembered that when 
 her mother began to read ' Pride and 
 Prejudice ' aloud on its first arrival from 
 London, Jane could not repress a secret 
 regret that she read it too fast, and did not 
 always make the characters ' speak as they 
 should do.' But her own aspirations were 
 high, for as regarded the stage itself she 
 owns, ' Acting seldom satisfies me. I think I 
 want something more than can be.' 
 
 Her nephew and first biographer often 
 formed part of the family party to whom 
 she would read her novels aloud, and as he 
 also was endowed with a charming voice 
 and excellent taste, the few survivors among 
 the many of those who in former years 
 listened to his reading can still believe that 
 they have, through him, heard the tones and 
 the mamner in which Jane Austen was 
 
62 EDUCATION 
 
 accustomed to make her characters ' speak 
 as they should do.' Nor did she read from 
 her own writings alone. One of her hearers 
 wrote, as an old man in 1870 : ' She was a 
 very sweet reader. I last heard her when 
 she was on a visit to Steventon. She had 
 finished the first canto of ' Marmion ' and 
 had begun the second, when a visitor was 
 announced. It was like the interruption of 
 some pleasing dream, the illusions of which 
 suddenly vanished.' 
 
 Nothing has hitherto been said concerning 
 the most important part of the education 
 Jane Austen received in her home — her 
 moral and rehgious training. It wiU be 
 found that this is dealt with in the course 
 of the following chapter. 
 
CHAPTER V ^ 
 
 MORALITY 
 
 Was Jane Austen a Moralist ? ' No ! many 
 of her fervent admirers will exclaim — 
 'Thank Heaven — that she was not!' Her 
 mission was to amuse, to delight, to 
 refresh us — but neither to reprove nor to 
 condemn us ! Those who want ' Moral Tales ' 
 must seek them elsewhere ; they are not to be 
 found among Jane Austen's writings ! They 
 are not, indeed, if to be moral is to be dull, 
 and if no one can instruct without growing 
 tedious. Far, far away from such odious 
 reproaches must those pages for ever shine 
 to which we turn again and again, as beguilers 
 of trouble and companions in mirth, equally 
 welcome in society or solitude, in sickness 
 or health, in early life or in advancing years. 
 They even seem to grow with our growth and 
 strengthen with our strength, for old though 
 
 * Reprinted by permission from the Quarterly Review 
 for October, 1919. 
 
 63 
 
64 MORALITY 
 
 we may be, and wise as we may think our- 
 selves, we never outgrow their freshness or 
 their wisdom. Such is the creed of Jane 
 Austen's earnest adherents. Nor is this all. 
 In addition to the unflagging interest taken 
 in her books by successive generations of 
 readers, a separate interest has grown up in 
 the hearts of many. For them to know her 
 books — in some cases almost by heart — ^is 
 much, but it is not enough. They desire to 
 know herself also, they seek after a more 
 intimate acquaintance with their unseen 
 lifelong friend, Jane Austen, who, more than 
 one hundred years ago, was laid to rest, early 
 on a summer morning, within the walls of 
 Winchester Cathedral. 
 
 The existence of such a feeling came to 
 light as soon as the original ' Memoir of Jane 
 Austen,' already mentioned, was published 
 in 1869 by her nephew, the Rev. J. E. Austen- 
 Leigh.^ When this book appeared, a sin- 
 gular change took place. It not only brought 
 into being a large number of articles, notices, 
 and reviews concerning its subject and her 
 works, but it also brought to himself a variety 
 of interesting letters from unknown corre- 
 
 1 See Chapter I, p. 3. 
 
TRIBUTES FROM STRANGERS 65 
 
 spondents, both English and American, de- 
 scribing the effect that its perusal had produced 
 upon the writers' minds . These letters afforded 
 him much pleasure and not a little sur- 
 prise. Until that period he had not realised 
 to how large a number of readers, and 
 in what a high degree, the Aunt to whom 
 he as a boy and young man had been so 
 warmly attached, had also become a living, 
 though an unseen, friend. 
 
 An extract from one of the letters may be 
 given to serve as a specimen of many others : 
 ' Your Memoir has but one drawback — it 
 leaves us with a sad craving for more . . . 
 much as we loved and honoured her before, 
 we love and honour her the more for what 
 you have told us of her, and in the name of 
 my Grandfather, Father, Uncles and Aunts, 
 Cousins and Children, I thank you for your 
 book.' 
 
 Words such as these showed that it was 
 not only as an author but as a woman that 
 Jane Austen had made her way into the 
 affections of many readers. Entreaties also 
 arrived that any stories, or fragments of 
 stories, left by her in manuscript might be 
 published, one correspondent urging that 
 
66 MORALITY 
 
 ' Every line from the pen of Jane Austen is 
 precious.' In response to these warmhearted 
 applications, the writer of the ' Memoir ' could 
 do Httle beyond attending to the last-men- 
 tioned request. Having obtained the neces- 
 sary permission from those members of his 
 family to whom the original manuscripts had 
 been bequeathed by Jane's sister, Cassandra, 
 he included in the second edition of his 
 'Memoir' 'Lady Susan,' 'The Watsons,' the 
 alternative ending of ' Persuasion,' and some 
 of her childish writings. The reasons why it 
 was impossible for him at the time to do 
 more than this have been already stated — and 
 mention has been made of books subsequently 
 put forth by other members of Jane Austen's 
 family, contciining fresh information regarding 
 the external aspects of her history which may 
 in some degree have fulfilled the wishes of 
 the eagerly enquiring readers of the original 
 'Memoir.' 
 
 But though gratified, they may not be 
 whoUy satisfied. They may still desire a 
 more intimate acquaintance with her inner 
 self, with those hidden recesses of feeling 
 concerning which a dehcate reserve impelled 
 her to keep a very sacred silence. They 
 
A NEW PATH 67 
 
 may long for a sight of the vanished 
 letters, not from idle curiosity, but that, 
 in the words already recorded, ' Much as 
 they loved and honoured her before, they 
 might learn to love and honour her still more.' 
 A natural but a vain wish ! The letters 
 perished long ago— sacrificed by Cassandra 
 as an offering of love and reverence to the 
 memory of a sister unspeakably dear to 
 herself. 
 
 Yet though in this way we can learn 
 nothing, there is another path, hitherto, we 
 believe, untrodden, by the help of which 
 we may attain a point of view affording us 
 some fresh knowledge respecting those inner 
 convictions Jane Austen was always slow 
 in revealing to the public gaze, and which 
 will at the same time offer a reason for the 
 question at the beginning of this chapter. 
 To accomplish such an object we must turn 
 to her books and reverse our usual attitude 
 of mind towards them by considering each 
 story, not as a separate creation, but as 
 part of a general whole. From an artistic 
 standpoint there is nothing that can tempt 
 us to act in this manner. Every novel is 
 complete in itself, possessing its own plot, 
 
68 MORALITY 
 
 characters, and distinctive atmosphere in 
 a remarkable degree. We find scarcely any 
 repetition of ideas among the six, and 
 this may induce the beUef that while com- 
 parison is easy, combination is impossible, 
 as they possess no similarity among them- 
 selves apart from the creative, dramatic, 
 humorous qualities common to all. This 
 is our first, and not unnatural, conclusion. 
 Nevertheless it wiU be seen on reflection 
 that there is one feature which declares their 
 family likeness. There is one line of thought, 
 one grace, or quaUty, or necessity, which- 
 ever title we hke to know it by, apparent 
 in aU her works. Its name iS — Repentance. "^ 
 It will be found on examination that this 
 incident recurs in all her novels, neither 
 being dragged in as a moral nor dwelt upon 
 as a duty, but quietly taking its place as a 
 natural and indispensable part of the plot — 
 as an inevitable incident in the formation 
 and development of each successive child 
 of her imagination. Every one, gayer or 
 graver as the case may be, has its own testi- 
 mony to give on this question, while all 
 display the skill with which the author 
 knew how to handle the subject according 
 
CATHERINE MORLAND'S REPENTANCE 69 
 
 to the var5dng needs of place, character, 
 and surroundings. We shall find that it could 
 not be dispensed with, even in her very early 
 and most lighthearted story, ' Northanger 
 Abbey.' Here the young heroine, under the 
 excitement of wUd and captivating romances, 
 allows herself to believe that the man in 
 whose house she is a guest had, not long 
 before, desired, perhaps connived at, the 
 death of his own excellent and charming 
 wife, or, at the very least, is keeping her 
 immured in some dungeon on the premises. 
 Such delusions could not be suffered to go 
 unpunished. Nor were they, but having 
 arisen from nothing worse than wonderful 
 folly, the penalty iuflicted is mercifully 
 abridged. Still, the offender has to undergo 
 a period of sharp anguish, brought upon 
 her by a not unreasonable remonstrance 
 on the part of the hero, a son of the 
 supposed villain. Its effect was immediate. 
 ' Catherine,' we read; ' was completely 
 awakened. Most grievously was she humbled. 
 Most bitterly did she cry. She hated her- 
 self more than she could express.' But 
 Jane Austen, we aire very sure, would never 
 break a butterfly upon the wheel, conse- 
 
'/o MORALITY 
 
 quently we learn with no surprise that, after 
 forming a resolution ' of ' always judging 
 and acting in the future with the greatest 
 good sense,' and being assisted by Henry 
 Tilney's ' astonishing generosity and noble- 
 ness of character in never aUuding to what 
 had passed,' Catherine is ready to be con- 
 soled by ' the lenient hand of time,' which 
 ' did much for her by insensible gradations 
 in the course of another day,' and that she 
 has nothing to do but to ' forgive herself and 
 be happier than ever.' Nevertheless, so 
 effectually has the work of penitence been 
 performed that when General Tilney, not 
 long afterwards, turns her out of his house 
 at a few hours' notice, she magnanimously 
 abstains from reverting to her previous sus- 
 picions that he has at an earher period either 
 poisoned or shut up his wife. 
 
 Passing from these playful pages to those 
 of her latest and most pathetic work, 
 ' Persuasion,' we find the same chord struck, 
 but in a minor key and with a softer tone. 
 Nothing glaringly wrong could become a 
 character of whom her own creator wrote 
 beforehand to a niece ' You may perhaps 
 like the heroine, as she is almost too good 
 
ANNE ELLIOT'S REPENTANCE 71 
 
 for me.' Anne Elliot's error was want of 
 judgment, of too meek a submission to the 
 direction of an older friend, an error that 
 ' leaned to virtue's side,' and which was 
 embraced by her unselfish spirit the more 
 readily because, though destructive of her 
 own happiness, she was persuaded to believe 
 that it would promote the future good of a 
 man whom she devotedly loved. Want of 
 mental balance and some youthful weak- 
 ness of character are the worst charges 
 that can be brought against this almost 
 perfect being, yet for these she has to suffer 
 long and to learn, through suffering, the 
 nature of the mistake she had made. 
 Repentance, in the form of deep regret, 
 overtook her as years passed on. ' She 
 felt,' we are told, ' that were any young 
 person in similar circumstances to apply to 
 her for counsel they would never receive 
 any of such certain immediate wretchedness 
 — such uncertain future good.' Captain 
 Wentworth had on his side a worse fault 
 to repent of. 'I was proud,' he cried, ' too 
 proud to understand or to do you justice 
 — too proud to ask you again. This is a 
 recollection which ought to make me forgive 
 
72 MORALITY 
 
 everyone sooner than myself.' Readers can 
 only agree with both speakers and rejoice 
 in the sequel that closes these confessions. 
 
 Much graver instances of misconduct and 
 
 its subsequent results will be found in the 
 
 four remaining novels. Even in the story 
 
 written when Jane Austen was quite a 
 
 young girl, called first ' EUnor and Marianne/ 
 
 and afterwards 'Sense and Sensibility,' the 
 
 plot is made to hinge upon the evils inflicted 
 
 by the heroine upon herself and her family 
 
 through too violent indulgence in a romantic 
 
 passion. This renders her indifferent to the 
 
 needs and the claims of other people, and 
 
 blind to the sorrow of her sister, who is also 
 
 suffering- in silence from an unfortunate 
 
 attachment. It is not untU Marianne is 
 
 herself in the depths of disappointed affection 
 
 that her eyes are opened to the truths around 
 
 her. Then — ' Oh ! Ehnor,' she cries, ' you 
 
 have made me hate myself for ever. How 
 
 barbarous have I been to you ! — you, who 
 
 have been my only comfort, who have borne 
 
 with me in all my misery, who have seemed 
 
 to be only suffering for me ! ' Such is her 
 
 first burst of penitence, to be strengthened 
 
 by time and a severe iUness, after which 
 
MARIANNE DASHWOOD'S REPENTANCE 73 
 
 she speaks once more : ' I considered the 
 past. ... I saw in my own behaviour 
 nothing but a series of imprudence towards 
 myself and want of kindness to others. I 
 saw that my own feelings had prepared my 
 sufferings, and that my want of fortitude 
 under them had almost led me to the grave. 
 . . . Had I died, it would have been self- 
 destruction.' The enthusiasm of her self- 
 reproving spirit flows on — to be checked 
 only by resolutions of future amendment, 
 for though as yet unable to believe that 
 her remembrance of Willoughby will ever 
 be weakened by time, she can still add, ' But 
 it shall be regulated, it shall be checked by 
 religion, by reason, by constant employment ' 
 — a resolution sincerely made and faithfully 
 kept. 
 
 Repentance in a double form comes 
 before us in the next novel. Nowhere in 
 any of her other writings does it play so 
 conspicuous a part as in ' Pride and Prejudice.' 
 The whole scheme of the book depends 
 upon its being felt, in a very high degree, 
 by the two principal characters, upon its 
 influencing their actions during the last half 
 of the book and leading steadily up to its 
 
74 MORALITY 
 
 closing scenes. The late Professor W. 
 Courthope has left a striking analysis of the 
 manner in which this feeling affected the hero 
 of the book and the consequent changes it 
 wrought within him.^ For this, as for the 
 whole work, he expresses the warmest pos- 
 sible admiration, comparing it, on account 
 of the manner in which ' under a common- 
 place surface a great artist has revealed a 
 most dramatic conflict of universal human 
 emotions,' to the structure of some grand 
 Greek play. By no other writer can Jane 
 Austen's genius have been dv/elt upon with 
 more eloquence or more sympathetic recog- 
 nition ] but even this appreciation is incom- 
 plete, for it contains no reference to the 
 corresponding work of repentance effected 
 in the heroine by the words and actions of 
 the hero. Yet had this been lacking, the 
 perfectly proportioned plot, to which he 
 accords unquaUfied praise, could never have 
 been constructed and developed. Elizabeth's 
 self-reproach, so soon as she recognises the 
 truth, is not less severe than Darcy's. ' She 
 grew absolutely ashamed of herself . . . 
 
 1 ' Life in Poetry, Law in Taste.' Lectures delivered in 
 Oxford by Professor W. J. Courthope, 1895-1900. Vol. V. 
 
ELIZABETH BENNET'S REPENTANCE 75 
 
 of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she 
 think without feeling that she had been 
 blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.' ' How 
 despicably have I acted,' she cried, ' I who 
 have valued myself on my abilities . . . how 
 humiliating is this discovery ! . . . Yet how 
 just a humiliation ! I have courted pre- 
 possession and ignorance and have driven 
 reason away, where either were concerned. 
 Till this moment I never knew myself.' 
 Again, in a confession to her sister she admits 
 ' I was very uncomfortable, I may say, 
 unhappy, and with no one to speak to of 
 what I felt, no Jane to comfort me and say 
 I had not been so very weak and vain and 
 nonsensical as I knew I had ! Oh ! how I 
 wanted you ! ' Time, by disclosing more 
 of Darcy's real character, could only deepen 
 such regrets and make her grieve over 
 ' every ungracious sensation she had ever 
 encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever 
 directed towards him. For herself she was 
 humbled, but she wals proud of him. Proud 
 that in a cause of compassion and honour 
 he had be^n able to get the better of himself. 
 Darcy's self-condemnation was equally strong. 
 ' My behaviour towards you,' he assures 
 
76 MORALITY 
 
 her, ' merited the severest reproof. It was 
 unpardonable. I cannot thmk of it without 
 abhorrence. . . . The recollection of what 
 I said, of my conduct, my manners, my 
 expressions, is now, and has been for many 
 months, inexpressibly painful to me. ... I 
 have been a selfish being all my life . . . 
 what do I not owe you ! You taught me a 
 lesson hard indeed at first, but most advan- 
 tageous. By you I was properly humbled.' 
 Such reciprocal repentance and confession 
 could not fail to bring reciprocal forgive- 
 ness, and the title of the book ceases to be 
 appropriate before the last page is turned. 
 
 Reciprocity in error and penitence were 
 not destined to console the remaining heroine, 
 who faUs, entirely through her own fault, 
 into deep distress, Emma Woodhouse, 
 having erred alone, has to endure her burden 
 of remorse in solitude. Every reader will 
 admit that Emma went through vanity 
 further astray than Elizabeth Bennet through 
 prejudice, a verdict foreseen by the author, 
 who, while declaring that how she would be 
 able to ' tolerate those who do not like 
 Elizabeth she does not know,' frankly admits 
 that in Emma she is going to take a heroine 
 
EMMA WOODHOUSE'S REPENTANCE ^^ 
 
 ' whom no one will like but herself.' She 
 did take her, however, to endow her with 
 that ' nature and spirit ' _ which were dear 
 to her own heart, and drawing a being, full 
 of faults, and yet, as Emma's lover believes 
 at the end, ' faultless in spite of them.' 
 But justice could not allow this conclusion 
 to be reached until great vicissitudes of 
 feeling had been endured. Emma's faults 
 had inflicted much pain and distress upon 
 other persons, consequently, at the proper 
 moment, they had to bring corresponding 
 wretchedness upon herself. ' Her feelings,' 
 we are told, after Mr. Knightley's expostula- 
 tion on Box Hill, ' were combined of anger 
 against herself, mortification, and deep con- 
 cern. . . . The truth of his representation 
 there was no denying. She felt it at her 
 heart. How could she have been so brutal, 
 so cruel to Miss Bates ! ' Far heavier retribu- 
 tion, however, is still awaiting her when she, 
 with horror, finds herself obliged to listen to 
 Harriet Smith's outpourings of hopes and 
 expectations respecting Mr. Knightley. Then 
 she saw her own conduct with a clearness 
 which had never blessed her before. . . . 
 ' What blindness, what madness, had led her 
 
78 MORALITY 
 
 on ! It struck her with dreadful force, and 
 she was ready to give it every bad name in 
 the world. . . . With insufferable vanity had 
 she believed herself to be in the secret of 
 everybody's feelings ; with unpardonable 
 arrogance proposed to arrange everybody's 
 destiny. She was proved to have been 
 universally mistaken ; and she had not quite 
 done nothing — for she had done mischief.' 
 ' What,' in conclusion, ' could be increasing 
 Emma's wretchedness but the reflection, 
 never far distant from her miud, that it 
 had been all her own work ? The only 
 source whence anything like consolation or 
 composure could be drawn was in the resolu- 
 tion of her own better conduct and in the 
 hope that every future winter of her life 
 would find her more rational, more acquainted 
 with herself, and leave her less to regret 
 when it were gone.' Satisfied with such 
 genuine repentance, the author can now 
 permit herself to make this favourite heroine 
 once more happy. 
 
 Can we avoid perceiving that these five 
 pictures of life resemble each other in so 
 far that every one of them gives a description, 
 closely interwoven with the structure of 
 
JANE AUSTEN'S BENT OF MIND 79 
 
 the story and concerned with its principal 
 characters, of error committed, conviction 
 following, and improvement effected, all of 
 which may be summed up in the word ' Re- 
 pentance ' ? If so, do we not also through 
 this perception gain more knowledge as 
 to the habitual bent of that mind in which 
 these successive creations arose ? Does not 
 Jane Austen's outlook upon life grow clearer 
 to us when we learn that it was not merely 
 by the ' follies and nonsense, whims and 
 inconsistencies ' (as she makes Elizabeth 
 Bennet call them) ever visible on the surface 
 of society, that her quick eyes were caught, 
 but that her penetrating gaze went down to 
 the hidden springs of action, prompting her 
 to reflect upon the race that all human 
 beings have to run in this world, upon the 
 various courses they pursue, and upon the 
 necessity of powerful influences being 
 exercised over them, in order to bring about 
 that improvement of character which ' is 
 the final purpose of it all? Can we fail to 
 see how, in dealing with these heroines, she 
 desired to leave them, not only happier, but 
 better, than she found them ; wiser, stronger, 
 humbler, and more charitable, richer in 
 
8o MORALITY 
 
 self-control, and in that self-knowledge on 
 which she always places a high value ? If 
 we have seen all this, we have seen also 
 something of her hidden self. 
 
 There is still another book, standing in 
 some respects apart from the rest, through 
 which we acquire even more information 
 on this subject. ' Mansfield Park ' is the 
 gravest novel Jane Austen ever wrote. It 
 was composed after a long interval of silence, 
 and may be called a ' Second First.' It 
 was the result of a wider experience of man- 
 kind, together with that of various personal 
 trials which she had to undergo during 
 eight years passed in large towns after 
 quitting Steventon in 1801. She herself 
 when writing this book declared ' it was 
 not half so entertaining as " Pride and^ 
 Prejudice," ' an opinion with which her 
 readers may or may not agree. In its 
 pages humour, insight into character, creative 
 genius, and power of description shine as 
 brightly as ever, but in addition to these 
 we are aware of a deeper seriousness and a 
 more searching enquiry into the ultimate 
 issues of conduct than had as yet appeared 
 in her works. The author of the original^ 
 
TEN YEARS OF SILENCE 8l 
 
 ' Memoir ' was informed that a number of well- 
 known literary men who happened to meet 
 at a country house agreed to write down 
 the title of their favourite novel. The only 
 name which appeared more than once was 
 'Mansfield Park,' and this had been chosen 
 by three or four of the company, while all 
 united in admiring the book. Such a power 
 of attracting powerful minds may be due 
 to the union of brilliant writing with serious 
 reflection which its pages contain, and it is 
 interesting to recall the circumstances under 
 which this novel, the first important original 
 work taken in hand by her for ten years, was 
 written. 
 
 The lapse of ten years, beginning in early 
 \^romanhood, can hardly pass over any head 
 without producing sensible differences. To 
 Jane Austen they had brought many changes, 
 as enumerated in ' Life and Letters.' ^ 
 Sorrow had touched her closely. She had 
 lost through sudden death, and almost 
 simultaneously, her father and her much- 
 loved, friend, Mrs. Lefroy of Ashe, The same 
 cause had. brought to an end her own personal 
 romance, inflicting a wound which was, as 
 
 1 Life and Letters, Chap. XIV. 
 
82 MORALITY 
 
 we know, not the less but the more hkely 
 to have been deeply felt, on account of the 
 silence preserved by Cassandra on this subject 
 for many years after her sister's death, and 
 the guarded manner in which she at length 
 alluded to it. Other trials and troubles 
 had come upon the Austen family in recent 
 years, one being of a most unusual nature, 
 threatening to overwhelm some of them in 
 irretrievable disaster, and to bring lasting 
 distress upon their whole circle.^ That such 
 practical acquaintance with some of hfe's 
 heaviest afflictions should for a time stop 
 all flow of fancy on Jane Austen's part is 
 not surprising, nor that the only new work 
 she began during this period should have 
 been broken off at the end of the twelfth 
 chapter, apparently because the author 
 ceased to feel any interest in its contents. 
 One more loss — this time neither sudden nor 
 unusued — must be added to those already 
 mentioned. She had lost her youth. At 
 the age of twenty-five, while still a young 
 woman, she had left her native place, her 
 earliest friends, and every well-loved scene 
 associated with the first overflowings of her 
 
 ' Life and Letters, Chap. IX. 
 
RETURN TO AUTHORSHIP 83 
 
 happy girlish fancies. It was the birthplace, 
 not of herself alone, but of many creations, 
 born to a far longer existence than hers 
 was destined to be upon earth — all those 
 characters that live and move for us through- 
 out the pages of her first three novels. Eight 
 years were to pass before a return to Hamp- 
 shire would take place, and her own words 
 have described how much such a period can 
 include. ' Eight years . . . what might not 
 eight years do ? Events of every description, 
 changes, alienations, removals, all, all must 
 be comprised in it.'^ The varied events 
 which this passage of time had held for 
 herself can hardly have been absent from 
 her thoughts when she placed such a reflection 
 in the mind of Anne Elliot, rejoicing no doubt 
 that it was in her power to restore to that 
 heroine a happiness which her own heart 
 might never now know. It is certain that 
 on beginning a country life at Chawton she 
 and Cassandra were satisfied to assume to 
 themselves, too readily as some of their 
 relations considered, the position of middle- 
 aged women. It is impossible, however, not 
 to rejoice at any decision that ensured to 
 
 ^ Persuasion, Chap. VII. 
 
84 MORALITY 
 
 her a larger amount of quiet leisure for 
 composition, and now it was, after the 
 revision of two earlier works had renewed 
 the habit of writing, that ' Mansfield Park ' 
 was begun in February, 1811, to be finished 
 in June, 1813. 
 
 Here we find the theme, never absent from 
 her works, displayed again, and in an acuter 
 form, for in this book we meet with the chief 
 and saddest example of repentance that her 
 pen ever drew — the saddest because, in a 
 sense, the most unavailing. There can be no 
 comparison between any of the csises aheady 
 mentioned and that of an unhappy father 
 whose ' anguish arising from the conviction 
 of his own errors in the education of his 
 daughters was never to be entirely done 
 away.' Such are Sir Thomas Bertram's feel- 
 ings as he contemplates a domestic tragedy 
 for which he beheves these errors to have been 
 the primary cause. It is not with foUy and 
 thoughtlessness that ' Mansfield Park ' deals, 
 but with vice and sin, with misery and degra- 
 dation ; subjects the writer herself describes 
 as ' odious,' which she touches as distantly 
 and dismisses as rapidly as possible. That 
 she forced herself to write of them at all tends 
 
JANE AUSTEN'S CONVICTIONS 85 
 
 to show that some of the phases of the 
 fashionable life she had been observing around 
 her had impressed themselves so deeply on 
 her soul that her spirit could not rest until she 
 had entered a protest, through the medium of 
 her own dramatic art, against these forms 
 of evU. A record remains which shows that 
 in her opinion this wAs the only proper 
 method for a writer of fiction to employ. 
 Soon after the publication of the original 
 ' Memoir ' its writer received a letter from a 
 well-known clergyman, who stated that he 
 had been intimately acquainted with a lady 
 who had known Jane Austen well, and from 
 whom he had heard much about her. He 
 spoke of ' the tribute of my old friend to the 
 real and true spring of a religion which was 
 always present though never obtruded.' ' Miss 
 Austen,' she used to say, ' had on all the 
 subjects of enduring religious feeling the 
 deepest and strongest convictions, but a 
 contact with loud and noisy exponents of 
 the then popular religious phase made her 
 reticent almost to a fault.' She had some- 
 thing to suffer in the way of reproach from 
 those who believed she might have used her 
 genius to greater effect, ' but ' (her old friend 
 
86 MORALITY 
 
 used to say) ' I think I see her now, defending 
 what she thought was the real province of a 
 delineator of life and manners and declaring 
 her belief that example, and not " direct 
 preaching," was all that a noveUst could 
 afford properly to exhibit.'^ 
 
 Means such as these when employed by 
 herself are so powerful and speak so plainly 
 that it is difficult to see how to any author 
 the title of ' Morahst ' can be more justly 
 given. Those who object to it in her case, as 
 necessarily implying a double point of view 
 in a writer's mind, destructive of that sim- 
 plicity of aim which ought to be the inspiring 
 motive of any true work of art, should con- 
 sider whether there is in ' Mansfield Park ' 
 any evidence that the design of the artist has 
 been cramped by the mind of the morahst. 
 There are, again, others who would dis- 
 approve of the terms ' Morality,' ' Moral 
 Precepts,' as falling short of the highest ideals, 
 and implying something that may be only 
 cold and formal, based upon a theory that 
 correct conduct should be maintained because 
 
 » This lady used to add, ' Anne Elliot was herself, 
 her enthusiasm for the Navy and her perfect unselfishness 
 reflect her completely. 
 
SIR T. BERTRAM'S REPENTANCE 87 
 
 it is in the long run the most likely method of 
 obtaining success and comfort in this world. 
 If so, then ' Mansfield Park ' may again be 
 quoted to refute, in its author's opinion, 
 any such theory, for it contains a strong 
 protest against worldliness and the ideals 
 that worldliness upholds, whether in educa- 
 tion, marriage, or general society. In this 
 book she plainly declares her belief that 
 moral conduct must spring from a deeper 
 source and cherish a higher aim than this. 
 She had seen, and would describe, how 
 little dependence can be placed upon well- 
 bred decorum and outward propriety unless 
 they are inspired by religious principles. 
 The veil of habitual reticence employed by 
 her on these subjects is here drawn further 
 back, and the language used is more expUcit 
 than in any of her other books. Sir Thomas 
 Bertram's self-reproach is addressed to this 
 very point. He came to feel, we are told, 
 that ' Something must have been wanting 
 within.' He feared that principle, active prin- 
 ciple had been wanting ; that his daughters 
 had never been taught to govern their in- 
 clinations and tempers properly by that 
 sense of duty which alone can suffice. They 
 
88 MORALITY 
 
 had been instructed theoretically in their 
 religion, but never required to bring it into 
 daily practice. To be distinguished for ele- 
 gance and accomplishments, the authorised 
 object of their youth, could have had no 
 useful influence that way, no moral efiect on 
 ' the mind ... of the necessity of self-denial 
 and humihty he feared they had never heard 
 from any Ups that could profit them.' Again, 
 the term ' Sin ' is given to express flagrant 
 evil. Edmund employs it in his last inter- 
 view with Mary Crawford, and of her brother 
 we are told that ' though too Uttle accus- 
 tomed to serious reflection to know good 
 principles by their proper name, yet in his 
 highest praises of Fanny he expressed what 
 was inspired by the knowledge of her being 
 well principled and reUgious.' 
 
