May, Lou & Cass Page 6

  You like him well enough to marry, but not well enough to wait. — The unpleasantness of appearing fickle is certainly great — but if you think you want Punishment for past Illusions, there is it — and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to one, & preferring another. That is a Punishment which you do not deserve.95

  Fanny had now entered her twenties and, as with her brothers, her aunt could foresee her inevitable moving away: ‘You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart. — Oh! What a loss it will be when you are married.’96 Fanny was not yet seriously attached, however, and still had charge of a large family, with the help only of the governess, Miss Clewes. Together, they managed, more or less, to contain the high spirits of the youngest children. ‘Miss Clewes & my sisters are not particularly pleased at our absence, as you may imagine,’ she wrote to Miss Chapman, when she had taken a short trip to Bath with her father, ‘& indeed, I quite hate to leave them for so long.’97

  Even when the family was at Chawton, which they visited for May and part of June 1814, it was clear that priorities had shifted. Lizzy was now fourteen and a half, and had to begin to prepare for her coming out into society: ‘Lizzy goes on a little with her dancing,’ wrote Fanny, ‘but the poor girl is sadly quite disadvantaged, as we cannot get a Master. Jeffery attends us now for Music, & she gets on very well with singing — instrumental music she has now given up.’98 By 1815, a dancing master had been secured, and Lizzy was finally having lessons. Fanny, too, was studying music, as were Marianne and Louisa, now thirteen and ten, and the whole family, with all their servants, enjoyed a great celebration in May 1815 for the coming of age of the eldest of the Knights, Edward:

  I had Meyer for the Harp, which I began last summer with Mr Jeffery & which I continue to enjoy very much. He is now here giving Marianne & Louisa lessons on the Pianoforte, and he thinks the latter will make a fine performer in time ... I am not sure whether you recollected that the 10th of this month was the day Edwd came of age — we had grand doings on the occasion — at least very pleasant doings, for it is always delightful to see a number of people happy & I believe that was most thoroughly the case. We had a ball for the servants and tenants, & as the Laundry was not thought large enough, the beds were taken down in the Nursery for them to dance there, & the servants ornamented the room very prettily with handfuls of Lavender and Lilacs & at the upper end E. K. in gold letters surrounded with boughs & lamps. I had the honour of opening the Ball with Mr Therer [?] and I believe they danced till 1 o’clock, & then supped in the Servants’ Hall & Lobby ... The next day the poor people danced before the Servants’ Hall door, & afterwards danced on the green in front of the house — we counted above 200 people, & I never witnessed a more gratifying sight, than the glimpses of dancers & smokers ... They gave several rounds of cheers, & I think their hurrahs might almost have been heard at Chilham ... & we had also ‘God Save the King’ in fine style. We do not go to Chawton this year, & I am thoroughly enjoying this sweet spring in Kent — the woods are already in high beauty, & the Flower garden is coming on rapidly ... Lizzy & Marianne join me in kind remembrance ... 99

  The last sentence of that account may be the most telling. The focus of the Knight family, and especially that of Fanny and her younger charges, was concentrated almost exclusively on Kent and on their lives in the Great House at Godmersham. Chawton figured less and less. Neither Jane nor Cassandra was part of the great celebration of Edward’s coming of age.

  During those years from 1813 to 1815, however, Jane had her own pre- occupations, and they were delightful to her. She had gone home from her last visit to Godmersham in November 1813 refreshed and renewed, and had spent that unusually harsh winter most productively, beginning Emma soon after the New Year, 1814. May that year saw the publication of Mansfield Park and by November the first edition was sold out. Emma, which was completed in March 1815, was published at the end of December by John Murray, described by Jane to Cassandra as ‘a rogue of course, but a civil one’.100 She started work on Persuasion in August 1815, and completed it in August 1816. Her professional life could not have been better.

  In her personal life, however, matters became rather more difficult after 1815. Her brother Henry, who had ably assisted Jane in the process of publication, became seriously ill in London during November of that year, and Jane nursed him back to health. Moreover, the bank in which he had been a partner since 1802 failed on 15 March 1816, and Henry was declared bankrupt. The consequence for the wider family was severe, though less so for Henry. He decided almost immediately that he would become a clergyman, and was ordained by the end of the year, securing with relative ease a curacy at Bentley near Chawton where he was soon known for the eloquence of his sermons.101 It was not quite so straightforward for those in the family with investments in the failed bank, especially Edward, who lost £20,000. Jane herself lost £13, no small sum to her.102 To make matters worse, Edward had been contesting a law suit since 1814, brought by some of Catherine Knight’s relatives, a Mr and Miss Hinton and their nephew James Baverstock, who had challenged his right to the Knight estate. To have lost the suit would have cost him up to two-thirds of his income and, while in the end he did not lose, he was obliged to cut down many trees in Chawton Park to raise the £15,000 he needed to extricate himself from the case. This, in conjunction with Henry’s failed banking venture, cost Edward and all of his children dearly, putting the onus on all of them to marry, if they could, into money.103 The family was remarkably forgiving. Edward, the greatest loser by Henry’s failed venture, bore it, as Caroline Austen later wrote, in a ‘spirit of forbearance and generosity’.104 In December 1816, Jane wrote to her nephew James Edward, who, like his half-sister Anna, had begun to try his hand at fiction: ‘Uncle Henry writes very superior sermons — You & I must try to get hold of one or two, & put them into our Novels:— it would be a fine help to a volume.’105 Indeed, when she wrote her will, in April 1817, leaving almost all she had to Cassandra, she made sure there was a legacy of £50 for her brother.

