Jane Austen at Home: A Biography Read online

  About the Author

  Lucy Worsley is an historian, author, curator and television presenter. Lucy read history at New College, Oxford and worked for English Heritage before becoming Chief Curator at the charity Historic Royal Palaces. She also presents history programmes for the BBC and is the author of several bestselling books.

  Also by Lucy Worsley

  Cavalier: The Story of a Seventeenth Century Playboy

  Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace

  If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of Your

  Home

  A Very British Murder

  Novels

  Eliza Rose

  My Name is Victoria

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Lucy Worsley 2017

  The right of Lucy Worsley to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 63221 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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  To Mark

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Lucy Worsley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Jane Austen at Home

  ACT ONE: A SUNNY MORNING AT THE RECTORY

  1. To Steventon

  2. Enter Jane

  3. Boys

  4. A Little Learning

  5. The Abbey School

  6. The Freindship of Women

  7. The Wars

  8. Cassandra’s Romance

  9. Youth and Beauty

  10. Novels

  11. ‘My Irish friend’

  12. First Impressions

  13. Godmersham Park

  14. Away from Home

  15. Homeless

  ACT TWO: A SOJOURNER IN A STRANGE LAND

  16. Bath

  17. The Sea

  18. Manydown Park

  19. Susan

  20. ‘Wild to see Lyme’

  21. Green Park Buildings East

  22. A House Fit for a Heroine

  23. Castle Square

  ACT THREE: A REAL HOME

  24. Chawton Cottage

  25. Published!

  26. Pride and Prejudice

  27. The Great House

  28. The Diversions of Young Ladies

  29. Parading about London

  30. Carlton House

  ACT FOUR: THE END, AND AFTER

  31. Disasters

  32. A Poor Honey

  33. Unfinished Business

  34. College Street

  35. A Final Home

  36. ‘Was there anything particular about that lady?’

  Epilogue: What happened to Jane’s homes?

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Introduction

  ‘Miss Austen’s merits have long been established beyond a question; she is, emphatically, the novelist of home.’1

  Richard Bentley, publishing Jane Austen’s novels in 1833

  THE WORLD OF Jane Austen’s novels, seen in countless feature films, is domestic, well ordered and snug. Her characters inhabit neat, genteel cottages, gentlemanlike country mansions, and elegant townhouses in London or Bath.

  And her life is often seen through the same lens.

  It’s an impression that you can’t help but take away from the pretty, flower-filled country cottage at Chawton in Hampshire that finally provided Jane, her sister and their mother with a long-sought home. Jane moved there in 1809, probably expecting to live there happily until the end of her life. As it would turn out, she would not.

  For Jane, home was a perennial problem. Where could she afford to live? Amid the many domestic duties of an unmarried daughter and aunt, how could she find the time to write? Where could she keep her manuscripts safe? A home of her own must have seemed to Jane to be always just out of reach. With only a tiny stash of capital hard earned by her writing, the death of her father forced her into a makeshift life in rented lodgings, or else shunted between the relations who used her as cheap childcare.

  It’s not surprising, then, that the search for a home is an idea that’s central to Jane’s fiction. The majority of her scenes take place indoors, with people talking, always talking, in a room, which is very often a drawing room. And yet, when Jane’s characters want to talk about what really matters – their feelings, the truth – they often have to go outdoors. They escape the jaws of the drawing rooms that confine their lives. ‘You were sick of civility’, says Lizzy Bennet in a moment of intimacy with Mr Darcy.

  Young people reading Jane Austen for the first time think that the stories are about love and romance and finding a partner. But a happy home is equally as much what all of her heroines don’t have, and yet desire. All of Jane’s leading ladies are displaced from either their physical home, or from their family. Jane shows, subtly but devastatingly, how hard it is to find a true home, a place of safety in which one can be understood and loved. She is uniquely sensitive to a particular home’s happiness – or unhappiness.

  This has led people to assume that Jane herself was unhappy at home, flawed or damaged in some way. But the depressing fact is that she was just one among many spinsters of her time and position in society who had to try to feel ‘at home’ in unusual, meagre or unpleasant places. And it wasn’t just spinsters. ‘I cannot help feeling a great desire to be at home, however uncomfortable that home may be’, wrote Jane’s sister-in-law, Fanny.2 Home to her was a cramped cabin on board her sailor husband’s ship.

  And so Jane’s novels are full of homes loved, lost, lusted after. In her first published work, Sense and Sensibility, it is a death in the family that forces Elinor and Marianne out of their childhood home. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters will be expelled from their home at the end of her father’s life. Fanny Price is sent away from her home, like one of Jane’s own brothers, to live with richer relations at Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot misses her country life at Kellynch Hall when packed off in Persuasion to Bath. Even Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey and Emma Woodhouse of Emma, young, relatively well-off and in no immediate danger of homelessness, have to choose their future domestic set-ups wisely.

  In real life, perhaps contrary to expectation, Jane did not have to enter the ‘years of danger’ without a home of her own, for she was a spinster by choice. Far from lacking romance, as people often think, in her life she turned down at least one suitor for absolute certain, and in her story we’ll encounter no fewer than five potential life-partners. I believe that Jane deliberately kept herself free of all that because she believed that marriage and property and a substantial home could be a prison.

  I also hope to introduce you to Jane’s everyday life at home, good days, bad days, domestic pleasures and domestic chores, the ‘little matters on which the daily happiness of priva
te life depends’, as Jane put it herself in Emma. The idea that women of the gentry didn’t ‘work’ is long since debunked: they either performed ‘work’ that society deemed virtuous, like playing the piano or reading improving books, or else they discreetly carried out – and this was the case in the Austen family – much of the actual labour needed to keep the food on the table and the clothes clean. Sometimes this meant actively supervising contract labour, sometimes rolling up their sleeves to do the domestic work themselves.

  We know so much about Jane’s life from day to day, even hour to hour, because she was a prolific letter writer. Despite vigorous excisions by the Austen family, Jane has left us hundreds of thousands of words, chiefly written to her sister Cassandra.

  These letters, full of the mundane detail of everyday life, have often disappointed readers. The trouble has been that they do not directly comment on the French Revolution, or the great affairs of state. One of Jane’s fussy relatives claimed that ‘they could be no transcript of her mind’, and that a reader ‘would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them’.3 Wrong, wrong, wrong! The affairs of state are there, all right, for those who know how to read the tiny details of the changing social life of Jane’s age. And her personality is there, bold as brass, bursting with life, buoyant or recalcitrant as each day required. These letters are a treasure trove hiding in plain sight.

  They are also a resource that can be read in many different ways, to paint a picture of the Jane that the reader wishes to find. I am interested in them as a record of the little evasions of feminine duty that Jane must have made in order to win herself the time to write. ‘I often wonder’, Jane wrote to her sister, ‘how you can find the time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House.’ Well, I wonder the same thing. Jane had to fight against domestic duties to ‘find the time’ in a way that did not offend her family or their notions of what a spinster aunt should do. This was her battle, a grimy, unexciting, quotidian domestic battle, about who should do which chores. It’s a battle that still holds women back. It’s a battle that continues to this day.

  ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer’, wrote Jane’s brother Henry after her death. ‘A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.’4 Big mistake! Jane’s life contained bitterness and regret, financial deprivation and anxiety. But she and her family kept much of this from us. Above all other authors, Jane is attractive but elusive to her readers: she tantalises, hints, retracts. ‘Seldom, very seldom,’ she herself warns us, ‘does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.’

  I’ve been at pains to try to place Jane in the context of the physical world of her homes, but this will inevitably be a personal, not a definitive, interpretation of her life. Every generation gets the ‘Jane Austen’ it deserves. The Victorians searched for, and found, a ‘good little woman’ who wrote her books almost accidentally, with no apparent effort, ‘St Aunt Jane of Steventon-cum-Chawton Canonicorum’ as she’s been called. More recently, biographers have been at pains to show Jane as a much more modern woman. ‘If I am a wild Beast I cannot help it’, she wrote, and much has been made of her dancing, her hangovers, her anger. This version of Jane can best be summed up by the 1990s argument that Jane deliberately chose the pseudonym of ‘Mrs Ashton Dennis’ for writing cross letters to her publishers, enabling her to close with: ‘I am Gentlemen &c &c MAD’. ‘Mad was how she felt, and that was how she signed herself’, argues her biographer David Nokes.5

  While I’ll try to put Jane back into her social class and time, I must admit that I also write as a signed up ‘Janeite’, a devotee and worshipper. I too have searched for my own Jane, and naturally I have found her to be simply a far, far better version of myself: clever, kind, funny, but also angry at the restrictions of her life, someone tirelessly searching for ways to be free and creative. I know who I want Jane Austen to be, and I put my cards on the table. This is, unashamedly, the story of my Jane, every word of it written with love.

  But in searching for this Jane of mine, I have accidentally met a whole generation of women for whom Jane seems to speak: the governess Anne Sharp, her sister spinster Cassandra, her sisters-in-law killed by childbearing, the female friends who cheered her on through her publishing triumphs and disasters. Jane’s passage through life, so smooth on the surface, seems sharply marked by closed doors, routes she could not take, choices she could not make. Her great contribution was to push those doors open, a little bit, for us in later generations to slip through.

  A sad life, a life of struggle, is at odds with the first impression given by her books: of a country parsonage on a sunny morning, with roses round the door, a spirited heroine about to meet her life-partner, a fresh romance about to unfold …

  ACT ONE

  A Sunny Morning at the Rectory

  Steventon Rectory, Hampshire

  1

  To Steventon

  ‘The rector of a parish has much to do … his parish duties, and the care and improvement of his dwelling.’

  Pride and Prejudice

  TO GENERATIONS OF Austen worshippers, the site of Steventon Rectory is hallowed ground. They are often to be found at the side of the lane, silent and thoughtful, peering through the hedge into the Hampshire field where it stood. This is the place where she spent twenty-five years and wrote three novels. This is where it all began.

  Anyone who reads Jane Austen’s novels closely will notice that although we have a picture in our minds of Pemberley, or Trafalgar House in Sanditon, or Donwell Abbey, the details she actually gives us are very sparse. She sketches an outline; our minds then fill it in. But the houses Jane describes in the most detail are always parsonages. In Mansfield Park, for example, we get a much fuller physical description of Edmund Bertram’s future home in his parish than we do of the great mansion of Mansfield Park itself. That’s because parsonages mattered to Jane. She often visited great houses and was familiar with places like Pemberley. But Jane was most at home in a parsonage like the one she knew from growing up with her parents and brothers and sister in the Hampshire countryside. And yet, to work out what her real home, Steventon Rectory, was like, takes time, patience and imagination, because the house itself is gone.

  The story of the Austens at Steventon Rectory really begins in the late summer of 1768, when a wagon heavily loaded with household goods made its way through the Hampshire lanes from nearby Deane to the village of Steventon. Its members had no notion that so many historians and biographers would scrutinise this ordinary event in the life of an ordinary family.

  Although Mr George Austen (thirty-eight) and his wife Cassandra (twenty-nine) had only been married for four years, their household was not inconsiderable. It included Mrs Austen’s own mother, Mrs Jane Leigh, and the couple’s three boys: James (‘Jemmy’), George, and Edward (‘Neddy’), the latter less than one year old. There would also have been maids and manservants, of name and number unknown. They probably included Jane Leigh’s servant Mary Ellis.

  Although it was only a short distance of just over a mile from Deane to Steventon, their wagon crept slowly along a road that ‘was a mere cart track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassable for a light carriage’.1 The village of Steventon was deep in the countryside, difficult to reach if the ‘rough country lanes’ were muddy. Indeed, many a coachman would not take you. Once, a member of the Austen family travelling by carriage near Steventon called out to his driver to hurry up and get on with it. ‘I do get on, sir, where I can!’ came the answer. ‘You stupid fellow!’ was the response. ‘Any fool can do that. I want you to get on where you can’t.’2

  Mrs Jane Leigh, the mother-in-law, had even made her will just before the journey. Now in her sixties, she feared that she was terminally ill. Her daughter, Mrs Cassandra Austen, was also far from well. She travelled along ‘on a feather-bed, placed upon some soft articles of furnitur
e in the waggon’.3 She was ‘not then in strong health’, an early indicator of a lifetime of ailments, and possible hypochondria, that would alternately amuse and exasperate her family. But she does deserve some sympathy for having given birth to three children in four years. Mr George Austen’s brother-in-law thought they were mad for having so many children so quickly. ‘I cannot say’, wrote this brother-in-law, Tysoe Hancock, who was out in India, ‘that the News of the violently rapid increase of their family gives me so much pleasure.’ The problem was that all these children, one of them his own godson, ‘must be provided for’.4

  Mr George Austen was a man of many cares: an ill wife, a dying mother-in-law, and his second son George’s suffering from fits. Not least among his worries was his financial situation. The records of Mr Austen’s account at Hoare’s Bank in London show that on 6 August he had sold stock worth more than £250, presumably for the expenses of bringing the new house up to a habitable standard.5 This sum of money represented nearly a year’s income for him.

  Mr Austen had in fact been in charge of the parish of Steventon for the last four years. But he had found his Rectory there so run-down and dilapidated, ‘of the most miserable description’, that he and his family had been living instead in a rented house in the neighbouring village of Deane.6 This building was hardly any better: a ‘low damp place with small inconvenient rooms, and scarcely two on the same level’.7 The pokey parsonage at Deane was about the size of a coach, its various rooms the ‘Coachbox, Basket & Dickey’ (the box being the seat at the front for the driver, the dickey being the seat at the back for servants).

  In 1764, the year George and Cassandra had married and moved to Hampshire, there had been great rains at Deane: ‘the Wells in the Parish rose to their Tops, and Fish were taken between the Parsonage Yard & the Road’.8 The other freak of nature to be seen in Georgian Deane was its enormous cabbages; a neighbour grew one ‘five feet in circumference in the solid part, and [which] weighs upwards of 32 lbs’.9 Meanwhile, down the lane in the neighbouring parish of Steventon, the high winds of February had blown down the church’s timber steeple.10