 We learn here more of Jane Austen's deep 
 feelings on moral questions than she has 
 expressed elsewhere, but every allusion to 
 them in her other works is in complete 
 harmony with the teachings set forth in the 
 latter chapters of ' Mansfield Park.' When, 
 therefore, we find in the sister volumes the 
 not infrequent words ' principles ' and ' duty ' 
 we should remember how much they imply. 
 
JANE AUSTEN'S HUMILITY gg 
 
 and that we have, as already stated, evi- 
 dence proving her general reticence on these 
 important points to be intentional and not 
 accidental. ' Still waters run deep,' and the 
 uniform though restrained teaching in these 
 books assures us of the steadfastness of con- 
 viction respecting the highest subjects on the 
 part of her to whom we owe their existence. 
 The virtues she loves to cultivate in her 
 characters she would certainly seek after for 
 herself ; the ' self-knowledge ' she prizes so 
 highly as a means of improvement she would 
 personally desire for the same reason, nor 
 was there in her that want of humility which 
 prevents some souls from ever acquiring it. 
 All her life she looked up to Cassandra as her 
 superior in wisdom and goodness, and to its 
 very close she esteemed others as better than 
 herself, for on her deathbed she wrote to a 
 nephew, ' God bless you, my dear Edward. 
 If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly 
 nursed as I have been. May the same blessed 
 alleviations of anxious sympathising friends 
 be yours ; and may you possess, as I daresay 
 you will, the greatest blessing of all in the 
 consciousness of not being unworthy of tlieir 
 love. I could not feel this.' 
 
90 MORALITY 
 
 That she had reflected silently on solemn 
 questions some expressions in her letters 
 show us, and one of her elder nieces has 
 written : ' When Aunt Jane was grave she was 
 very grave, graver I think even than Aunt 
 Cassandra.' Such thoughts on her part, and 
 such an attitude of mind wUl not appear 
 improbable when we recall her ancestry 
 and education. Her father on one side, 
 her grandfather on the other, had been 
 excellent and active parish priests. By 
 precept and by example she had received 
 both from her stricter mother and her gentler 
 father the firm reUgious principles which 
 governed her throughout hfe. Mrs. George 
 Austen writes, on returning from a visit to 
 London, that in it ' everyone seems in a 
 hurry,' adding ' 'Tis a sad place, I would 
 not live in it on any account, one has not 
 time to do one's duty either to God or Man ' 
 — a verdict that may provoke a smile, but 
 which serves to show the speaker's conviction 
 as regards the great object of human life. 
 George Austen's instructions to his sons 
 express, as might be expected, the same 
 belief. In a long letter of advice, written 
 to the elder of his two sailor sons, Francis, 
 
PARENTAL TRAINING 91 
 
 when the latter first went to sea, ' attention 
 to reUgious duties ' is given the primary 
 place, and never were they forgotten by 
 him or by his brothers to the close of their 
 long and honourable careers. Round these 
 twin poles, therefore, ' Duty to God and duty 
 to Man,' had Jane Austen been taught that 
 hfe should revolve, and this it is that she 
 always presupposes would be accepted in 
 a hke manner by the heroes and heroine^ 
 in all her books. Not that she considers 
 them to be ' already perfect.' ' Pictures 
 of perfection,' she owns, ' make me sick and 
 wicked.' No wonder ! She knew human 
 nature too well for it to be possible that she 
 should accept them as faithful portraits, 
 but this is what she wishes to make her own 
 favourite creations aspire towards throughout 
 the course of their several histories. 
 
 To some, perhaps to many, it may appear 
 hardly necessary to insist upon all this. ' We 
 have long known,' they would say, ' the 
 moral tendency of her books, and have 
 beUeved in the firmly religious convictions 
 of the mind that produced them. Why, 
 then, spend so much time on gilding gold or 
 painting the Uly white ? ' Two reasons may 
 
92 MORALITY 
 
 be given in answer to this question, the first 
 and obvious one being that what is evident 
 to certain minds is not therefore so to all, 
 and that among the latter class there may be 
 those who sincerely desire a closer intimacy 
 with Jane Austen's inner self, and who may, 
 by taking the novels as a whole, find that 
 they can come nearer to comprehending 
 something fresh and fundamental respect- 
 ing the nature and soul of their author. 
 But there is a second reason, and not a slight 
 one. Jane Austen has now more than one 
 pubUc. Her novels are read, appreciated, 
 and reviewed in other countries besides 
 our own. In France they have recently 
 been again brought forward in a work of 
 great ability, by a writer who describes 
 her as ' une romanciere que I'Angleterre 
 compte parmi ses plus parfaits artistes de 
 lettres et que I'originalite aussi bien que 
 le merite de son oeuvre font qualifier d'incom- 
 parable.' ^ Mile. ViEard gave further proof 
 of her admiration for Jane Austen's novels 
 by choosing them as the subject of her 
 
 * Jane Atcsten .■ sa vie et son eeuvre, par Leonie 
 Villard, Agi6g6e de I'Universit^, Docteur 6s lettres (1915), 
 preface. 
 
MLLE. VILLARD'S ' LA VIE ' 93 
 
 thesis when standing for the Doctorial degree 
 lately bestowed upon her by the Sorbonne. 
 Her knowledge and enthusiasm could hardly 
 be surpassed, while the insight and talent 
 with which her long and important book is 
 filled can scarcely be overpraised. But 
 though the merit of the book is great, this 
 makes it only the more regrettable that the 
 view taken by its writer of Jane Austen's 
 character is so mistaken as to be in some 
 respects- exactly the reverse of the truth. 
 This is especially the case when dealing 
 with its reUgious aspect. Mile. ViUard first 
 asserts that the Church of England was in 
 the eighteenth century destitute of all rehgious 
 fervour, which, in her own words, ' a disparu 
 pour faire place a I'indifference,' ^ and then 
 passes from the general to the particular 
 by assuming that the same must therefore 
 be true of Jane Austen's writings, and that, 
 for the characters she depicts, reHgion is 
 merely ' une fait de meme ordre que celui 
 d'observer les r^les de la biens^ance mon- 
 daine.' In proof of this statement a remark 
 of Archbishop Seeker, divorced from its 
 context, is given, no reference being made 
 
 1 Page 235. 
 
94 MORALITY 
 
 to any evidence leaning the other way 
 furnished by EngUsh divines, or, above all, 
 by those who employed the natural voice 
 of strong emotion, poetry— though of these 
 there were a considerable number, including 
 such as belonged to the school of reUgious 
 mystics. Of one of these latter — Norris— 
 Sir F. Palgrave writes that in 1730 his poems 
 had passed through ten editions, ' one proof 
 out of many,' he adds, ' how exaggerated is 
 that criticism which describes that period 
 as devoid of inner Ufe and spiritual aspira- 
 tion.' ^ It is thus spoken of in ' La Vie,' 
 where it is called cold, formal, concerned 
 with externals only, and destitute of any 
 ' elan vers un au-dela.' Having passed this 
 judgment upon the Church to which Jane 
 Austen belonged, similar conclusions are come 
 to regarding herself. Sermons, it is said, 
 were wearisome to her ; but a love of sermons, 
 as St. Louis told our Henry III. long ago, is 
 not an indispensable element in the reHgious 
 life. Moreover, Jane Austen herself says: 
 ' I am very fond of Sherlock's Sermons, and 
 prefer them to almost any.' It is also asserted 
 that she took no interest in anything outside 
 
 1 The Treasury of Sacred Song, Note CXLIX. 
 
MISTAKES IN ' LA VIE ' 95 
 
 ' a series of traditional rites,' as the services of 
 her Church are called, and that she as a writer 
 • eloigne de son observation la souff ranee, 
 la tristesse et la laideur,' proving that, as 
 a. woman, she cared nothing for the sorrows 
 and wants of the poor. Other entire mis- 
 apprehensions of her nature are also evident, 
 but being concerned with points of com- 
 paratively minor importance these need not 
 be entered upon here. The sum total, 
 however, represents a narrow nature, with 
 a heart cold towards God and unsympathetic 
 towards man, somewhat contemptuous of 
 the needy and ignorant and caring little for 
 any fellow creatures beyond those of her 
 immediate family circle. Easy indeed is it 
 to prove the contrary, both from her own 
 letters and from the writings of -her relations, 
 and to show how completely such a conclusion 
 misrepresents her attitude of mind towards 
 the highest questions. But all serious 
 students of her biography may be left to 
 discover this for themselves. They can weigh 
 the assertions made in ' La Vie ' against the 
 testimony ^ given by thqse who knew her 
 intimately as to her faith, unselfishness, 
 humility, and the ' piety which ruled her in 
 
96 MORALITY 
 
 life and supported her in death.' Above 
 all, they will examine the records of that 
 closing scene, when face to face with a 
 comparatively early death, ' neither her love 
 of God nor her fellow creatures flagged for 
 a moment,' and will consider whether such 
 faith, courage, and entire submission to the 
 Divine will could have been felt by one to 
 whom religion was ' merely a matter of 
 externals.' 
 
 Mile. Villard's book is, as a literary 
 criticism, so exhaustive and valuable that 
 it will probably be accepted in France as a 
 standard work on Jane Austen and her novels. 
 It may have already served to increase the 
 number of readers in that country, and this 
 number is likely to become larger, for at the 
 present time, when a strong desire is felt that 
 the bonds between our nearest Ally and our- 
 selves should be drawn closer, those formed 
 by a mutual study of each other's literature 
 can hardly be neglected. As it must be 
 desirable that correct ideas of the writer of 
 any English classic should be offered to the 
 French nation, those who are the most nearly 
 concerned in seeing that justice is done to 
 the personal character of Jane Austen, and 
 
ARCHBISHOP WHATELYS WORDS 97 
 
 who are best able to speak of it from authentic 
 and unimpeachable testimony, could hardly 
 be excused if they failed to offer a protest 
 against the estimate regarding it put forth 
 in 'La Vie,' as being utterly unworthy of her 
 and entirely misleading in respect of a vital 
 part of her nature. It is well to recall that 
 this was comprehended and rightly described 
 by a juster and more discriminating judge 
 nearly one hundred jears ago, when Arch- 
 bishop A^'hately, in the Quarterly Revietp, thus 
 summed up his estimate of herself and her 
 works * : 
 
 ' Miss Austen introduces ven,* Httle of 
 what is technically called religion into her 
 books, yet that must be a blinded soul which 
 does not recognise the vital essence, every- 
 where present in her pages, of a deep and 
 enlightened piety.' 
 
 * Quarterly Rirci^i. No. XXIV, January-. iSzi. 
 
 Note, — TSie present \rriter is happy to state that she 
 has received an assurance from Mile. Villaxd that the niis- 
 appr^ensions relating to Jane Austen's character objected 
 to in tiiis diapter shall be revised and amended in any 
 future edition of ■ La Me* 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 • LADY SUSAN ' 
 
 When ' Lady Susan * first appeared in print, 
 this title being prefixed to the second 
 edition of Mr. Austen Leigh's original 
 'Memoir,' it was remarked by more than 
 one critic that so short a story should 
 hardly have been allowed to give a name 
 to a whole volume. With this observation 
 the editor entirely agreed. He knew it had 
 been arranged that the tale itself should be 
 placed after the ' Memoir,' together with other 
 unpublished writings of the author, and, there- 
 fore, when the second edition of his work 
 appeared, bearing the title of ' Lady Susan,' 
 he felt both surprise and regret. He foresaw 
 the disappointment of its readers when they 
 should discover the nature eind brevity of 
 the story, and still more did he feel that to 
 put forward, as though on a par with her 
 
 other works, a character sketch which she 
 
 98 
 
DATE OF ■ LADY SUSAN ' 99 
 
 never intended to give to the world, would 
 not appear on his own part to be showing 
 due respect to the memory and judgment 
 of his aimt. So scrupulous was he on this 
 point that even in writing the short notice 
 prepared for it, when he had no expectation 
 that the title would be affixed to the whole 
 volume, he said, ' If it should be judged 
 unworthy of the pubUcity now given to it, 
 the censure must fall on him who has put 
 it forth and not on her who kept it locked 
 up in her desk.' 
 
 The exact date of its composition is 
 uncertain, but there are several reasons for 
 preferring an early one. It was written in 
 letters, the form used in some of the novels 
 known to Jane Austen almost from child- 
 hood and employed by her when she was 
 very young in (a) an unpubHshed fragment, 
 (6) the first version of ' Sense and Sensibility, 
 called ' EHnor and Marianne,' and ageiin 
 (c) in ' Lady Susan,' which seems to place the 
 latter in the category of early compositions. 
 This, it is true, would not be a sufficient 
 proof if taken alone. The author may have 
 thought that the most forcible way of dealing 
 with Lady Susan would be by leaving her 
 
100 'LADY SUSAN' 
 
 to speak for herself, and might therefore have 
 chosen to narrate the history in the form of 
 letters. Critics have observed, not unnatu- 
 rally, that this remarkable analysis of a 
 vicious woman's nature seems a strange 
 subject for a young girl either to have at- 
 tempted or to have succeeded in, and such 
 a conviction has made it the more difficult for 
 them to imagine what date should be assigned 
 to the work. There is, we beUeve, but one 
 solution to this puzzle, one that was discerned 
 by a correspondent of the present writer, 
 whose position had enabled him to observe 
 human nature closely, and who, though 
 knowing Jane Austen's six novels weU, had 
 recently read ' Lady Susan ' for the first 
 time. He says in his letter concerning the 
 book, ' I find it very clever. It is, of course, 
 more bitter and worldly than her other 
 works, but it shows a tremendous insight 
 into shams. I feel quite sure the character 
 is drawn from life.' How far the last remark 
 is justified by facts may be decided after the 
 reader has perused the following true history 
 taken from a family MS. 
 
 ' About two hundred years ago, Mr. and 
 Mrs. , well-connected people, were 
 
A FAMILY MS. loi 
 
 living on their property in the Midlands, 
 with a family of one son and five daughters. 
 The daughters had but a rough ^ife. Their 
 mother, a beautiful woman and most cour- 
 teous and fascinating in society, was of a 
 stern, tyrannical temper. They were brought 
 up in fear, not in love. They were sometimes 
 not allowed proper food, but were required 
 to eat what was loathsome to them, and were 
 often relieved from hunger by the maids 
 privately bringing them up bread and cheese 
 after they were in bed. Perhaps some of 
 the traditions of their mother's personal 
 cruelty to her children as endangering their 
 hves went beyond the truth, but there could 
 be no doubt that she was a very unkind and 
 severe mother. When making long visits 
 from home it was her custom to take one 
 daughter with her to act, it was said, as her 
 maid. On one occasion, all her daughters 
 being then young women, and one of them 
 being married, she did so— taking one daughter 
 with her, and leaving three at home. Her 
 absence lasted for several months. Their 
 father, so far as is known, was likewise 
 absent. Two of the three daughters took 
 this opportunity of marrying, but not in 
 
102 'LADY SUSAN' 
 
 their own condition of life. One married the 
 son of a neighbouring yeoman, and the other, 
 a friend of her new brother-in-law, a horse- 
 dealer. The first marriage turned out not 
 so very bad, but the second was deplorable. 
 The remaining sister, knowing how much her 
 mother would resent these mis-alliances, and 
 foreseeing nothing but increased severity in 
 the house, could not resolve to face her anger. 
 