  It was during this difficult period that Jane became conscious of feeling unwell. Through the spring and summer of 1815, she experienced intermittent back pain, unusual weakness and inexplicable fatigue.106 Her illness pro- gressed, even as her work began to take on its own momentum. There were other stresses, too, for the collapse of Henry’s venture was compounded by another disappointment. Jane’s maternal uncle, James Leigh Perrot, died on 28 March 1817. He was a wealthy man, and it had long been assumed, and indeed expected, that he would provide in his will for his sister Cassandra, Mrs George Austen, and her daughters. In the event, Mrs Austen was not named in the will. James Austen, Jane’s eldest brother, father of James Edward, Anna and Caroline, was the main beneficiary, and £1,000 was to be left to any of Mr Leigh Perrot’s nieces and nephews who should outlive his wife.107 ‘Single women,’ Jane would write soon afterwards to Fanny, ‘have a dreadful propensity for being poor’. It was a theme to which she returned in her novels, with increasingly ironic compassion, beginning with the dispossessed Bennet and Dashwood girls of her early novels, and moving from her delineation in Emma of the precarious position of Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates, to the desperate plight of Mrs Smith in Persuasion. Now, feeling increasingly unwell, she could not find that saving detachment. Her great refuge had always been in her talent and, though as late as January 1817 she had begun a new novel, later known as Sanditon, she had laid it aside by 18 March, unable to write and too ill even to walk.108 The shock of her uncle’s will, coming so soon afterwards, was very great. Jane knew that Edward, with eleven children of his own and an unexpectedly reduced income, could scarcely do more for them than he was already doing. Moreover, while she had faith in her own talent, she was not only too ill to work, but all too well aware that the rewards of authorship were likely to be uncertain. Cassandra, who had gone as soon as she learned of their uncle’s death to the Leigh Perrot house to help her widowed aun
t, received to her surprise a most uncharacteristic letter from Jane, imploring her to return. Jane herself was abashed at such weakness, as she wrote to her brother Charles:

  I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle’s Will brought on a relapse, & I was so ill on Friday & thought myself so likely to be worse that I could not but press for Cassandra’s returning with Frank after the funeral last night, which she of course did, & either her return, or my having seen Mr Curtis, or my Disorder’s chusing to go away, have made me better this morning. I live upstairs for the present & am coddled. I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak nerves. My Mother has borne the forgetfulness of her extremely well; — her expectations for herself were never beyond the extreme of moderation, & she thinks with you that my Uncle always looked forward to surviving her. — She desires her best Love & many thanks for your kind feelings; and heartily wishes that her younger Children had more, & all her Children something immediately.109

  While the Leigh Perrot will was causing such havoc in the minds of their Austen relatives, young Edward Knight and his interesting brother George, who had tried the navy and decided it did not suit him, were about to set out on the Grand Tour of Europe, just as their father had done. Henry and William were in their late teens, Henry with his regiment in France, and William about to begin to study for the Church. Charles, by then fourteen, was at school at Winchester; lively John, at eight and a half, was proving almost too much for his sisters and governess; and Lizzy, at seventeen, was about to enter society, as Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman:

  Edward & George too are going abroad for a longer time in April, so we shall be quite deserted. George made a short trial in the navy last Autumn, but it disagreed with his health, which is not very strong. You will imagine how much we shall miss them ... Wm is decided for the Church ... Charles is at Winchester & John is still at home, though we are beginning to think it time to send him to School. I think you heard of an accident he had nearly two years ago with an arrow in his eye, poor child — the sight can never be recovered but he suffers no pain & it is not much disfigured & his other eye is very strong, I hope he will not experience any material inconvenience from the loss of it ... Miss Clewes is still with us ... Lizzy has left the Schoolroom, & is grown a very fine girl (though I say it that should not say it) — she has been to one ball, but she is not to be considered as regularly out till the Races, which I hope she will attend, as Isabella Deedes is also to make her appearance at that time. Sophia Cage tho’ about the same age is not strong enough ... to be of the party this year ... My other Sisters grow of course & I think improve. Cassandra has been confined lately with an inflammation in one knee but it has improved & they are all really well at present.110

  It seems unusual that neither Marianne nor Louisa is mentioned by name in this letter, though Marianne in March 1817 was fifteen and a half, and should surely have been receiving dancing lessons, for she too would soon be old enough to go into society. Cassandra Jane, however, had received a special message from Jane, probably the last she ever had from her. Knowing Cassandra had been ill, and in pain, Jane encapsulated the young girl’s character, a mixture of charm, sweetness and a certain dogged patience of which she would have need in her adult life: ‘What a comfort that Cassandra should be so recovered! — It is more than we had expected. — I can easily believe she was very patient & very good. I always loved Cassandra, for her fine dark eyes & sweet temper.’111 Shortly afterwards, Fanny wrote to Jane, bringing her up to date with the details of her own latest unfortunate romance, with Mr James Wildman of nearby Chilham Castle. In her reply of 13 March 1817, advising her to wait for the right man, her aunt kindly wrote as though Fanny were just a young woman, not mistress of a vast establishment, and quite as though she herself were not increasingly ill:

  By your description he cannot be in love with you, however he may try at it, & I could not wish the match unless there were a great deal of Love on his side ... Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony, but I need not dwell on such arguments with you, pretty Dear, you do not want inclination. — Well, I shall say, as I have often said before, Do not be in a hurry; depend upon it, the right Man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years, meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as ever He did, & who will so completely attach you, that you will feel you have never really loved before.112

  Fanny would soon bear out this prediction, though her aunt would not see it. Fanny could not know how ill she was, and Jane spoke little in this letter of her own health, telling her: ‘I am got tolerably well again, quite equal to walking about & enjoying the Air; & by sitting down & resting a good while between my Walks, I get exercise enough’.113 She moved quickly to the subject of Fanny’s brother William, who had been visiting at Chawton: ‘Wm & I are the best of friends. I love him very much — Everything is so natural about him, his affections, his Manners & his Drollery. He entertains & interests us extremely.’ As a ten-year-old he had sat beside her working at cross stitch, and had made a footstool for the cottage of which Jane had said, ‘We shall never have the heart to put our feet on it.’114 Nine years later, she was pleased to find him just as congenial, no doubt a pleasant surprise after her disappointment in his older brothers Edward and George.

  A certain ruthlessness in Fanny’s developing character, however, did not escape Jane’s notice, however unwell she may have felt. It was demonstrated by her first requiring the unfortunate Mr Wildman to read all of her aunt’s then published work, and then reporting his subsequent critical remarks. ‘You are the oddest Creature!’ Jane wrote, ‘nervous enough in some respects, but in others perfectly without nerves! — Quite unrepulsible, hardened & impudent.’115 Jane would not live to see Fanny marry in three years’ time. Fortunately, she did not live to see her become the Victorian matriarch who would one day dismiss her and her work as coarse and unrefined. Yet, this insight of March 1817 may indicate that she would have been less surprised by Fanny’s criticism of her than some of her loyal readers were to be.

  Jane’s illness worsened and her family, always at their best in time of crisis, stepped in. She wrote to her friend, the former Godmersham governess Anne Sharp, on 22 May: ‘I have kept my bed since the 13 of April, with only removals to a Sopha.’116 Feeling a little better at the time of writing this letter, she mentioned that she was about to travel to Winchester in the hope of expert medical help, ‘to see what Mr Lyford can do to re-establishing me in tolerable health’. Never at a loss for wry observation, having commented how kind her entire family had been to her in her time of illness, she added: ‘In short, if I live to be an old Woman I must expect to wish I had died now, blessed in the tenderness of such a Family, & before I had survived either them or their affection’.117 The three who were nearest, James, Henry and Francis, ensured that one of them, or members of their families, visited daily. Yet, it is a sad fact that, while Mrs Austen and her daughters were trying to absorb the fact that there would be no material improvement in their circumstances, and while Jane was writing her last will and testament in April 1817, most of the Godmersham family were caught up in preparations for holidays and celebrations of their own. Six days before Jane travelled to Winchester in the vain hope of recovery of ‘tolerable health’, Edward Knight left for a fortnight’s holiday in Paris, bringing Fanny, Lizzy and George, with two of their late mother’s family. It was James Austen, himself gravely ill, who lent his carriage for Jane’s last journey. Young William Knight, who had so captured his aunt’s heart earlier in the year, accompanied her to Winchester, riding outside the carriage on one side, with his mercurial uncle Henry Austen on the other. Their lodgings were at 8 College Street, and Charles Knight, next door at the College, did his best to visit his aunt, as Jane wrote to her nephew James Edward on 27 May 1817:

  Thanks to the kindness of your Fath
er & Mother in sending me their Carriage, my Journey hither on Saturday was performed with very little fatigue, & had it been a fine day I think I shd have felt none, but it distressed me to see Uncle Henry & Wm K— who kindly attended us on horseback, riding in rain almost all the way.— We expect a visit from them tomorrow, & hope they will stay the night, and on Thursday, which is Confirmation & a Holiday, we are to get Charles out to breakfast. We have had but one visit yet from him poor fellow, as he is in Sickroom, but he hopes to be out tonight. —118

  During July 1817, Jane’s health deteriorated sharply, and finally, in the early hours of the morning of 18 July, with her head on a pillow placed by her sister on her own lap, ‘in quietness and peace’, as James Edward later wrote, ‘she breathed her last’.119 Though Fanny had continued to write to Jane almost to the end, she did not attend the funeral on Thursday 24 July. Neither did Cassandra Austen, nor any of the girls, for it was not then the custom that women should be present. Nonetheless, they felt the enormity of her passing. ‘Thursday was not so dreadful a day to me as you imagined,’ Cassandra wrote afterwards to Fanny: