Jane Austen For Dummies (12 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
While Anglo-Saxon England had its King Edward the Confessor, the Austen family was lucky to have as their third son, Edward, who became the heir to two great estates: one in their native Hampshire and another in Kent. Edward's (and Jane's) father's wealthy cousin, three or four times removed, Thomas Knight II, of the Godmersham estate in Kent, had married, on May 8, Miss Catherine Knatchbull, who was also from an old and important Kentish family. (Thomas Knight's father had given George Austen his church livings or benefices, Deane and Steventon, in Hampshire.) Traveling on their honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. Knight stopped at Steventon, where they saw Edward, age 12, and of course his siblings, including Jane, not yet 4. When they left Steventon to continue their honeymoon, Edward accompanied them. Yes, this strikes us as unusual today. But not so much in Austen's day.
In Austen's day, not only was it common for children to be adopted by rich relatives, it was also traditional â if the bride and groom desired it â for a companion to go along on the honeymoon so that the couple did not
look like
honeymooners, thereby avoiding a shivaree (a mock celebration with horns and pans for a newly married couple, a sample of which you can see in the movie and play
Oklahoma!
when Curlie and Laurie marry). The Knights returned Edward to his family a few weeks later. But they remained both childless (perhaps Mrs. Knight knew from the outset that she would not be able to bear children; hence, the Knights' taking Edward on the honeymoon to get to know him as soon as possible) and impressed with this charming boy, whom they invited to spend school holidays at their beautiful Kentish estate, Godmersham, though Mr. Austen was worried about Edward missing his Latin lessons at home. The Knights became so fond of him that they formally adopted him, making Edward their son and heir. This adoption probably occurred in 1783, for a silhouette bearing the date 1783 made by William Wellings shows Mr. Austen presenting Edward (looking short for age 16) to the Knights.
Why would parents allow a child to be adopted by relatives? And why was this common in Austen's day? While the Rev. Mr. Austen was certainly, as a clergyman, a gentleman in the eyes of society, Edward would become a true member of the gentry: a gentleman who lived in a magnificent house at the center of a large country estate, or, in other words, a man of property, as the heir of the wealthy Knights. The future would show that the Knights chose wisely because Edward managed his inherited estates well. Mrs. Austen observed that Edward had a good head for business. He also had a good heart: He kept in close touch with his birth family and saw them frequently. In 1812, upon the death of Mrs. Knight, Edward, then a widower, and his children assumed the surname Knight.
Seeing her brother leave his birth family to live with their father's cousins may well have inspired the mature novelist Austen to include in two of her novels characters who grow up in homes that weren't their parents'. This practice was not unusual for two reasons:
1. Wealthy relatives could give a poor niece, nephew, cousin, or even a close friend's child a better start in life than the child's parents could. Remember from Chapter 2 that Austen's was a very class-oriented society. Who wouldn't want to see a son or daughter get a chance to move to a higher class? Letting a wealthy relative adopt a child meant a huge improvement in their child's prospects, their grandchildren's prospects, and so on.
2. Wealthy members of the gentry with rich, large estates wanted to be sure that their money and land stayed in the family. For this, they needed a male heir. (For information on the tradition and laws of male inheritance, see Chapters 7 and 10.) If they had no children of their own, adopting a nephew or male cousin (Edward) would keep the estate in the family. Everybody recognized the need for male heirs in Austen's time.
Jane Austen deals with both reasons in her novels. In
Mansfield Park,
the heroine Fanny Price leaves her poor birth family to join the household of her rich and titled aunt and uncle; she becomes a gentlewoman who marries well. In fact, when Fanny visits her birth parents, she disappointingly finds they are too poor, too harried, and too distracted with their brood of younger children to have ever missed her!
Emma
's Jane Fairfax, orphaned by the early deaths of both parents, leaves the home of her kind but poor aunt and grandmother to be raised by her late father's dear friends, Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, who have their own daughter, Jane's age. The Campbells raise both girls as young ladies, with all the masters and training required for a daughter of the gentry, enabling Jane to associate with the gentry and make a genteel marriage. In the same novel, the widowed Mr. Weston allows his brother-in-law and his wife, the wealthy but childless Churchills, to raise his son Frank from childhood; they adopt Frank, who will succeed to the Churchills' estate and money. When Isabella Knightley recalls the story of little Frank's departure from his father, she exclaims, “âI never can comprehend how Mr. Weston could part with him. To give up one's child! I really never could think well of any body who proposed such a thing'” (E 1:11). But Jane Austen appears to have been far more practical than her distressed character Isabella. For she saw that her own brother Edward's good fortune filtered into his birth family. As she grew up, Austen visited many great estates, including Edward's, which enabled her to depict the country life of the gentry accurately in her novels. But she also enjoyed the luxury of visiting him and his family, too! In 1809, Edward provided his widowed mother and two unmarried sisters with a place to live: Chawton cottage, which is now the Jane Austen Museum, a popular tourist site in England and a veritable shrine to Jane Austen's fans and admirers. (For details on the museum and instructions on how to get there after you arrive in London, see Chapter 19.)
Photo by Adrian Harvey, Courtesy of the Jane Austen Society of North America
The Austens were gentry, but they occupied the lower end of the gentry class. The Austens had less land and less money than the characters from Jane Austen's novels, but rather than owning a magnificent country house at the center of a huge estate with a working farm, the Austens lived at the rectory, which had a farm that produced enough food to sustain them.
The farm was away from the Austen's house, not next to it as the 2005 film version of
Pride and Prejudice
erroneously shows the Bennets' farm.
Austen was later able to write so eloquently and so knowledgeably about life on the large country estates owned by richer gentry. The Rev. Mr. Austen's clerical profession and excellent education opened the doors of the homes of richer neighbors of the gentry with whose children his children could associate. Back then, like today, a good education opened many doors.
But Jane rarely longed for playmates or entertainment.
The Steventon rectory was a busy place. To help make ends meet, the Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Austen boarded four or five young boys â frequently from wealthy and even titled families â as students, who lived with Jane's brothers in the rectory's attic. The Rev. Mr. Austen taught the boarding students, along with his own sons, such subjects as Latin, Greek, and literature, thereby preparing them for Eton or the other elite public schools. (Such schools are still called public schools even though they're private. For more information on elite English public schools, see Chapter 9.)
Mrs. Austen supervised what women of that time supervised: the busy household, which included the cooking, washing, and mending. Like Cassy, Jane was nursed by their mother and then sent to live with a local farmer's wife until she more or less turned from baby to little girl â able to walk, talk, and do those other things that make us say, “She's not our little baby anymore,” probably between ages 2 and 3. Of course, Jane's parents and family would see her at the neighboring farm daily, but Mrs. Austen was spared the chores of changing, dressing, feeding, and watching a crawling baby when she had all those boys running around the rectory.
Between the ages of 7 and 11, Jane began to split her time between Steventon and two boarding schools that she attended with her sister. (You can read more about her time at boarding school in the “Surviving boarding school” section later in this chapter.) While at Steventon, Jane enjoyed a happy childhood in the Hampshire countryside playing outdoors and also learning from her father and reading the books from his well-stocked library of 500 volumes. From Shakespeare and Milton (the very works that many of today's college students fret over reading) to the popular new novels that were being published, young Jane Austen was absorbing literature. But even more important, she was listening to the intelligent, witty conversation carried on by her clever parents and big brothers.
Eighteenth-century England is called “The Great Age” of many things. Among those “greats” was the Great age of Conversation. Jane Austen's overheard conversations during her childhood were an education that included the discussion of the literature, including the novels that her brothers, sister, and parents had read. Later Jane would read them, too, and share in those lively and intelligent family conversations.
With her own family, a couple of servants, and the boarding students all in residence at the rectory, little Jane was now living among 16 or 17 people! Is it any wonder that she clung to her big sister, Cassandra? The two Austen girls â as their father called them well into their adulthood â were very close as the only two little females in a world of boys at home.
At the ages of 7 and 9, respectively, Jane and her sister went off with their cousin (Jane Cooper) in 1783 to Mrs. Cawley's boarding school in Oxford. The experience wasn't only an educational fiasco (Mrs. Cawley let her students have a free reign), but also more frighteningly, a health disaster for the three girls. The girls would probably have died of typhus while at school, but the timely arrival of their mothers saved them: They nursed the girls and as soon as they could travel, took them to Steventon. Alas, poor Mrs. Cooper eventually died of the fever.
Alas, more boarding school was in Jane's future. But this time, it was a happier and healthier experience. The Austens felt that Cassandra needed more formal schooling and planned in the spring, 1785, to send her to the Abbey School (still standing) in Reading. When Jane, age 9, heard that her big sister was heading to school, she insisted on going along. So their parents gave in â parents can only take so much insistence, right? â and off the girls went. The school's headmistress was Madame la Tournelle, whose most fascinating quality, besides her name, especially for girls aged 10 to 12, was having a cork leg. She provided the girls with a little spelling and sewing instruction in a friendly (and thankfully, non-pestilence-ridden) environment, but not much else. And certainly no French. For it turned out that her real name was the very un-French Sarah Hackitt. But happy memories of the Abbey School stayed with Austen. For when she wrote
Emma
decades later, she undoubtedly thought of those school days when she said of Mrs. Goddard's school that it was “a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where . . . girls might be sent out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies” (E 1:3).
When Jane wasn't springing over puddles or playing ball with her friends and siblings, young Jane was writing fiction to entertain her family during the evening when the Austens would read aloud. A voracious reader with a large memory for what she read, the adolescent Jane was inspired to try her own hand at fiction. Between the ages of 12 and 18, she wrote short pieces of fiction as gifts for her brothers, sister, and others. Little did the recipients know that the young writer who presented them with presents of fiction would some day be considered both the world's greatest novelist and the world's favorite novelist.
