May, Lou & Cass Read online

  Imprint Information

  First published in 2011 by Blackstaff Press

  This edition published 2011 by

  Blackstaff Press

  4c Heron Wharf, Sydenham Business Park

  Belfast BT3 9LE

  © Text, Sophia Hillan, 2011

  © Photographs and images, see ‘Picture acknowledgements’ which constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Sophia Hillan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Family Trees designed by Lisa Dynan, Belfast

  Cover design by Two Associates

  Produced by Blackstaff Press

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

  EPUB ISBN 978-0-85640-898-4

  MOBI ISBN 978-0-85640-899-1

  www.blackstaffpress.com

  About Sophia Hillan

  Dr Sophia Hillan was Assistant Director of the Queen’s University of Belfast’s Institute of Irish Studies. Her publications include, In Quiet Places: Uncollected Stories, Letters and Critical Prose of Michael McLaverty (1989); The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (1992) and The Edge of Dark: A Sense of Place in the Writings of Michael McLaverty and Sam Hanna Bell (2001). As a writer of fiction, she has been published in David Marcus’s New Irish Writing, and his first Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, 2004–5. She was a finalist for the Royal Society of Literature’s first V.S. Pritchett Memorial Award (1999), and her short story, Roses, was featured as part of BBC Radio 4’s Defining Moments series.

  Dedication

  To the memory of my mother and my brother, who knew their Jane Austen

  ‘... the Manners there’

  … And we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false misrepresentations.

  Jane Austen to her niece Anna, August 1814

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Imprint Information

  About Sophia Hillan

  Dedication

  ‘... the Manners there’

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Daughters of the House

  Chapter 1: ‘Everybody is Rich There’

  Chapter 2: ‘Goodbye from the Cowhouse’

  Chapter 3: ‘No Money – All Charms’

  Chapter 4: ‘Wintering in England’

  Chapter 5: ‘The Manners There’

  Chapter 6: ‘Our Lost Home’

  Chapter 7: ‘I Can’t Live by Myself’

  Chapter 8: ‘The Fashion to be Poor’

  Postscript: A New Century

  List of Abbreviations

  Timeline

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Notes: Introduction

  Notes: Chapter 1

  Notes: Chapter 2

  Notes: Chapter 3

  Notes: Chapter 4

  Notes: Chapter 5

  Notes: Chapter 6

  Notes: Chapter 7

  Notes: Chapter 8

  Notes: Postscript

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Austen, Austen Leigh and Knight Family Trees

  Hill and Ward / Mulholland Family Trees

  Acknowledgements

  Over the five years in which this book has been in the making, I have had the expert assistance of a number of people, and to all of these I am indeed grateful. Patsy Horton, Managing Editor of Blackstaff Press, saw the potential in the project at an early stage and, despite the fragile economic climate affecting us all, championed it and saw it through to the end. To Patsy and to her colleagues, Julie Steenson, who copy-edited the book with style and grace, Helen Wright and Michelle Griffin, who worked with me on the illustrations with great understanding of the subject and Simon Coury, who read the proofs, special thanks are due.

  The staff of Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire could not have done more for me: Tom Carpenter, Louise West and Ann Channon made me welcome from the outset and gave me unlimited access not only to research facilities, but also to rare manuscripts and early editions. I was given the privilege of working with them, and with Isabel Snowden, among the personal possessions of Jane Austen and her family in the house where she lived and wrote most of her finest work: to do so has been one of the greatest pleasures of the last five years.

  A short walk from the Jane Austen House, at the former home of her brother Edward Knight, once Chawton Great House, now Chawton House Library, I was most kindly permitted to consult unique editions, and was shown the room where family legend has it that Jane Austen sat and looked out over the grounds. Having stood there, I do not doubt it. I thank the Librarian, Jacqui Grainger, for showing it to me, and for all her kind assistance. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, where so many of Marianne Knight’s letters, and the papers of Montagu Knight and James Edward Austen Leigh are kept. I am especially grateful to Nicola Pink, who helped enormously with finding rare images of members of the family and their homes.

  The Knight sisters spent most of their childhood at Godmersham in Kent: I owe a great debt of thanks to the staff of the Centre for Kentish Studies at Maidstone, Julie Gregson and her colleagues. I was given invaluable and painstaking assistance by two people in particular: Helen Orme and Mark Ballard, to whom I am indebted for helping me so consistently and patiently through the Knatchbull and Rice archives. Though I did not meet Margaret Hammond, whose earlier work on the Rice archive proved very helpful to me, I am most grateful to her. I am sorry that the sudden death of Henry Rice, who most kindly answered my queries, means I cannot thank him: I do thank Mrs Rice, his widow, for the help that she gave in his stead. In Kent, too, I was privileged to meet Margaret Wilson, whose meticulous work on the life, letters and diaries of Fanny Knight (later Lady Knatchbull) has been a boon: I thank Margaret, a most generous scholar, for her careful attention to my many queries, which few but she could have answered.