 She also left her home before Mrs. 
 
 could get back to it. All the sisters had 
 £500 a-piece, left to them by an uncle— and 
 on the interest of this little sum she resolved 
 to try and live.' The further history of the 
 last daughter was brighter. Friends and 
 relations assisted her, and she finally made a 
 suitable marriage in her own rank in Ufe. 
 
 Mrs. , when afterwards left a widow, 
 
 married a gentleman of good property, with 
 whom she had long been well acquainted. 
 The descendants of the last-named daughter 
 
 always spoke of her as ' the cruel Mrs. .' 
 
 Among these, Jane, as a young girl, had 
 intimate friends, and the whole tale would 
 naturally become known to her. That it was 
 so is also shown by a passage in one of her 
 letters, perfectly comprehensible to those who 
 
ORIGIN OF ' LADY SUSAN ' 103 
 
 are acquainted with, the names and details 
 belonging to the foregoing history. 
 
 This being certain, and it being also certain 
 that she wrote ' Lady Susan/ there is no. 
 room for doubt that the two facts are. closely 
 related to each other, and that she could not 
 have depicted an inhuman, repulsive mother, 
 carrying on her barbarities beneath a mask 
 of charm and beauty, without having con- 
 stantly before her thoughts the prototype of 
 this exceptional character, of whose actual 
 existence she was well aware. Why this 
 knowledge caused her to write such a sketch — 
 not for publication — may claim a moment's 
 thought. To strongly imaginative and sen- 
 sitive souls,^ ' wax to receive, and marble to 
 retain,' revelations of beauty and glory, or 
 of darkness and horror, come with a force 
 beyond that which others can know, leaving 
 an impression, amounting to a possession of 
 the soul, not to be flung off until rehef has 
 been found through some outward and 
 concrete act. When Byron died, and all the 
 Jennyson family mourned him, it was Alfred 
 who, as a boy, rushed out and endeavoured 
 to express'Hs sense of England's unspeakable 
 loss by carving on a rock of sandstone, ' Byron 
 
104 'LADY SUSAN' 
 
 is dead.' He may have felt that in this way 
 he and nature could mourn together, and 
 that he had at least done something to record 
 the despair of his heart in the face of this 
 great calamity. A similar intensity of feeling, 
 though this time of horrified indignation, may 
 have seized upon Jane Austen's soul when 
 the story of an unnatural and brutal mother 
 was made known to her, overpowering her 
 fancy to sa great a degree that she was at 
 last impelled to seek relief in gibbeting this 
 repulsive being by setting down her character 
 in writing, thus to express the depth of her 
 disgust through the medium of her own 
 peculiar Art. 
 
 So far as we know, it is the only ' Study 
 from Life ' that she ever made, nor was it 
 now accomphshed in order that it might 
 appear again in any of her longer works. 
 She once said that ' it was her desire to create, 
 not to reproduce,' and there is nothing in the 
 novels which calls * Lady Susan ' to mind, 
 unless some hint of her unblushing worldli- 
 ness can be found in Mary Crawford's letter 
 to Fanny or of her maternal harshness in 
 Mrs. Ferrars' behaviour to her eldest son. 
 We are, therefore, compelled to believe that 
 
• LADY SUSAN ' A FIGURE-PIECE 105 
 
 the horror which oppressed her imagination, 
 when reflecting on this picture of outward 
 beauty and secret barbarity, could not be 
 relieved without giving expression to her 
 sense of its enormity by placing it upon paper. 
 Had she never heard the tale, her youth 
 might have saved her from conceiving the 
 possibility of so evil a being, but having heard 
 it, that same youth would intensify the 
 repulsion and disgust it must create within 
 her. That the sketch was not meant to meet 
 the public eye is clear, partly because, in 
 1803, she attempted to publish a novel in 
 two volumes, then called ' Susan,' later 
 " Catherine,' and finally ' Northanger Abbey,' 
 and she would not have wished to give the 
 same name to two published works, and yet 
 more so because the strong resemblance 
 between the character of ' Lady Susan ' and 
 that of her friends' ancestress would render 
 such a thought impossible to her scrupulous 
 sense of honour. The structure of the story 
 itself confirms this view. Incident and plot 
 are neglected throughout its course, in which 
 there is little attempt to elaborate any 
 character in such a way as to arouse the 
 interest of the reader. The book is a figure- 
 
io6 'LADY SUSAN' 
 
 piece, with a cruel, heartless woman for its 
 single sub j ect . In comparison with this central 
 object, the rest of the dramatis fersonce are 
 but shadowy beings. Of one of these the 
 author writes at the close that 'it must 
 already have been evident that Mr. Vernon 
 existed only to do whatever might be required 
 of him,' and the same remark may be apphed 
 with a shght expansion in its meaning to the 
 whole of the company, who exist merely to 
 bring out the various vices imited in one 
 woman, a creature entirely devoid of con- 
 science, and without a single redeeming 
 quaUty. 
 
 That such unnatural mothers can be 
 found is unhappily certain, a fact proved by 
 the existence of a modem society for 'Pre- 
 vention of Cruelty to Children ' — generally 
 from the cruelty of their own parents — ^but 
 that they are on the whole rare is also 
 happily true, and so great a monster is not 
 to be met with anjAvhere in the six published 
 novels. In this the author shows her usual 
 wisdom. An artist, speaking of landscape 
 painting, has observed that ' Nature employs 
 only small spots of deep dark,' and the same 
 may be said of that field of Nature in which 
 
AVOIDANCE OF EVIL 107 
 
 Jane Austen painted — ^human nature. She 
 did not commit the mistake of taking excep- 
 tions for rules, nor of thinking the world 
 must be villainous as a whole because some 
 villains can be found in it. She avoids the 
 use of ' deep darks,' and employs but seldom 
 the lighter shades of evil, coarseness, and 
 vulgarity, being, as it would seem, unwilling 
 to blacken her canvas more than might be 
 found necessary in order to provide some 
 contrast to the brighter and purer tints of 
 her picture. That she had either kind at 
 command, should she choose to make use of 
 them, is proved by the introduction, in their 
 proper places, of Mr. Price and Nancy Steele, 
 and, above all, by the more lately revealed 
 character, ' Lady Susan,' who is drawn with 
 an unsparing hand, showing that ' tremendous 
 insight into shams ' already mentioned. This 
 inborn gift must have been greatly quickened 
 
 by hearing the history of Mrs. , It 
 
 would teach her to look below the surface, 
 even in the case of parents and children, and 
 would serve to assure her, whenever in the 
 future she was describing parental heirshness 
 or tyranny, that she was still keeping well 
 within the mark. 
 
io8 -LADY SUSAN' 
 
 Although ' Lady Susan ' iiiust be placed 
 in a totally different category from the 
 other novels, it should not be neglected by 
 anyone who wishes to form a just estimate 
 of Jane Austen's varied powers as a writer, 
 or of herself as a woman. That she drew 
 such a portrait once enlarges our conception 
 of her genius ; that she never drew such 
 another increases our value for her as a 
 woman. She chose wholesome, sane, cheerful 
 subjects, ' things of good report,' for her 
 own imagination and that of her readers to 
 dwell upon, describing evil as little as possible 
 and never with a needless detail. This con- 
 sideration will, it is thought, give additional 
 force to what has been already said respecting 
 the silent strength of her moral character. 
 We can thus learn how to appreciate the self- 
 control with which she resists any tempta- 
 tion to the use of extravagant language in 
 describing emotions and situations, such as 
 has earned for later writers the title of ' intense,' 
 deeming it to be beneath the dignity both of 
 true art and of that which is highest and 
 best in human nature. 
 
 The words of an American writer, Mr. 
 W. L. Phelps, well deserve to be quoted here : 
 
SELF-RESPECT 109 
 
 'Let no one believe,' he says, 'that Jane 
 Austen's men and women are deficient in 
 passion because they behave with decency; 
 to those who have the power to see and 
 interpret there is a depth of passion in her 
 characters that far surpasses the emotional 
 power displayed in many novels where the 
 lovers seem to forget the meaning of such 
 words as honour, virtue, and fidelity.' These 
 words Jane Austen certainly never forgot, 
 either as an author or a woman. Several 
 passages in her personal history show her to 
 have been possessed of keen sensibility and 
 deep attachments, but we know that her own 
 sensations never made her indifferent to the 
 claims of those with whom she lived, nor 
 caused her to forget the call of ' Self -reverence, 
 self -honour, self-control.' Tennyson's words 
 she could not know, but the spirit that 
 inspired them was akin to her own. Neither 
 is there any evidence that she was acquainted 
 with Wordsworth's poems, though the earliest 
 of these were published twenty-four years 
 before her own death. She probably never 
 saw ' Laodamia,' written three years prior to 
 that event, but if Wordsworth knew her 
 writings and had wished to give a voice to 
 
no 'LADY SUSAN' 
 
 her consistent utterances concerning the 
 strongest of all human emotions, he could 
 not have done so more fittingly than in 
 Protesilaus' well-known lines : 
 
 'Be taught, faithful Consort, to control 
 Rebellious passion : for the Gods approve 
 The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul ; 
 A fervent, not ungovernable, love.' 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 Mention has already been made of various 
 mistaken rumours spread abroad concerning 
 Jane Austen during the first half -century 
 that followed her death, one of these being 
 that ' she did not hke children.' No suppo- 
 sition could have been further from the truth. 
 On no point is the family testimony more 
 unanimous than on the unfailing love and 
 kindness she bestowed upon them, together 
 with the warm love they felt for her in return. 
 She was quickly provided with such objects 
 of affection, as four of her five brothers had 
 families, and two nieces were bom before 
 she was herself grown up, both of whom hved 
 to become, as young women, her close and 
 intimate friends. Another younger niece has 
 written : ' My visits to Chawton were frequent. 
 I cannot teU when they began. They were 
 very pleasant to me and Aunt Jane was the 
 
112 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 great charm. As a very little girl I was 
 always creeping up to her and following her 
 whenever I could, in the house and out of 
 it. Her charm to children was great sweetness 
 of manner ; she seemed to love you, and you 
 loved her naturally in return. This was what 
 I felt in my earliest days, before I was old 
 enough to be amused by her cleverness. But 
 soon came the deUght of her playful talk. 
 Everything she could make amusing to a child. 
 Then, as I got older and cousins came to share 
 the entertainment, she would tell us the most 
 delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and 
 her Fairies had aU characters of their own. 
 The tale was invented, I am sure, on the spur 
 of the moment, and was sometimes continued 
 for two or three days if occasion served. 
 I believe we were, all of us, according to 
 our different ages and natures very fond of 
 our Aunt Jane, and that we ever retain a 
 strong impression of the pleasantness of 
 Chawton Ufe. One of my cousins, after he 
 was grown up, used occasionally to go and 
 see Aunt Cassandra, then left the sole inmate 
 of the old house, and he told me that his 
 visits were always a disappointment to him, 
 for that he could not help expecting to feel 
 

 
 -^<'^^! Ill I'lxW^^ 
 
 
KINDNESS TO CHILDREN 113 
 
 particularly happy at Chawton, and never, 
 tiU he got there, could he realise to himself 
 how aU its peculiar pleasures were gone.' 
 Similar testimony on these points has been 
 given by another niece — the Httle Anna who, 
 when three years old, was placed by her 
 widowed father, James Austen, at Steventon 
 Rectory, to be ' mothered ' by his two sisters. 
 Anna composed stories of her own long 
 before she was old enough to write them 
 down, and had always a vivid recollection of 
 the way in which her kind Aunt Jane per- 
 formed that office for her. On reaching the 
 age of seven she dictated to her aunt a 
 drama founded on * Sir Charles Grandison,' 
 which still exists in Jane Austen's hand- 
 writing. Anna's half brother and sister, 
 Edward and Caroline, had the same love of 
 inventing stories, and all brought their com- 
 positions to be read and reviewed by their 
 Aimt Jane — ^Anna continuing the practice as 
 a young woman when she had embarked 
 on what was intended to be a serious novel. 
 For an author to be ready at any time to 
 put aside her own writings — and such writings 
 — ^in order to interest herself in these 
 very young performances shows that entire 
 
114 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 unselfishness of nature and ready sympathy 
 with the wants of childhood which was 
 always ascribed to Jane Austen by those who 
 truly knew her. 
 
 Her pen was often at their service when 
 they were apart, for she wrote them charming 
 notes, with many playful turns, containing 
 now and then a little good advice as well. 
 Her niece Carohne has truly said that 'in 
 addressing a child she was perfect.' She 
 lived indeed in a circle of childhood, and when 
 we look at her books we see how steady and 
 consistent a place children take in them — 
 without uttering a word ! The old-fashioned 
 maxim that, when in company, children 
 should always be seen and not heard, was 
 no doubt one on which Jane had herself been 
 brought up, and she observes the same rule 
 as regards the children of her fancy ; the 
 reader is not troubled with dniy of their 
 remarks. Even the elder among them are 
 not allowed to say much. The author 
 advised her niece Anna to remember that, 
 in novel writing, ' girls are not interesting 
 until they are grown up,' consequently of the 
 speeches of little Fanny Price and her cousins 
 only enough are given to show in few words 
 
CHILDHOOD IN THE NOVELS 115 
 
 their relative conditions and characters, to 
 bring out the kindness of Edmund and the 
 negUgence of his sisters. Margaret Dashwood, 
 as a half-grown girl, utters a few remarks 
 equally malapropos in themselves, and apropos 
 to the conduct of the story. But the younger 
 ones are all silent, yet not the less valuable 
 on that account. They provide motives for 
 action and conversation on the part of their 
 elders, and are even allowed on one occasion 
 to take a small share in carrying on the drama 
 of the plot. No fewer than twenty children, 
 known to us by number or by name, and 
 generally by the latter, appear in the course 
 of the six novels, without counting the vaguer 
 groups of little Harvilles at Lyme, and happily 
 occupied little Perrys at Highbury. However 
 slight the sketch may be, we can always 
 recognise in it the sure touch of one who 
 herself moved about childhood's realm as a 
 constant visitor and a ready sympathiser. 
 If we try to imagine Jane Austen's novels 
 deprived of their children, we shall see that 
 in some cases they could hardly be carried on 
 at aU, while in every instance that sense of 
 simple truthfulness, of warmth, and of life 
 which they now possess would be greatly 
 
ii6 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 lessened or altogether wanting. Just as in 
 the figure-pieces of early ItaHan masters the 
 charm is enhanced and the general effect is 
 completed by' those miniature hiUs, rivers, 
 and houses in the background, which provide 
 a fitting setting for the central objects upon 
 which they are never suffered unduly to 
 intrude, so do Jane Austen's little people 
 fill up, furnish, and decorate in a suitable 
 manner the more distant portions of her 
 scenes. Though at no time allowed to put 
 themselves forward, they are, in their proper 
 places and angles, highly useful by imparting 
 a constant feeUng of reality and by supply- 
 ing a due sense of perspective, atmosphere, , 
 colouring, and space. ' 
 
 What is there, then, to be found in these, 
 books that could have led anyone to suppose* 
 their author did not like children ? The idea 
 must have rested on the fact that she did not 
 hke spoilt children, or, rather, that she strongly 
 objected to the spoiling of children — a subject 
 on which it is evident she bestowed a good 
 deal of thought. But that this showed no 
 want of interest in the children themselves 
 may be read in a letter, written towards the 
 close of her life to a niece, after she had been 
 
' A SCHOOL FOR PARENTS ' 117 
 
 spending some days in a house filled with 
 younger cousins of the latter. She says: 
 'Though the children are sometimes very 
 noisy and not under such order as they ought 
 and easily might [be], I cannot help liking 
 them or even loving them, which I hope 
 may be not wholly inexcusable in their, 
 and your, affectionate Aunt Jane Austen.' 
 Here we see at once, not only a natural 
 quickness of vision towards children, but also 
 the even balance of her judgment when 
 reviewing the whole case, ' the children 
 might, and should [have been] kept in better 
 order.' 
 
 It was towards the middle of the last 
 century that a striking tale appeared, named 
 '' A School for Fathers,' in which a charming 
 young hero is forced into a duel, against 
 his own inclination, by parental pride, and 
 falls in consequence fatally wounded. Jane 
 Austen's novels may be not unjustly entitled 
 ' A School for Parents,' and this not merely 
 with reference to the young children to be 
 found in them, who are over-indulged by 
 mothers until they become an annoyance to 
 everyone. Her outlook goes much further 
 than this. Our language, unfortunately, 
 
ii8 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 contains no word expressive of the connection 
 between parents and their sons and daughters, 
 after the latter have ceased to be ' children '— 
 properly speaking — and are becoming, or have 
 become, men and women. But it is in these 
 later stages of life that we find Jane Austen 
 exhibiting to us the results of early training 
 or of its absence. We do not learn this only 
 in the case of such spoilt children as the 
 little Middletons and Betsy Price, for older 
 examples are as plainly dealt with, and their 
 parents' faults are indicated with equal clear- 
 ness. Mr. Allen, who is ' a sensible man,' 
 soon discovers that ' Mrs. Thorpe is, without 
 doubt, too indulgent to her daughters,' and 
 we have Isabella in consequence. Mrs. Dash- 
 wood tells Marianne to ascribe her misfortunes 
 to ' her mother's imprudence,' a remark 
 with which the reader wiU easily agree— 
 while of Mrs. Bennet it is enough to say 
 that she was exactly fitted to be the mother 
 of Lydia. Irreproachable parents — mothers 
 especially — are indeed greatly in the way of 
 any novelist, who has to get them out of 
 the way as handsomely as may be. This 
 truth was discerned very early in her own 
 literary career by Jane Austen, one of her 
 
PARENTS IN THE NOVELS 119 
 
 girlish fragments, called ' Kitty, or The Bower,' 
 beginning with these words : ' Kitty ' (after- 
 wards changed to Catherine) 'had the mis- 
 fortune, as many heroines, have had before her, 
 of losing both her parents while she was still 
 quite young.' But even when the maternal 
 parent has been disposed of by death or by 
 distance, the daughter must, none the less, 
 be brought up or brought out by someone, 
 who may contrive to go as far wrong in the 
 process as any mother herself could do. Mrs. 
 Weston, charming and sensible though she 
 was, had been ruled for many years by her 
 own charge, Emma ; Edmund and Fanny 
 agree in ascribing Mary Crawford's want of 
 principle to deficiencies in the education she 
 had received from her aunt, together with 
 the bad example set by her uncle ; and the 
 one error into which Anne Elliot falls is 
 spoken of as having been due to the mistaken 
 advice of an older friend, who has over her 
 almost the influence of a mother. Nor are^ 
 the fathers spared. Mrs. Ferrars is the only 
 instance of unfeeling harshness among the 
 mothers, while both General Tilney and Sir 
 Walter EUiot are absolutely unpardonable 
 fathers, and there is also a good deal requiring 
 
120 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 forgiveness in Mr. Woodhouse, Sir Thomas 
 Bertram, and — not least — in Mr. Bennet, one 
 of the author's most surprising creations. She 
 had, as we have seen, gained a knowledge when 
 still quite young, through a history belonging 
 to past days, of the depths to which parental 
 cruelty can descend, and we have also seen 
 how this knowledge very probably quickened 
 her insight respecting lighter shades of the 
 same evil visible around her, the evil, it may 
 be, ' that is wrought from want of thought, 
 and not from want of heart.' Shortcomings 
 on the side of parents are not shown to us 
 merely by Jane Austen herself, speaking from 
 her position as author, since she frequently 
 points out that they were clearly apprehended 
 by a daughter of their own. Some time later, 
 a school of fiction arose, intended to a great 
 extent for the young, in which it would have 
 been held highly disrespectful for daughters 
 to comment adversely, even to themselves, 
 upon any action on the part of their parents, 
 while to utter a remonstrance to either father 
 or mother on their neglect of a parent's 
 duties, would have been looked upon as an 
 unpardonable liberty. Jane Austen, however, 
 takes a different view, and never blames her 
 
MR. BENNET AS A PARENT 121 
 
 heroines for possessing some acquaintance 
 with the characters of those by whom they 
 had been brought up, being, as it would seem, 
 of opinion that they could not become rational 
 and thinking beings without acquiring such 
 a perception, which she has no hesitation in 
 attributing to some of the best among them. 
 Poor Eleanor TiJney, when compelled to turn 
 Catherine Morland out of the house, can only 
 exclaim, ' Alas ! for my feelings as a daughter. 
 He is certainly greatly, very greatly, discom- 
 posed. I have seldom seen him more so.' 
 Anne Elliot, who ' often wished her know- 
 ledge of her father's character were less,' 
 could not but be aware of the weak vanity 
 that laid him open to Mrs. Clay's insidious 
 designs, while the most striking example of 
 filial insight and resolution in character in 
 all the novels is to be found in Elizabeth 
 Bennet's remonstrance with her father on his 
 neglect of responsibility as a parent. It must 
 have been a hard task, but when it was over 
 she ' felt confident of having performed her 
 duty,' a reflection that can only do her 
 honour in the mind of the reader, and, 
 coupled with Mr. Bennet's most characteristic 
 reference to it after Lydia's elopement had 
 
122 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 taken place, shows that it had done her 
 honour in his judgment also. Though dis- 
 trust of a parent's wisdom was the compelling 
 cause of the action taken both by Ehzabeth 
 and by Anne, there was no lack of filial respect 
 in their manner of performing it. This is at 
 no time wanting on the part of her heroines, 
 even towards those for whom it was impos- 
 sible that love should be felt. Where this 
 did exist, parental shortcomings were never 
 suffered to check it. Marianne Dashwood 
 ardently loved her mother, imprudent though 
 she had shown herself to be, and Emma 
 Woodhouse, when engaged to the man of her 
 heart, at once formed a solemn resolution 
 never to quit her father, and ' even wept 
 over the idea of it, as a sin of thought.' 
 
 We must, then, come to the conclusion 
 that Jane Austen's quick intuition had deeply 
 impressed upon her the extreme importance 
 of parental duties being well performed and 
 of the evils sure to follow if these were 
 neglected. Dogmatic she never was, but 
 her own light and dehcate touches, joined to 
 the working out of various incidents in her 
 plots, sufficiently indicate the views she held 
 on this point and give us some cause to 
 
MR. KNIGHTLEY'S OPINION . 133 
 
 suspect that, if things went wrong between 
 the two parties, her sympathies would be 
 mostly found on the side of the children, even 
 when over-indulged and, consequently, trouble- 
 some. For these she was unwilling to abandon 
 hope, and here Mr. Knightley is deputed to 
 speak her mind. When Emma looks for- 
 ward to Mrs. Weston's educating her infant 
 
 daughter in a perfect manner, since she had 
 
 had the advantage of practising first upon 
 herself — ' That is,' replied Mr. Knightley, 
 ' she will indulge her even more than she 
 did you, and believe that she does not 
 indulge her at all. It will be the only 
 difference.' 
 
 ' Poor child ! ' cried Emma, ' at that rate 
 what will become of her ? ' 
 
 ' Nothing very bad — the fate of thousands. 
 She will be disagreeable in infancy and 
 correct herself as she grows (^Ider. I am 
 losing all my bitterness against spoilt children, 
 my dearest Emma. I, who am owing all my 
 happiness to you, would it not be horrible 
 ingratitude in me to be severe on them ? ' 
 
 Jane Austen could also admit the exist- 
 ence of other influences likely to affect the 
 ultimate fate of children. She could take 
 
124 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 into consideration the child's own character 
 and the power of surrounding circumstances. 
 The young Prices, not through parental good 
 training, but in spite of its absence, prospered 
 when aided by Sir Thomas Bertram, on 
 account of ' The advantages of early hardships 
 and discipUne,' and 'The consciousness of 
 being bom to struggle and endure.' Such a 
 consciousness, meeting with a like success, 
 their efforts being in this instance encouraged 
 by their own parents, Jane may have often 
 rejoiced over when reflecting upon the 
 careers of her two sailor brothers. 
 
 ' Persuasion ' suppUes us with a very 
 different type of sailor, whose ill-doing is 
 ascribed to his own perverse character and 
 not to any neglect on the part of his parents. 
 Many readers have objected to the terms in 
 which the unlucky Dick Musgrove's history 
 and his mother's lamentations over him are 
 described ; they have been thought hard 
 and unworthy of Jane Austen's kind heart 
 and deUcate taste. One reply alone can be 
 made to this charge. Though she wrote this 
 passage, she did not publish it. On March 
 13, 1817, four months before her own death, 
 she tells her niece, Fanny Knight, ' I have a 
 
REVISION OF COMPOSITIONS 125 
 
 something ready for publication, which may 
 perhaps come out in a twelve months time.' 
 And again on March 23, ' Do not be surprised 
 at finding -Uncle Henry acquainted with my 
 having another ready for publication. I could 
 not say No when he asked me, but he knows 
 nothing more of it. You will not like it, so 
 you need not be impatient . You will, perhaps, 
 like the heroine, as she is almost too good 
 for me.' Why Fanny was not to Uke it does 
 not appear, but the tone of these remarks, 
 coupled with the author's intention of 
 keeping it laid by for a whole year, points 
 clearly in the direction of an intended revision 
 when a considerable length of time should 
 have elapsed. Her brother Henry's testi- 
 mony confirms the belief that such was her 
 usual custom. He says : ' Though in com- 
 position she was equally rapid and correct, yet 
 an invincible distrust of her own judgment 
 induced her to withhold her works from the 
 pubUc till time and many perusals had 
 satisfied her that the charm of recent com- 
 position was dissolved.' A possible allusion 
 to this practice may be found in the advice 
 she offered to her niece Anna, when the latter 
 was composing a novel : ' I hope when you 
 
126 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 have written a great deal more you will feel 
 equal to scratching out some of the past.' 
 
 The book, though called ' ready for pub- 
 lication,' in the sense, perhaps, that its final 
 page had been written, does not seem to 
 have been ready for perusal, nor as yet 
 for announcement to her frequent confidant, 
 Henry, to whom, even after his persistent 
 enquiries had forced her to confess its existence, 
 it was not to be shown at present. In another 
 way it was certainly unfinished ; it had 
 received no name. Younger generations of 
 the family learnt subsequently, through their 
 Aunt Cassandra, that this question had been 
 a good deal discussed between Jane and 
 herself, and that among several possible 
 titles, the one that seemed most likely to be 
 chosen was ' The EUiots.' Nothing, how- 
 ever, was finally settled, and Henry Austen, 
 to whose care it had been bequeathed, 
 brought it out under the name of ' Persuasion,' 
 re-naming at the same time her other work 
 left in MS. which she had called ' Catherine,' 
 but which he published as ' Northanger 
 Abbey.' Though it is possible to object to 
 tjoth titles, as overweighting either book 
 by referring to one incident or one division, 
 rather than to the entire work, criticism 
 
LAST FINISHED BOOK 127 
 
 must give way to thankfulness that we possess 
 th^m, even in a slightly imperfect condition, 
 and what the fate of one might have been 
 had its author lived longer is rendered a 
 little questionable by her words to Fanny 
 Knight in March, 1817: 'Miss Catherine is 
 put upon the shelf for the present, and I do 
 not know that she will ever come out.' Had 
 she never done so, much delight must have 
 been lost to many readers, and not a few 
 streets and terraces in Bath would have been 
 the poorer in associations for all those who 
 now love to imagine they are treading in the 
 steps of Morlands, Thorpes, and Tilneys, 
 while ' Persuasion ' has so captured some 
 hearts that their owners feel inclined to 
 assign to it the highest place of all. Never- 
 theless, when judgment is passed upon the 
 position that Jane Austen's books have won 
 as English classics, it should be remembered 
 that ' Emma ' is the last novel put forth by 
 her as a completely finished work of art ; while 
 it is open to anyone to believe that changes 
 might, and probably would, have been made 
 in her later and unpublished story had she 
 herself survived to the close of the twelve 
 months which she had allotted to it as a 
 term of silent retirement. 
 
128 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 There is still one theory, advanced by a 
 reviewer, that must be mentioned before 
 quitting the subject dealt with in this 
 chapter, as it concerns Jane Austen's per- 
 sonal experience of the relations subsist- 
 ing between parents and children. He takes 
 up a position that these, in Steventon 
 Rectory, were not pleasant, and that the 
 family circle did not contain enough union 
 and sympathy among its members for Jane 
 to have felt or witnessed much domestic 
 happiness beneath her father's roof, and 
 that on this account she hardly ever gives 
 in her books any description of a happy and 
 affectionate family party. A most extra- 
 ordinary theory indeed ! It leads us to 
 enquire how far its inventor has closely 
 studied either her books or her biographies. 
 Did he altogether forget Mrs. Dashwood and 
 her daughters — their grief at parting and 
 their eagerness for a reunion ? Or the 
 household of the John Knightleys, with its 
 master's ' strong domestic habits and all 
 sufficiency of home to himself ' ? Or the 
 return of Catherine Morland to FuUerton, 
 where, in spite of her woes as a heroine, 
 she was welcomed with such affectionate 
 eagerness that ' in the embrace of each she 
 
THE AUSTEN HOME CIRCLE 129. 
 
 found herself soothed, surrounded, caressed — 
 even happy ' ? Or the Crofts — never satisfied 
 if apart — or the Westons, the Harvilles in 
 quitting whose house ' Anne thought she 
 left great happiness behind her' — or the 
 Gardiners, and the ' fine fanuly piece ' of 
 the Christmas party at Uppercross, alive with 
 boys and girls, Mr. Musgrove with children 
 clamouring on his knees and Mrs. Musgrove 
 glancing happily round the room and observing 
 that ' After all she had gone through nothing 
 was so likely to do her good as a little quiet 
 cheerfulness at home ' ? 
 
 Whether we examine her writings or her 
 memoirs we are equally led to believe that no 
 one knew better than Jane Austen, both by 
 observation and experience, the meaning of 
 the word ' home ' in its fullest and best sense. 
 So baseless is the conjecture mentioned above 
 that we may rather say the conditions of Uf e 
 to be found in her father's house would 
 quicken her perception of the contrast afforded 
 to them by some other famihes, through an 
 absence of peace and harmony in the latter 
 between parents and children, brothers and 
 sisters. To assume that these were lacking 
 in Steventon Rectory is a most unwarrant- , 
 able~conclusion, and one that is absolutely \ 
 
130 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 opposed to the truth. Evidence on this 
 point is, happily, equally abundant and 
 convincing. Mrs. George Austen, writing 
 in 1796 to Mary Lloyd, soon to become her 
 daughter-in-law, speaks of her own and 
 her husband's heartfelt satisfaction in the 
 prospect of ' adding you to the number of 
 our very good children.' In a letter written ^ 
 more than twenty years later she explains 
 to -her sister-in-law, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, the 
 partic\ilars of her income, and dwells upon 
 the eagerness all her sons had shown, when 
 she had been left a widow in 1805, to make 
 it a comfortable one. Of her two eldest 
 she says : 'Mr. Knight (the second son) 
 has a most active mind,' a clear head, and 
 a sound judgment; he is quite a man 
 of business. That my dear James was not. 
 Classical knowledge, literary taste, and the 
 power of elegant composition he possessed 
 in the highest degree. To these Mr. Knight 
 makes no pretensions. Both equally good, 
 amiable, and sweet-tempered.' 
 
 The feehngs and the conduct of all her 
 sons on the death of their father are shown 
 in letters written to the one then absent 
 on naval duty (Captain Frank Austen) by 
 his brothers at home. Henry laments the 
 
AFFECTIONATE CHILDREN 131 
 
 loss of ' the best of Fathers and of Men/ 
 adding ' Language is so inadequate to what 
 we all feel on such a subject that you will 
 know why I prefer silence to imperfect 
 praise. The survivors are now what we 
 must all think of.' The letters that then 
 passed between the brothers on the question 
 of making a comfortable provision for their 
 mother are equally remarkable for the 
 generosity they display towards herself and 
 for the courtesy and affection they exhibit 
 towards each other. When the result was 
 finally made known to Mrs. Austen she 
 exclaimed that ' Never were children so 
 good as hers/ at the same time declining 
 to accept the whole of the income which 
 they offered her. 
 
 The author of the original ' Memoir ' 
 has indicated that if there were a family 
 fault, it lay in exactly the opposite direction 
 from that suggested by this critic. He says : 
 ' There was so much that was agreeable in this 
 family party that its members may be ex- 
 cused if they were inclined to live somewhat 
 too exclusively within it. They might see 
 in each other much to love and esteem 
 and something to admire.' To this may be 
 added, from family tradition, that of all the 
 
132 PARENTS AND CHILDREN 
 
 party, Jane was the one chiefly conscious of 
 this family tendency, and most alive to 
 the duty of struggling against it. To this 
 another testimony may be added, that of the 
 last-named writer's sister, Caroline Austen, 
 who, as a child and young girl, was often 
 at Chawton Cottage both before and 
 after her Aunt Jane's death; nor could 
 any more fitting words be found than hers 
 with which to close these ' Personal 
 Aspects of Jane Austen.' ' In the time of 
 my childhood, it was a cheerful house, my 
 uncles, one or another, frequently coming 
 for a few days, and they were all pleasant in 
 their own famihes ; I have thought since, 
 after seeing more of other households, wonder- 
 fully so. The family talk had much spirit 
 and vivacity, and it was never troubled by 
 disagreement, as it was not their habit to 
 argue with one another. There was always 
 perfect harmony amongst the brothers and 
 sisters, with firm famUy union, never broken 
 but by death, and over my Grandmother's 
 door might have been inscribed the text : 
 
 ' Behold how good and joyful a thing it is. 
 Brethren, to dwell together in unity.' 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Some additional information respecting Jane 
 Austen and the family party immediately 
 surrounding her may be acceptable to that 
 inner circle of her readers who are willing to 
 bear with a httle repetition of -facts in order 
 to glean, from original documents, a few 
 particulars not yet fully known to them. It 
 is to such readers that the following extracts 
 and remarks are offered. 
 
 The original ' Memoir,' after giving the 
 account of her funeral, closes with these 
 words : ' Her brothers went back sorrowing to 
 their several homes. They were very fond 
 and very proud of her . . , and each loved 
 afterwards to fancy a resemblance in some 
 niece or daughter of his own to the dear 
 sister -Jane, whose perfect equal they yet 
 never expected to see.' Of these nieces, 
 
 133 
 
134 APPENDIX 
 
 many were at that time so young that such 
 a resemblance ccruld develop at a later period 
 only. The three of whom she had seen most 
 were, Fanny Knight, her brother Edward's 
 eldest daughter; Anna Austen, her brother 
 James's eldest daughter, who, prior to her 
 Aunt Jane's death, had married Benjamin 
 Lefroy of Ashe (son of Madam Lefroy, 
 Jane Austen's beloved friend) ; and Anna's 
 half-sister Caroline Austen. It was of the 
 latter that their father wrote in April, 1819 : 
 ' Caroline has that playfulness of mind, united 
 with an affectionate heart, which so peculiarly 
 marked our lamented^Jane.' Fatherly par- 
 tiality did not mislead him in his high estimate 
 of this daughter. Like her Aunt Jane, she 
 had gifts both of humour and pathos, which, 
 combined with a similar originality and 
 independence of mind, made her in later 
 years a delightful companion and a charming 
 converser. Like her, also, she, in her turn, 
 became a perfect aunt to whom nephews and 
 nieces are indebted for many kindnesses, 
 one of these being the manner in which she 
 related, both by word of mouth and in writing, 
 family history and personal reminiscences. 
 One of these gives an account of her elder 
 
ANNA AUSTEN'S WEDDING 135 
 
 sister's wedding.^ This event was deeply 
 interesting to her grandmother, Mrs. Austen, 
 and to her aunts, Cassandra and Jane, the 
 first-named sending good wishes to the bride, 
 both in prose and verse. Nevertheless, all 
 three stayed quietly at home, making no 
 attempt to attend the ceremony, though 
 Steventon and Chawton are but sixteen miles 
 apart. It is true that sixteen miles of in- 
 different road then formed a considerable 
 barrier in wintry weather for ladies who 
 possessed no carriage and horses, but their 
 absence from the wedding is a fresh proof 
 of the customary simplicity^ of procedure on 
 these occasions, such as we meet with in 
 ' Mansfield Park ' and in ' Emma,' which 
 strongly characterised Anna Austen's wed- 
 ding day. 
 
 Caroline Austen writes : ' On the 8th 
 November, 1814, my sister was married to 
 Benjamin Lefroy, Esq. He had not then 
 taken orders, although of the full age that 
 was necessary. Weddings were then usually 
 very quiet. The old fashion of festivity 
 and publicity had quite gone by, and was 
 
 ^ Published by permission in Miss Hill's book, Jane 
 Austen's Homes and Friends. 
 
136 APPENDIX 
 
 universally condemned as showing the bad 
 taste of former generations. But it revived 
 again, and no protest is now ever heard 
 against it. My Sister's wedding was cer- 
 tainly in the extreme of quietness ; yet 
 not so as to be in any way remarked upon, 
 or censured, and this was the order of the 
 day : The Bridegroom came from Ashe 
 Rectory, where he had hitherto Uved with 
 his Brother; and Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy (his 
 Brother and Sister-in-law) came with him, 
 as well as another brother, Mr. Edward 
 Lefroy. Anne Lefroy, the eldest little girl, 
 was one of the Bridemaids and I was the 
 other. My Brother came from Winchester - 
 that morhing, but was to stay only a few 
 hours. We in the house had a shght early 
 breakfast upstairs ; and between nine and 
 ten the Bride, my Mother, Mrs. Lefroy, Anne 
 and myself, were taken to Church in our 
 carriage; all the gentlemen walked. The 
 weather was duU and cloudy but it did not 
 actually rain. The season of the year, the 
 unfrequented road of half a mQe to the lonely 
 old Church, the grey light within of a 
 November morning, making its way through 
 the narrow windows, no stove to give warmth, 
 no flowers to give colour and brightness, no 
 
OLD-FASHIONED CUSTOMS 137 
 
 friends, high or low, to offer their good wishes — 
 and so to claim some interest in the great 
 event of the day — all these circumstances 
 and deficiencies must, I think, have given a 
 gloomy air to our Wedding. Mr. Lefroy 
 read the service. My father gave his daughter 
 away. The Clerk, of course, was there, though 
 I do not particularly remember him, but I 
 am quite sure there was no one else in the 
 Church. Nor was anyone asked to the 
 Breakfast, to which we sat down as soon as 
 we got back. I do not think this idea of 
 sadness struck ihe at the time. The bustle 
 in the house and all the preparations had 
 excited me, and it seemed to me a festivity 
 from beginning to end. 
 
 ' The Breakfast was such as best Breakfasts 
 then were. Some variety of bread, hot rolls, 
 buttered toast, tongue or ham, and eggs. 
 The addition of Chocolate at one end of the 
 table and the Wedding Cake in the middle 
 marked the speciality of the day. I and 
 Anne Lefroy, nine and six years old, wore 
 white frocks and had white ribband on our 
 straw bonnets, which I suppose were new 
 for the occasion. Soon after breakfast the 
 Bride and Bridfegroom departed. They had 
 a long day's journey before them to Hendon. 
 
138 APPENDIX 
 
 The other Lefroys went home, and in the after- 
 noon my Mother and I went to Chawton, to 
 stay at the Great House, then occupied by 
 my Uncle Captain (Francis) Austen and his 
 large family. My Father stayed behind for 
 a few days and then joined us. The servants 
 had cake and wine in the evening, and Mr. 
 Digweed walked down to keep my father 
 company. Such were the Wedding festivities 
 of Steventon in 1814 ! ' 
 
 The dress of the bride has been recorded 
 by one of her own daughters. ' She wore 
 a dress of fine white muslin, and over it a 
 soft silk shawl, white, shot with primrose, 
 with embossed white satin flowers and very 
 handsome fringe, and on her head a small 
 cap to match, trimmed with lace, and the 
 delicate yellow tints must have been most 
 becoming to her bright brown hair, hazel 
 eyes, and sunny, clear complexion.' The 
 bride was then twenty-one, and was con- 
 sidered to be the prettiest girl in the neigh- 
 bourhood, the most striking feature of her 
 face being the widely-opened large dark 
 eyes, which retained their brilliant beauty 
 to the close of a long life. It was necessary 
 for the bridal pair to start early that Bagshot 
 
LIFE AT CHAWTON COTTAGE 139 
 
 Heath, a resort of highwaymen, should be 
 passed over in daylight. Jane Austen went 
 up to her brother Henry's house in London 
 a few days later, and had then the satis- 
 faction of driving out to Hendon to visit 
 her niece as a bride.^ Anna and her husband 
 afterwards returned from Hampstead to 
 live in a house called ' Wyards,' within a 
 walk of Chawton Village, and frequent com- 
 munication with her relations in that place 
 could thus be easily maintained. 
 
 CAROLINE AUSTEN ON THE LIFE AT CHAWTON 
 COTTAGE 
 
 Written in 1867 
 
 ' I have been told the house had formerly 
 been an Inn, and it was well placed for such a 
 purpose, just where the road from Winchester 
 comes into the London and Gosport road. 
 The front door opened on the road ; a very 
 narrow enclosure on each side protected 
 the house from possible shock of any run- 
 away vehicle. A good-sized entrance and 
 two parlours, called dining and drawing-room, 
 made up the length of the house, all intended 
 originally to look on the road, but the large 
 
 1 Cf. Life and Letters, Chap. XIX, p. 361. 
 
140 APPENDIX 
 
 drawing-room window was blocked up and 
 turned into a bookcase when Mrs. Austen 
 took possession, and another was opened at 
 the side which gave to view only turf and 
 trees. A high wooden fence shut out the 
 road (to Winchester) all tlfe length of the 
 Uttle domain, and trees were planted inside 
 to form a shrubbery walk which, carried 
 round the enclosure, gave a very sufl&cient 
 space for exercise. You did not feel cramped 
 for room, and there was a pleasant irregular 
 mixture of hedgerow and grass and gravel 
 walk, and long grass for mowing, and 
 Orchard, which I imagine arose from two 
 or three little enclosures having been thrown 
 together and arranged as best might be for 
 ladies' occupation. There was, besides, a good 
 kitchen garden ; large and many out bmldings, 
 not much occupied. All this affluence of 
 space was very delightful to children, and I 
 have no doubt added considerably to the 
 pleasure of a visit. Everything, indoors 
 and out, was well kept, the house was well 
 furnished, and it was altogether a comfortable 
 and ladylike establishment, though I beUeve 
 the means which supported it were but small. 
 The house was quite as good as the generahty 
 
TRAFFIC THROUGH CHAWTON 141 
 
 of Parsonage Houses then were, and much 
 in the same old style, the ceilings low and 
 roughly finished, some bedrooms very small, 
 none very large, but in number sufiicient 
 to accommodate the inmates and several 
 guests. The dining-room could not be made 
 to look anywhere but on the road, and there 
 my Grandmother often sat for an hour or 
 two in the morning, with her work or her 
 writing, cheered by its sunny aspect and by 
 the stirring scene it afforded. I believe the 
 close vicinity of the road was no more an 
 evil to her than it was to her grandchildren. 
 CoUyer's daily coach with six horses was a 
 sight to see ! — and most delightful was it 
 to a child to have the awful stillness of night 
 frequently broken by the noise of passing 
 carriages, which seemed sometimes even to 
 shake the bed. The village of Chawton has, 
 of course, long since been tranquillised ; it 
 is no more a great thoroughfare. ... As 
 to my Aunt Jane's personal appearance, hers 
 was the first face that I can remember 
 thinking pretty, not that I used that word 
 to myself, but I know I looked at her with 
 admiration. Her face was rather round than 
 long ; she had a bright, but not a pink, colour. 
 
142 APPENDIX 
 
 a clear, brown complexion.l and very good 
 
 hazel eyes. She was not, I believe, an absolute 
 
 beauty, but before she left Steventon she 
 
 was established as a very pretty girl in the 
 
 opinion of most of her neighbours, as I learnt 
 
 afterwards from some of those who still 
 
 remained. Her hair, a darkish brown, curled 
 
 naturally in short curls round her face (for 
 
 then ringlets were not). She always wore 
 
 a cap. Such was the custom with ladies 
 
 who were not quite young — at least of a 
 
 morning — but I never saw her without one. 
 
 My Aunts were particularly neat ; they held 
 
 all untidy ways in great dis-esteem. Aunt 
 
 Jane began the day with music, for which I 
 
 conclude she had a natural taste, as she thus 
 
 kept it up, though she had no one to teach, 
 
 and was never induced (as I have heard) 
 
 to play in Company, and none of her family 
 
 cared much for it. I suppose that she might 
 
 not trouble them she chose her practising 
 
 time before breakfast, when she could have 
 
 the room to herself. She practised regularly 
 
 every morning. She played very pretty tunes, 
 
 I thought, and I liked to stand by her and 
 
 listen to her. Much that she played was from 
 
 Manuscript copies written out by herself. ^ . ■ 
 
DAILY LIFE 143 
 
 At 9 o'clock she made breakfast— that was 
 her part of the household work. The tea 
 and sugar stores were under her charge — 
 and the wine. Aunt Cassandra did all the 
 rest, for my Grandmother had suffered herself 
 to be superseded by her daughters before I 
 can remember, and soon after she ceased even 
 to sit at the head of the table. 
 
 ' I don't believe Aunt Jane observed any 
 particular method in parcelling out her day, 
 but I think she generally sat in the drawing- 
 room till luncheon, when visitors were there, 
 chiefly at work. She was fond of work, and 
 was a great adept at overcast and satin-stitch — 
 the peculiar delight of that day. She was 
 wonderfully successful with cup and ball, and 
 foiuid a resource sometimes in that simple 
 game when she was suffering from weak eyes 
 and could not work or read for long together. 
 After luncheon my Aunts generally walked 
 out ; sometimes they went to Alton for 
 shopping, often, one or the other of them to 
 the " Great House," as it was then called, in 
 order, when a brother was inhabiting it, to 
 make a visit ; or, if the house were standing 
 empty, they liked to stroll about the grounds, 
 sometimes to Chawton Park, a noble beech 
 
144 APPENDIX 
 
 wood, just within a walk, and sometimes — 
 but that was rarely — to call on a neighbour. 
 They had no carriage and their visitings did 
 not extend far. There were a few families 
 living in the village, but no great intimacy 
 was kept up with any of them ; they were on 
 friendly, but rather distant, terms with all. 
 Yet I am sure my Aunt Jane had a regard 
 for her neighbours, and felt a kindly interest 
 in their proceedings. She liked immensely 
 to hear all about them. They sometimes 
 served for her amusement, but it was her 
 own nonsense that gave zest to the gossip. 
 She never turned them into ridicule ; she was 
 as far as possible from being censorious or 
 satirical ; she never abused them or " quizzed ' ' 
 them. That was the word of the day — an 
 ugly one, now obsolete — and the ugly practice 
 which it bespoke is far less prevalent now, 
 under any name, than it was then. The 
 laugh she occasionally raised was by imagining 
 for her neighbours impossible contingencies, by 
 relating in prose or verse some trifling incident, 
 coloured to her own fancy, or in writing a 
 history of what they had said or done, thitt 
 could deceive nobody. My Aunt must have 
 spent much time in writing. Her desk lived 
 
FAMILY CORRESPONDENCE 145 
 
 in the drawing-room ; I often saw her writing 
 letters on it, and I beUeve she wrote much 
 of her novels in the same way, sitting with 
 her family when they were quite alone, but 
 I never saw any manuscript of that sort in 
 progress ' (Caroline may, however, have done 
 so without knowing it, as it was her Aunt's 
 habit to write them on note paper, the better 
 to be able to cover them with blotting paper 
 if a visitor were shown in). ' She wrote very 
 fully to her brothers when they were at sea, 
 and she corresponded with many others of the 
 family. There is nothing in these letters 
 which / have seen that would be acceptable 
 to the public. They were very well expressed, 
 and they must have been very interesting to 
 those who received them, but they detailed 
 chiefly home and family events and she seldom 
 committed herself even to any opinion, so 
 that to strangers there could be no transcript 
 of her mind ; they would not feel that they 
 knew her any the better for having read them. 
 They were rather overcautious for excellence. 
 Her letters to Aunt Cassandra were, I daresay, 
 open and confidential. My Aunt looked them 
 over and burnt the greater part as she told 
 me three or four years before her own death. 
 
146 APPENDIX 
 
 She left or gave some as legacies to the nieces, 
 but of those that I have seen several had 
 portions cut out.' (The ' Braboume letters ' 
 did not appear during this writer's life-time.) 
 ' When staying at Chawton, if my two cousins, 
 Mary Jane andCassy Austen, were there, we 
 often had amusements in which my Aunt 
 was very helpful. She was the one to whom 
 we always looked for help. She would furnish 
 us with what we wanted from her wardrobe 
 and she would often be the entertaining visitor 
 in our make-beUeve house. She amxised us 
 in various ways, once, I remember, in giving 
 a conversation, as between myseli and my two 
 cousins, supposed to be grown up, the day 
 after a ball. She was considered to read aloud 
 remarkably well. I did not often hear her, 
 but once I knew her take up a volume of 
 Evelina and read a few pages of " Mr. Smith 
 and the Branghtons," and I thought it was 
 like a play. She had a very good speaking 
 voice. This was the opinion of her contem- 
 poraries and though I did not then think of 
 it as a p>erfection, or even hear it observed 
 upon, yet its tones have never been forgotten. 
 I can recall them even now, and I know they 
 were very pleasant. Aunt Jane was a very 
 
JANE AND CASSANDRA 147 
 
 affectionate sister to all her brothers. One of 
 them in particular (Henry) was her especial 
 pride and delight, but of all her family her 
 nearest and dearest throughout her whole life 
 was her only sister, Cassandra. Aunt Cas- 
 sandra was the elder by three or four years, 
 and the habit of looking up to her, begun in 
 childhood, seemed always to continue. When 
 I was a little girl, Aunt Jane would frequently 
 say to me, if opportunity offered, that Aunt 
 Cassandra could teach everything much better 
 than she could — Aunt Cassandra knew more — 
 Aunt Cassandra could tell me better whatever 
 I wanted to know — all of which I received 
 in respectful silence. Perhaps she thought 
 my mind wanted a bias in that direction, but 
 I truly believe that she did always really 
 think of her sister as the superior to herself. 
 . . . The most perfect confidence and affection 
 ever subsisted between them, and great and 
 lasting was the sorrow of the survivor when 
 the final separation was made.' 
 
 The testimony given by Caroline's elder 
 sister Anna is entirely to the same effect. 
 ' Aunt Cassandra's loss in her sister was great 
 indeed, and most truly a loss never to be 
 repaired. They were everything to each 
 
148 APPENDIX 
 
 other. They seemed to lead a Ufe to them- 
 selves within the general family Ufe which was 
 shared only by each other. I will not say 
 their true, but their full, feelings and opinions 
 were known only to themselves. They alone 
 fully understood what each had suffered and 
 felt and thought. Yet they had such a 
 gift of reticence that the secrets of their 
 respective friends were never betrayed to 
 each other. They were thoroughly trust- 
 worthy, and the young niece who brought her 
 troubles to Aunt Jane for advice and sym- 
 pathy knew she could depend absolutely on 
 heir silence, even to her sister.' 
 
 When writing to her brother, Capt. Frank 
 Austen,then stationed in the Baltic,September, 
 1813, Jane refers to the fact of her author- 
 ship of ' Sense and Sensibility * and ' Pride and 
 Prejudice' having been revealed by their 
 brother Henry, and says : ' I know it is aU 
 done from affection and^partiaUty, but at the 
 same time let me here again express to you 
 and Mary my sense of the superior kindness 
 which you have shoAvn on the occasion in 
 doing what I wished. I am tr5dng to harden 
 
VERSES FROM A NEPHEW 149 
 
 myself. After all, what a trifle it is, in all its 
 bearings, to the really important points of 
 one's existence— even in this worid,' She 
 must have had an equally keen sense of 
 gratitude to her eldest brother James and 
 his wife (another Mary) for the strictly 
 honourable silence they had preserved on 
 the subject, in spite of what must have been 
 a strong temptation to act otherwise. Their 
 son Edward, then a boy at Winchester, 
 had read both these books with great 
 delight, but had never been told that his 
 Aunt Jane had written them. Now, how- 
 ever, further silence was needless, and he has 
 left a record of his feelings, on hearing the 
 great news, in the following lines. Though 
 written by a boy not yet quite fifteen years 
 old, they are worth reading, if only to show 
 the happy and intimate terms on which 
 he and his Aunt Jane stood towards each 
 other : — 
 
 To Miss J. Austen 
 
 'No words can express, my dear Aunt, my 
 
 surprise 
 Or make you conceive how I opened my 
 eyes, 
 
ISO APPENDIX 
 
 Like a pig Butcher Pile has just struck with 
 
 his knife. 
 When I heard for the very first time in my 
 
 Ufe 
 That I had the honour to have a relation 
 Whose works were dispersed through the 
 
 whole of the nation. 
 I assure you, however, I'm terribly glad ; 
 Oh dear ! just to think (and the thought 
 
 drives me mad) 
 That dear Mrs. Jennings's good-natured 
 
 strain 
 Was really the produce of your witty brain. 
 That you made the Middletons, Dashwoods, 
 
 and all. 
 And that you (not young Ferrars) found out 
 
 that a ball 
 May be given in cottages, never so small. 
 And though Mr. Collias, so grateful for all. 
 Will Lady de Bourgh his dear Patroness 
 
 call, 
 'Tis to your ingenuity really he owed 
 His Hving, his wife, and his humble abode. 
 Now if you will take your poor nephew's 
 
 advice. 
 Your works to Sir William pray send in a 
 
 trice. 
 
A NEW TALE 151 
 
 If he'll undertake to some grandees to show 
 
 it. 
 By whose means at last the Prince Regent 
 
 might know it, 
 For I'm sure if he did, in reward for your 
 
 tale, 
 He'd make you a countess at least, without 
 
 fail. 
 And indeed if the Princess should lose her 
 
 dear hfe 
 You might have a good chance of becoming 
 
 his wife.' 
 
 ' Oh ! Journal. Oh ! Journal, 
 Thou torment diurnal. 
 No Hydra so hopeless to slay ! 
 I demoHsh one head. 
 Before going to bed. 
 And another starts up the next day ! ' 
 
 MS. 
 
 These lines, composed about ninety years 
 ago, recurred involuntarily to the mind of 
 the present writer before this book was 
 finished. One reason for undertaking the 
 work was a desire to put an end if possible 
 to various misstatements made by com- 
 
152 APPENDIX 
 
 mentators respecting Jane Austen and her 
 surroundings. To members of her own 
 family some of these mistakes seem hardly 
 excusable, but in the conviction that they 
 were not ' set down in mahce,' but only in 
 haste, or in an unconscious desire to support 
 some pre-conceived theory, it was hoped 
 that by drawing together in a coimected 
 whole "a variety of facts scattered through- 
 out Jane Austen's biographies, all serious 
 misrepresentations of her home, her family, 
 and her own nature would be avoided in 
 the future. But quite suddenly a new and 
 strange tale respecting her has started up. 
 It appears in an interesting book,^ recently 
 published, and as it may be widely read such 
 a story cannot be left unnoticed. Miss 
 Ethel Smyth, the authoress, who had a 
 bachelor great uncle, Wm. Smyth, Master 
 of Peterhouse, Cambridge, says : ' My father 
 used to tell an odd Uttle story about his 
 imcle and Jane Austen, who were close friends. 
 It appears that the authoress, wishing to 
 get at his real opinion of one of her novels, 
 put on a friend to pump him, concealing 
 herself meanwhile behind a curtain. The 
 
 * Impressions that Remained, by Ethel Sni3rth, Mus. Doc. 
 (Longmans & Co.) 
 
JANE AUSTEN'S SENSE OF HONOUR 153 
 
 verdict was luckily all that could be desired 
 ■ till the Professor remarked he was not quite 
 certain as to her orthodoxy, having detected 
 slight Unitarian leanings in her later works, 
 upon which Jane Austen burst forth from 
 her hiding place, indignantly crying : "That's 
 not true ! " One may question whether any 
 degree of intimacy condones such a stratagem, 
 but no doubt she knew her man.' Miss 
 Smyth describes this as ' a curious sidelight 
 on an elusive personaUty.' 
 
 For more than one reason this story 
 cannot be accepted as accurate. That Dr. 
 Smyth should discover in either of her ' later 
 works,' ' Mansfield Park ' and ' Emma,' 
 Unitarian leanings, may surprise us, but it 
 would be far more surprising could we believe 
 that Jane Austen, with her high sense of 
 honour, had chosen to imitate some of her own 
 least worthy characters, the two Miss Steeles, 
 by concealing herself in order to overhear 
 anything concerning herself which she 
 beUeved the speaker would have desired 
 she should not hear. Elinor Dashwood's 
 displeasure when she finds that Nancy Steele 
 has been behaving in this way, cannot be 
 forgotten by the readers of ' Sense and 
 Sensibility.' Dr. Smyth may have been 
 
154 APPENDIX 
 
 well acquainted with Jane Austen, though, 
 as his name never appears in any extant 
 letters, it must be uncertain whether he 
 could have been ' a close friend ' of one who 
 did not easily make such friends. But how- 
 ever well she may have known him, nothing 
 would in her eyes have excused such conduct, 
 nor will the hasty action and language here 
 imputed to her appear, to those who have 
 studied her books and her character, to bear 
 any resemblance to her own. There are 
 also other reasons for declining to accept 
 the story -as it now stands. ' Emma ' was 
 pubhshed in December, 1815, and in the same 
 month Jane Austen retmned from London 
 to her home at Chawton, which she finally 
 quitted for her last journey to Winchester, 
 May 23, 1817. The intervening seventeen 
 months brought severe trial and distress 
 to all the George Austens. Henry was 
 declared a bankrupt in March, 1816, having 
 only just recovered, in January, 1815, from 
 a three months' Ulness, in the course of which 
 his hfe had been despaired of. Jane had- 
 nursed him all the time, at the expense, as 
 her relations afterwards beheved, of her own 
 health and strength. These began to fail 
 
PROBABLE MISTAKES 155 
 
 her, and she consulted a physician in London 
 before returning home, not yet as an avowed, 
 but as an incipient, invalid, who was depend- 
 ing more and more exclusively upon her 
 immediate family for society.^ 
 
 She scarcely left her home after this 
 return, but she once paid a visit to old 
 friends in Berkshire (who noticed with con- 
 cern that a change had taken place in her 
 health and bearing), and she once went to 
 Cheltenham in the vain hope of deriving 
 benefit from its waters. Cheltenham is the 
 only place where she might have fallen in 
 with. Dr. Sm3rth after * Emma ' was pub- 
 lished ; but if such a meeting occurred her 
 state of depression and weakness makes it 
 doubly unlikely she would lay a trap for a 
 friend such as she had denounced many 
 years before in one of her earUest books. 
 We can only conclude that whoever may 
 have attempted to deceive Dr. Smyth in 
 this way it could not at any time, and 
 least of all at that time, have been Jane 
 Austen, who never had anything in common 
 with the tricks of the Miss Steeles of the 
 hoydenish manners of Lydia Bennet. Collect- 
 
 1 Life and Letters, Chap. XX. 
 
156 APPENDIX 
 
 ing the opinions of those who read her 
 novels was a great entertainment to her, 
 and there is a long Ust of such verdicts, 
 both good and bad, on ' Emma ' given in 
 her biography.^ In this list Dr. Smyth's 
 name does not appear. It is, however, 
 possible that an attempt to obtain his opinion, 
 in the manner described above, was made 
 by some common friend, so intimately 
 acquainted with Dr. Sm5^h as to make the 
 artifice appear permissible, since it would 
 relate to a third person only. 
 
 At the close of the original ' Memoir ' 
 its author, after correcting a complete mistake 
 made by Miss Mitford respecting Jane Austen 
 which she had given on her mother's 
 authority, adds these words which may 
 very well be quoted here : ' AU persons 
 who undertake to narrate from hearsay things 
 which are supposed to have taken place 
 before they were bom, are Uable to error, 
 and are apt to call in imagination to the aid 
 of memory : and hence it arises that many 
 a fancy piece has been substituted for genuine 
 history.' 
 
 ' Life and Letters. Chap. XVIII. 
 
CHARADES 
 
 WRITTEN A HUNDRED YEARS AGO BY JANE 
 AUSTEN AND HER FAMILY 
 
 It is hoped that these old-fashioned charades and 
 conundrums possess a degree of merit sufficient to 
 afford entertainment to any persons inclined to take 
 pleasure in this kind of amusement, and, more 
 especially, that they may interest that inner circle 
 of readers who love the name of Jane Austen. 
 
 It is not as a celebrated writer that she appears 
 in these pages, but as one of a family group gathered 
 round the fireside at Steventon Rectory, Chawton 
 Manor House, or Godmersham Park, to enliven the 
 long evenings of a hundred years ago by merry 
 verses and happy, careless inventions of the moment, 
 such as flowed without difficulty from the lively minds 
 and ready pens of those amongst whom she lived. 
 
 Three of these charades are by Jane herself, and 
 even if her name did not appear beneath them their 
 authorship might possibly have been apparent to 
 those already acquainted with the playful exaggera- 
 tions and sparkling nonsense in which she some- 
 times loved to indulge when writing with perfect 
 unrestraint to her sister and other relations. In 
 all work intended for the public eye these had to 
 be kept within due bounds ; we find nothing but 
 
 157 
 
158 CHARADES 
 
 the soberest decorum in the charade laid long ago 
 upon the table at Hartfield, and transcribed by 
 Emma into that thin quarto of hot-pressed paper 
 in which Harriet was making ' her only mental 
 provision for the evening of life.' 
 
 The habit of writing charades seems to have 
 been general in the Austen family. Only one by her 
 father survives, but there are several by her mother, 
 Cassandra Leigh by birth, who was well gifted with — 
 to use a term of her own — ' sprack wit . ' Cassandra's 
 brother, James Leigh, who inherited the estate of 
 North Leigh in Oxfordshire from the Perrots, and 
 added their name to his own, was noted in the family 
 as a writer of good charades, and four of his lead 
 the way in this little collection. They may have 
 been composed by him in his young days at Bath, 
 in which gay and fashionable resort he and his wife 
 were often to be found, or at his country home. 
 Scarlets, in Berkshire, where as an older man he 
 passed most of his time. 
 
 All the other charades come from the pens of 
 three generations of Austens, and are inserted 
 according to the ages of the writers. Next in order 
 to the charades by Jane's parents come those of 
 her eldest brother, James, who on his father's death 
 succeeded to the family living of Steventon, Hants ; 
 then one by her brother Henry, a brilliant, versatile 
 member of the family party. The next is by her 
 sister, her second self, Cassandra ; and the succeeding 
 one by Francis, the elder of her two sailor brothers, 
 who survived all the rest of his generation and died 
 as Sir Francis Austen, Admiral of the Fleet, in 1865, 
 
CHARADES 159 
 
 aged ninety-two. Jane's own charades follow next 
 in Order. Two of her brothers are not represented 
 here, Edward Austen, afterwards Edward Knight, 
 and Charles, the youngest of the family. The last 
 two charades are by a nephew, who, being nearly 
 nineteen at the time of her death in July, 1817, and 
 well able to use his pen before that time, can claim 
 a place among the Steventon writers, even though 
 his charades may possibly date from the com- 
 paratively modern period of only seventy or eighty 
 years ago. 
 
 The key to No. 5, the only one of her father's 
 we possess, was long lost, and many accomplished 
 charade-guessers tried in vain to recover the mean- 
 ing, which he had hidden with much graceful 
 subtilty. It was at last discovered not very long 
 ago by his great-great-grandson, the late William 
 Chambers Lefroy, Esq., of Goldings, Basingstoke. 
 
 The accompanying portraits are taken from 
 family miniatures. That of Jane Austen and the 
 engraving of her home at Steventon Rectory are 
 reproduced, by the kind permission of Mr. Richard 
 Bentley, from her Memoir published by his father 
 in 1870. Most sincere thanks are due to Miss Ellen 
 G. Hill, of Inverleith House, Hampstead, to whose 
 talent and kindness we owe the illustrations she has 
 been so good as to furnish for two of the charades. 
 Our gratitude is only increased by the knowledge 
 that it has been to her, in every sense of the words, 
 a labour of love. 
 June, 1895. 
 
i6o ■ CHARADES 
 
 Two brothers, wisely kept apart, together are em- 
 ployed. 
 
 Though to one purpose both are bent, each takes a 
 different side. 
 
 To us nor heads nor mouths belong, yet plain our 
 tongues appear, 
 
 With them we never speak a word, without them use- 
 less are. 
 
 In blood and wounds we deal, yet good in temper we 
 are proved ; 
 
 We are from passion always free, yet oft in anger 
 moved. 
 
 We travel much, yet prisoners are, and close confined 
 to boot, 
 
 Can with the swiftest horse keep pace, yet always go 
 on foot. 
 
 James Leigh Perrot. 
 
 II 
 
 A HEAD and mouth I have, but — ^what's the wonder— 
 
 My head and mouth are very far asunder. 
 
 In at my mouth each day what I receive. 
 
 Without emetics, back again I give. 
 
 Eyes I have none, yet never miss my way ; 
 
 I have no legs, yet quickly run away. 
 
 With one hint more enough will sure be said, 
 
 I always travel, always keep my bed. 
 
 James Leigh Perrot. 
 
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 ■%i*\ 
 
 ^A 
 
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 V,"iT 
 
CHARADES i6i 
 
 III 
 
 In confinement I'm chained every day, 
 Yet my ellemies need not be crowing. 
 To my chain I have always a key, 
 , And iio prison can keep me fronl going. 
 
 Small and weak are my hands I allow. 
 Yet for strikin g my character's great. 
 
 Though ruined by one fatal blow, 
 My strokes, if hard pressed, I repeat. 
 
 I have neither mouth, eye, nor ear. 
 Yet I always keep„tiijifi_as I sing. 
 
 Change of season I never need fear, 
 Though my being depends on the sprinj 
 
 Would you wish, if these hints are too few, 
 One glimpse of my figure to catch ? 
 
 Look round ! I shall soon be in view 
 If you have but your eyes on the watch, 
 
 James Leigh Perrot 
 
 IV 
 
 Though low is my station. 
 
 The Chief in the Nation 
 On me for support oft depend ; 
 
 Young and old, strong and weak. 
 
 My assistance all seek, 
 Yet all -turn their backs on their friend. 
 
i62 CHARADES 
 
 At the first rout in Town 
 
 Every Duchess will own 
 My company not a disgrace ; 
 
 Yet at each rout you'll find 
 
 I am still left behind, 
 And to everyone forced to give place. 
 
 Without bribe or treat, 
 
 I have always a seat 
 In the Chapel so famed of St. Stephen ; 
 
 There I lean to no side. 
 
 With no party divide, 
 But keep myself steady and even. 
 
 Each debate I attend 
 
 From beginning to end. 
 Yet I seem neither weary nor weaker ; 
 
 In the house every day 
 
 Not a word do I say. 
 Yet in me you behold a good speaker. 
 
 James Leigh Perrot. 
 
 Without me, divided, fair ladies, I ween. 
 At a ball or a concert you'll never be seen. 
 
 You must do me together, or safely I'd swear, 
 Whatever your carriage, you'll never get there. 
 
 George Austen. 
 
CHARADES 163 
 
 VI 
 
 Sometimes I am bright, sometimes covered with 
 soot, 
 
 I'm of very great use at a feast ; 
 I am often applied to the right or left foot ; 
 
 I'm a Fish, I'm a Boy, I'm a Beast. 
 
 Cassandra Austen (Senior). 
 
 VII 
 
 My first, when good, may claim another ; 
 My second water cannot smother ; 
 My whole stands in the way before ye, 
 And puts a stop to speed and hurry. 
 
 Cassandra Austen (Senior). 
 
 vm 
 
 My first implies mirth, and my second reflection. 
 
 If my whole you divide in a proper direction. 
 
 It will tell you your fortune and answer your 
 
 question. 
 
 Cassandra Austen (Senior). 
 
 M2 
 
i64 CHARADES 
 
 IX 
 
 , Singly to possess my charms. 
 Soldiers, fearless, rush to arms; 
 Lawyers to their briefs apply. 
 Politicians scheme and he ; 
 Disr^arding toil and scars. 
 And when they've gained me — ^bless their stars ! 
 
 But when joined with any other. 
 Though it be a very brotiier, 
 AH our glory's banished quite. 
 We are then kept out of sight. 
 
 Modest ladies scarce will name us. 
 Though we made one lady famous. 
 Yet guess for once our name aright. 
 And when you find us, keep us tight. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
 X 
 
 In my first, that he may not be tardy and late 
 My second to do, and make nobody wait, 
 
 A curate oft crosses the plain ; 
 But if to my whole he should ever advance. 
 To me it appears an improbable chance 
 
 That he'U ever do either again. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
CHARADES 165 
 
 XI 
 
 By all prudent folk he a rash man is reckoned 
 Who, before he has gotten my first, takes my second. 
 Yet my first will afford him but Uttle delight 
 To the name of my whole if my second's no right. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
 XII 
 
 Divided, of an ancient house am I 
 
 A long, and dark, and sometimes useless story ; 
 
 United, I declare the station high 
 
 Of those who best support old England's glory. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
 XIII 
 
 My first a horseman's dire disgrace would tell 
 
 If it were only longer by an ell ; 
 
 My next, if strong enough and not too short, 
 
 Win always prove old age's best support ; 
 
 But much I doubt if any living wight 
 
 Could well support my whole for one short night. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
i66 CHARADES 
 
 XIV 
 
 If there be truth in proverbs old, my first, 
 Though best of servants, is of masters worst ; 
 Ruin unUmited my second brings ; 
 Then, flushed with triumph, knaves exult o'er 
 
 kings; 
 My whole a different scene, more welcome, gave, 
 Saw kings victorious, and a vanquished knave. 
 
 James Austen. 
 
 XV 
 
 I WITH a Footboy once was curst. 
 Whose name when shortened made my first. 
 He an unndy rogue was reckoned 
 And in the house oft raised my second. 
 My whole stands high in Usts of fame, 
 Exalting e'en great Chatham's name. 
 
 Henry Austen. 
 
 XVI 
 
 Should you chance to suffer thirst 
 Turn my second to my first ; 
 My whole is in the garden dug. 
 And may be fairly called a drug. 
 
 Cassandra Elizabeth Austen. 
 
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 The Young Girl of Spirit. 
 
CHARADES 167 
 
 XVII 
 
 By my first you may travel with safety and speed. 
 Though many dislike the conveyance indeed ; 
 
 My second no woman can well be. 
 My whole takes a change several times in a year 
 Hot and cold, wet and dry, benignant, severe. 
 
 What am I, fair lady, pray teU me ? 
 
 Francis William Austen. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit, 
 And my second confines her to finish the piece. 
 
 How hard is her fate ! but how great is her merit 
 If by taking my whole she effect her release! 
 
 Jane Austen. 
 
 XIX 
 
 Divided, I'm a gentleman 
 In pubUc deeds and powers ; 
 
 United, I'm a monster, who 
 That gentleman devours. 
 
 Jane Austen. 
 
i68,, CHARADES 
 
 XX 
 
 You may lie on my first by the side of a stream. 
 And my second compose to the n5miph you adore, 
 
 But if, when you've none of my whole, her esteem 
 And affection diminish — ^think of her no more ! 
 
 Jane Austen. 
 
 XXI 
 
 Shake my first, and to you in return it will give 
 
 A good shake, perhaps rather too rough. 
 If you suffer my second a twelvemonth to live 
 
 You will find it grown quite big enough. 
 My whole stands all day with its back to the wall, 
 
 A sad gossip as ever you'll meet. 
 Knows the first of each robbery, concert, or ball, 
 
 And tells every soul in the street. 
 
 James Edward Austen (Leigh). 
 
 XXII 
 
 My first to aid the works of man 
 
 From heaven a present came. 
 And yet this gift, do what he can. 
 
 He cannot catch nor tame. 
 
 For now 'tis on the mountain's brow. 
 
 And now 'tis on the wave. 
 Now sighs in Beauty's bower, and now 
 
 Howls o'er the maniac's grave. 
 
CHARADES 169 
 
 My second, like my first, I'm sure 
 
 From heaven its essence drew 
 As soft, as fragrant, and as pure ; 
 
 Say not, as changeful too ! 
 
 My whole explores earth's deepest stores. 
 
 And draws exhaustless up 
 The purest draught that e'er is quaffed 
 
 From mortal's varying cup. 
 
 James Edward Austen (Leigh). 
 
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 53 
 
 
KEY 
 
 I. Pair of Spurs. 
 II. River. 
 
 III. Repeating Watch. 
 
 IV. Chair. 
 V. A Light. 
 
 VI. Jack. 
 VII. Turnpike. 
 VIII. Merry-thought. 
 IX. Garter(s). 
 X. Canterbury. 
 XL Housewife. 
 
 XII. Aloft. 
 
 XIII. Falstaa. 
 
 XIV. Waterloo.* 
 XV. Patriot. 
 
 XVI. Liquorice.^ 
 XVII. Season. 
 XVIII. Hemlock, 
 
 XIX. Agent. 
 
 XX. Bank Note. 
 
 XXI. Handbill. 
 XXII. Windlass. 
 
 * In the game of Loo, Knaves are reckoned above Kings. 
 One form of the game is called ' Unlimited Loo.' 
 
 Printed by Spottiswoode, Ballantyne ^ Co, Ltd. 
 Colobester, London 3 Eton, England,