But even Austen's works from her early years show that at a young age she understood how fiction worked; how characters should be presented; how dialogue operates; how the plot should be constructed; and how all this could occur in a way that made entertaining, thought-provoking, and highly workable fiction.
Fortunately for posterity's sake, Austen copied many of her literary gifts in three notebooks. Better yet, all three volumes survived. The volumes aren't in chronological order, suggesting that Austen sorted and copied works to suit her tastes. While volume two has the earliest date, 1790, (14- to 15-year-old Jane), Austen scholars concur that some of the writing goes back to when she was 12 (1787). She obviously cared a lot about these works, because she corrected “typos” and revised certain entries here and there through 1809. The writing in the three volumes is called Austen's “Juvenilia.” In December 1794 â perhaps as a gift for her 19th birthday â Jane's father bought her a mahogany writing desk at Ring Brothers in Basingstoke, the big market town near Steventon. (See Figure 3-1.) As you can see in the photo, the writing desk is actually a writing slope, designed so the user could write without bending over. Being ergonomically correct is not just a 21st-century concern! The angled top is hinged so it can be raised to store paper, glasses, and so on inside. A glass ink-stand appears at the top. The desk sits on a table and is portable, allowing a writer to put her papers inside the desk and take both desk and writing with her. Austen's writing desk remained in the Austen family until October 29, 2001, when Joan Austen-Leigh, Austen's great-great-grandniece, donated it to the British Library, where it is on permanent display in the Treasures Room, which also holds the
Magna Carta
â pretty good company.
Austen's youthful works are divided as follows:
Volume the First:
With a mischievous sense of humor and ironic foresight, she pompously called the initial calf-bound notebook
Volume the First.
While it's quite worn, it's preserved in Oxford University's Bodleian Library. The “novels” â as she called the short pieces in this volume â combine a precociously shrewd undercutting of sentimental fiction, a cartoonist's sense of humor and absurdity (where characters get their legs caught in traps or jump from high windows, only to carry on as if nothing happened), and a knowledge of how a novel should be structured. Two of the better-known pieces from this volume are
â¢
“Jack and Alice”:
This “novel” consists of only nine chapters, each of which is only about two printed pages. It's a youthful and giggly work, with a heroine, Alice, who's a drunk, and her brother Jack, who is finally introduced in Chapter 7, only to be dismissed after a few lines because, he, too, is a drunk and “never did anything worth mentioning.” Imagine young Jane laughing her head off over a family of drunks! (Had she lived in Victorian, rather than Georgian England, her parents would have been mortified. For more on Georgian England, see Chapter 2.)
â¢
“Henry and Eliza”:
Another short “novel,” this piece, dedicated to her cousin Jane Cooper, deals less with Henry (who dies soon after he is introduced!) than with his wife, Eliza, whose children eat her fingers when they are hungry, but who carries on anyway.
Volume
the
Second:
The second notebook, along with the third in the British Library, is of higher quality (vellum) than the first, and in it Austen wrote “
Ex dono mei Patris,
” meaning, from my father. Perhaps Papa Austen liked what he heard her read from the first volume so much that he bought his daughter a better notebook â and at a time when paper was expensive â so that she could continue her writing. One work that stands out from this volume is
â¢
“Love and Freindship”:
And yes, that is how Austen spelled “friendship”! Her most well-known work in the second volume is “Love and Friendship” (dated June 13, 1790, when Jane was 14). This work is a hysterical, brilliant burlesque of the sentimentality that was extremely popular in contemporary fiction. An example, the loaded title,
The Man of Feeling,
tells the whole story of this tear-evoking 1771 bestseller! The ability to create an original burlesque of sentimental novels requires the writer to understand the style and use her talent to take the texts that inspired her to a laughable extreme.
As you've already seen, Austen had trouble spelling “friendship.” Apparently, she couldn't remember “i before e, except after c.” She also misspelled niece as “neice.” So there's hope for bad spellers to become great novelists â especially nowadays with spell-check on the computer!
â¢
“The History of England”:
Inspired to make fun of Oliver Goldsmith's fact-filled
History of England,
which young Jane, along with just about every other schoolchild in England was forced to read, the 16-year-old Austen presents her own history “By a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian.”
Volume the Third:
This volume is also bound in vellum, and on the inside cover in her father's handwriting are the words “Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady Consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.” This volume contains just two pieces:
â¢
“Catharine; or, The Bower”:
This piece (dated August 1792, when Jane was just 16 1/2) is an impressive work because it reveals a mature understanding of how realistic fiction operates. The fiction contains a believable set of characters in probable situations, rendered largely through dialogue.
â¢
“Evelyn”:
Described as “the best of men,” Mr. Gower arrives in the village of Evelyn and reveals himself to be anything but!
Figure 3-1: |  |
Photo by Adrian Harvey, courtesy of the Jane Austen Society of North America