  In Ireland, I carried out most of my work in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library, founded when Jane Austen was not yet thirteen years old. For all the assistance and support I have been given by the Librarian, John Killen, and his kind and most helpful colleagues, I am very grateful. The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland holds papers of the Downshire, Ward and Saunderson families: access to these was essential, and I thank the staff for all their help. In particular, I am also very grateful to the former Deputy Keeper of PRONI, A.P.W. Malcomson, who directed me very early in my research towards a key document in the Granard Papers. The staff of both the National Archives and the National Library in Dublin answered my queries quickly and fully: I owe special thanks to the Duty Archivist in the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ireland, Avice-Claire McGovern, who helped me find Lord George Hill’s copy of Brian Merriman’s Gaelic epic, ‘The Midnight Court’. My thanks are also due to Michelle Ashmore, Picture Library Executive of the National Museums Northern Ireland at Cultra, Holywood, who gave me access to photographs by James Glass of nineteenth-century Donegal. I had first seen these reproduced in a study of Irish photography by my former colleague at Queen’s University’s Institute of Irish Studies, W.A. Maguire. I am indeed sorry that Bill’s recent passing means I cannot now thank him as I would have wished. I thank, instead, his widow Joan, my former colleague at the Institute of Irish Studies. I can and do thank my former Director at the Institute of Irish Studies, R.H. Buchanan, not only for introducing me to the work of E. Estyn Evans, founder of the Institute and editor of the only modern edition of Lord George’s Facts from Gweedore, but also for identifying fo
r me the location of Isle O’Valla, where Jane Austen’s great-niece lived in County Down. I am also grateful to Ronnie’s wife, Rhoma, who photographed the house; to his successor at the Institute, my colleague Brian Walker, who kindly read the manuscript and gave me guidance on points of Irish history; and to Lord and Lady Dunleath for granting permission to use extracts from Ballywalter Park (1985), and for providing me with the images of Somerset and Norah Ward. In Donegal, I was greatly assisted by the Archivist of the Donegal County Archives in Lifford, Niamh Brennan, who gave me access to the first Gweedore Hotel Book. Patricia Doherty, proprietor of An Chúirt, the Gweedore Court Hotel and Heritage Centre, kindly allowed me to consult the second Gweedore Hotel Book, wonderfully discovered during her renovations of the old hotel, once Lord George Hill’s pride and joy. Susan McCaffrey of Donegal Ancestry in Ramelton gave me invaluable assistance in finding death certificates for Lord George, his wife and sisters-in-law. Also in Gweedore, I was given generous access to rare texts concerning Lord George and Father James McFadden by Tony McHugh, of Comharchumann Fordartha in Derrybeg, to whom I must also express my gratitude. Concerning Lord George Hill and his work in Donegal, I have been greatly aided by the kindness and generosity of Margaret Bonar in sharing with me evidence uncovered during her own invaluable research. I was introduced to Margaret Bonar’s scholarship by the present owners of Ballyare, Lord George’s house in Donegal, Roy and Noreen Greenslade, who have most kindly given of their time and unique knowledge of the subject. It is thanks to my friends Angélique Day and her husband Fergus Hanna Bell that I met Roy and Noreen Greenslade. I must also express my gratitude to Angélique not only for the hospitality she and her family have extended to me in Donegal but also, as all scholars of Irish Studies must, for her great work in editing, with Patrick McWilliams, the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of the early 1830s, which give a unique and comprehensive picture of the Donegal Jane Austen’s nieces knew.

  In present-day Donegal, I owe a debt of thanks to my brother Shane and his wife Patricia, who most kindly gave me the use of their house while I worked on the book. One of their own books in that lovely house, Hugh Dorian’s The Outer Edge of Ulster, helped me greatly at the outset of my research. From that same house, with the friends who made me so welcome in their home when I was researching the book in England, Kevin and Bernadette McLean, I set out one day to find the graves of Marianne and Louisa: it was Bernadette who discovered them first, and Kevin who took the remarkable photographs of those almost forgotten headstones, sadly obscured by weeds and débris. Other friends who made me welcome in Donegal, and gave generously of their own time to help me with my research, were Brendan and Jenny Meegan, who travelled to check sources in Bunbeg, where Brendan was able to photograph the plaque to Lord George in Bunbeg’s Church of Ireland church. It is also to Brendan that I owe the photograph of Ballyare (now Ballyarr) House, the Knight sisters’ last home.

  I must thank my sister Anne, my sister-in-law Sheelagh and my brothers Shane and Edward, with their families, for their extra support during the period of illness which held back the book’s progress in 2008. I cannot begin to thank my children, John and Judith, for all they have done and continue to do for me: nonetheless, I do. The book is dedicated to the memory of my eldest brother, Séamus (1944–1987), and my mother, Anne Judith (1915–2010), to whom I owe my lifelong delight in the novels of Jane Austen.

  Introduction: Daughters of the House

  ‘A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.’

  EMMA

  In an upper room of a house in an English village, inside a glass case, sits a small pair of white satin dancing slippers. The house, in the village of Chawton in Hampshire, was the last home of Jane Austen, and the slippers belonged to her niece, Marianne, who would be the last person to record first-hand memories of the author. She is remembered on a stained-glass window in St Nicholas’ Church in Chawton, yet Marianne is not buried there. Far across the Irish Sea, in a deserted hilltop graveyard in the windswept county of Donegal, an almost forgotten headstone, overgrown with nettles and wild flowers, marks the place where this English gentlewoman was laid to rest. How did Marianne Austen, and her two younger sisters, Louisa and Cassandra Jane, come to be buried so far from the genteel English household of their birth? In the lives of the three sisters, known in the family as May, Lou and Cass, the plots of Jane Austen’s extraordinary novels were echoed to an uncanny degree, with shades of Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility permeating their real lives. Yet, some of what befell the Knight sisters was beyond even the realm of their aunt’s extensive imagination.

  Born on 15 September 1801, Marianne Austen was the seventh child of eleven, and third daughter to Jane’s second brother Edward. By the time of her death in Ireland in 1895, she had become Marianne Knight. Like Jane Austen, however, she was never married. Her change in surname came about through her father’s adoption of the name on his inheritance of the estate of a distant relative. Marianne, known to her family as ‘Aunt May’, would outlive all of her generation. In that little churchyard at the top of a hill

  in Donegal, Ireland’s most northerly county, she rests beside her younger sister Louisa, one headstone listing towards the other. A few miles away, in the market town of Letterkenny, is the grave of their youngest sister of all, Cassandra Jane.

  Yet, in the lives and letters of these overlooked women, dismissively recorded on one Austen family tree as ‘three others, Knights of Chawton’, there is a story which provides a unique link between the Regency world of England so wittily and economically delineated by Jane Austen, and that of turbulent nineteenth-century Ireland.1 The Knight sisters lived through Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–47 and the subsequent Land Wars of the closing decades of the century. By the time Marianne died in 1895, the Victorian era was coming to a close and Ireland was within twenty years of the uprising in 1916 which would signal the end of its link with the British Empire.

  At the time of Jane’s death in 1817, the girls were still young and, although some commentators have therefore doubted the veracity of their memories, there is no doubt that they had every opportunity to spend time with their aunt. They played with her as children, sewed and read with her as young girls and, within their trusted circle, recorded their unique memories.2 Moreover, she observed them astutely and quite without sentiment, as her letters to her sister Cassandra show. In 1808, arriving to visit the family, she sent this unvarnished report of her sister-in-law Elizabeth and her then five youngest children – Lizzy, Marianne, Charles, Louisa and Cassandra Jane – all under nine years old:

  I cannot praise Elizabeth’s looks, but they are probably affected by a cold. Her little namesake has gained in beauty in the last three years, though not all that Marianne has lost. Charles is not quite so lovely as he was. Louisa is much as I expected, and Cassandra I find handsomer than I expected, though at present disguised by such a violent breaking-out that she does not come down after dinner. She has charming eyes and a nice open countenance, and seems likely to be very lovable. Her size is magnificent.3

  Jane’s sister-in-law Elizabeth was a beautiful and well-born woman, and the devoted mother of eleven children. In that quick pen-picture of 1808, perhaps rather enjoying the temporary loss of her sister-in-law’s looks to a cold, Jane assesses her family with a clinical detachment, anticipating her portraits of the young Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice, the Bertrams in Mansfield Park, and Mary Musgrove’s unruly little boys in Persuasion. Edward, though not the only brother to provide her with nieces and nephews to observe, was the only one to present her, from 1793 onwards, with such a large number of useful models and, even more importantly, to give her the opportunity to see at first hand how the landed gentry and their aristocratic connections lived from day to day.

  With her sister Cassandra, Jane ma
de regular visits to their brother’s estate at Godmersham Park in Kent after he took possession of it in 1798. From 1808 onward, Edward and his family often spent the spring and summer months at his second home in Chawton, where he allowed his sisters and mother to live after 1809. There, Jane saw May, Lou and Cass grow out of babyhood, and shared with them some of the most vivid experiences of the last extraordinary eight years of her life, the time of her greatest productivity and the very beginning of her fame. Louisa, born in 1804, received extra attentions as Jane’s goddaughter. She was named in the will Jane made in the final months of her life, and a needlecase specially made for her, wrapped in a paper inscribed ‘With Aunt Jane’s love’, was so carefully kept that it can be seen today, exhibited alongside Marianne’s dancing slippers.4 Louisa’s younger sister Cassandra, suffering a painful illness at eight and a half, received particular praise for her fortitude from her dying aunt. Marianne was not quite sixteen at the time of Jane Austen’s death. By then, although Jane had not been impressed with her looks when she was seven years old, May’s dark eyes and slight build reminded her uncle James Austen’s family most poignantly of their loss, and inspired in Jane’s future first biographer, Marianne’s cousin James Edward, even deeper feelings.5 In temperament, too, they had much in common, and Marianne was known in the family for her merry, lively wit and even temper. Throughout her long life, she had need of those qualities, for the greatest resemblance between Marianne Knight and Jane Austen may have lain not in a physical similarity, but in their powers of endurance and patience. As an unmarried woman, like her aunt Jane, Marianne lived from early adulthood on the edges of other people’s lives and found herself, through circumstances largely beyond her control, as uncertain of a place to live as her namesake Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.