May, Lou & Cass Read online

  Everything was done with the greatest tranquillity, & but that I was determined I would see the last & therefore was upon the list- en, I should not have known when they left the house. I watched the little mournful procession the length of the Street & when it turned from my sight & I had lost her for ever — even then I was not overpowered, nor so agitated as I am now in writing of it.120

  Only Edward Knight and Francis Austen walked beside the coffin to Winchester Cathedral. Their eldest brother James was too ill to attend: his son James Edward, deeply affected, rode fourteen miles from Steventon to represent him. The service was conducted early to avoid a clash with Morning Prayer at ten o’clock: afterwards, Jane Austen was quietly interred in the North Aisle.

  At Godmersham, on Sunday 20 July, Fanny recorded in her journal: ‘Evening church. Liz. Mne. & I did not go, in consequence of a letter from Papa announcing my poor dear Aunt Jane Austen’s death at 4 on Friday morning.’121 Three weeks later, she wrote to Miss Chapman to inform her of their loss. There is no doubt that she was greatly grieved; there is equally no doubt that she was by then quite in command of her emotions and, indeed, more concerned with the present and future than with the past, or the dead:

  The papers will have informed you of the sad loss we have lately sustained, & you will, I am sure, have felt for us, & will be glad to hear that my Grandmamma & Aunt Cassandra bear their loss with great fortitude, & that their health is not affected by the anxiety they have undergone. Did you hear of our little trip to Paris in May? Papa, Lizzy & I with my Aunts Louisa & Charlotte (Mrs John Bridges) went there with Edward & George & spent a fortnight very pleasantly ... I believe John still at Eltham, but we are not quite certain — he will certainly go somewhere before Mich’mas, as he gets too unmanageable for home, like most boys of this age. Cakey wished very much to take him today — I hope he will not be troublesome if you are so good as to admit him to visit you ... We have of course not attended the races, but we are going to an Ashford Ball next Thursday, when Lizzy is to be considered out. Wm is at home & is a good deal grown. Charles is also at home in his Winchester holiday. But Sackree will tell you about her darling ... Lizzy & Marianne write with me in kind remembrance ...122

  What Fanny did not say to Miss Chapman, indeed probably could not yet know, was that Lizzy had just met in Paris the man with whom she would fall in love, just as she herself had, without realising it, already met the man she would marry in 1820. Marianne, who would be out in society the following year, was herself only five years away from receiving a proposal. For Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra Jane Knight – May, Lou and Cass – the very situations which Jane Austen had conjured in her imagination would shortly be presented to them in reality, and they would have, more than any of their family, a chance to understand in their own lives the prescient truth of her work.

  Chapter 2: ‘Goodbye from the Cowhouse’

  Two Weddings, a Scandal and a Refusal

  1817–1826

  ‘He is just what a young man ought to be,’ said she, ‘sensible, good-humoured, lively. And I never saw such happy manners! So much ease, with such perfect good breeding!’

  ‘He is also handsome,’ replied Elizabeth, ‘which a young man ought likewise to be if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.’

  PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

  Following her aunt’s death, Lizzy’s début was deferred, though not for long. The ball in Ashford in Kent where she came out took place in mid-August, scarcely a month after Jane’s death. As it happened, the ball did not launch Lizzy in the usual way within her social set. A chance meeting had already decided her future, as her granddaughter, Evelyn Templetown, later described:

  They first met in Paris in 1817. Mr Knight had taken his two elder daughters, Fanny and Elizabeth, there for a period of enjoyment. Edward Rice had been there for the same reason for some considerable time. He was a friend of Elizabeth’s brother George who, while staying with his father and sisters, took him to call. ‘How remarkably pretty your sister is,’ said Edward as they left the house – it was love at first sight!1

  The ‘period of enjoyment’ was the trip taken in May 1817, shortly before Jane went to Winchester in her last hope of recovery. On their return in early June, when the full import of her illness became known, there was, for a time, a turning away from pleasure and social engagement. By the end of the summer of 1817, however, despite their bereavement, the Godmersham family had almost completely resumed normal life.

  Edward Royds Rice, ten years older than Lizzy and in a position to marry, was quickly certain of his feelings. ‘He followed up the acquaintance when they all returned to Kent,’ recorded Evelyn Templetown, ‘and soon proposed. Elizabeth refused him. She was only seventeen and very happy at home.’2 Lizzy, despite the sudden death in the family circle and her father’s recent legal and financial struggles, was indeed happy: she had just left the school room, enjoyed a unique position in the family where she was equally at home with her older and the younger siblings, and had a particularly close relationship with Marianne, just twenty months her junior and soon to join her in society. She had long looked forward to the excitement of her first season. ‘But she became deeply troubled,’ according to Evelyn Templetown. ‘She found herself deeply in love, and when Edward Rice again proposed, he was accepted.’3

  Edward Austen Knight approved of Edward Rice, saw that he was in a position to give his daughter a comfortable establishment, and actively en- couraged Lizzy to accept his proposal. Not everyone was quite so pleased. Fanny, who had carried the burden of looking after the family for nine years, was grieved that Elizabeth would now be leaving home.4 The children’s old nurse, Susanna Sackree, ‘Cakey’, who had wept when Marianne and Lizzy were sent off to school as young children, still felt deeply protective towards them. She was concerned to see Lizzy walk out alone with Edward Rice, and was oddly relieved that the young girl found it difficult to address her future husband by his Christian name. When he asked her to do so, a strange reprise of Emma Woodhouse’s conversation with her fiancé, Mr Knightley, ensued: ‘She replied that she had known him first as “Mr Rice” and liked that best. He retorted that she would think it odd if he called her sister Fanny “Miss Austen”, but of course, “she must do as she likes” and so she did.’5 It seems a pity that Jane was not there to comment on this match; she had known some of the Rices through her brother James, and there had once been a question of Edward’s older brother, Henry Rice, having the living at Deane, near Steventon, one of two livings formerly held by the Reverend George Austen. Jane had held a decided opinion of Edward’s mother, a redoubtable lady of French extraction known always as Madame Sarah Rice, and famous for her habit of wearing only white from head to toe. To Jane, even on slight acquaintance, Madame Sarah was ‘a perverse and narrow-minded woman’, not inclined ‘to oblige those whom she does not love’.6

  Lizzy’s wedding took place just over a year after the meeting in Paris, on 6 October 1818. Like their cousin Anna’s wedding a few years earlier – and quite unlike that imagined by Andrew Davies in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice – it was a very simple, understated affair:

  So quiet and simple was it in its arrangements that when the company returned to the house, the bridegroom went out shooting — and the bride, with her sister Marianne, ‘walked all round the chicken-houses, and climbed up to the top of the cowhouses to say goodbye’.7

  It was intended as Lizzy’s farewell to childhood; yet, it was also Marianne’s. After the two girls climbed down from the roof for the last time, and Lizzy set off with her new husband, Marianne was suddenly left, at seventeen, without her closest companion. Lizzy was to her as Cassandra had been to Jane and, like their aunts, they had seldom been parted. They had sat together as little children for their first painting, and had learned to read, write and ride together.8 Again like Jane and Cassandra, they had been sent away to school together at just seven and nine. Far away from the rest of their family, they had only one anothe
r in the two years following their mother’s sudden death and, when they were finally brought home, had combined to provoke a series of unfortunate governesses, before accompanying their aunt Jane to London for a painful visit to the dentist and a noisy, magical trip to the theatre. It was not until Jane decided to admit the thirteen-year-old Lizzy, but not the slightly younger Marianne, to her private readings that a difference was made between them. In fact, Jane’s separation of the two girls signalled the beginning, if not of a relegation of Marianne, certainly of a tendency to overlook her which was to become more marked over the next seven years.

  Fanny was almost nine years older than Marianne: Louisa and Cassandra Jane were just fourteen and twelve when Lizzy married. As Jane had known and emphasised throughout her work, famously giving it as the opinion of the monstrous but socially astute Lady Catherine de Bourgh, it was of considerable benefit to a family with several girls if the older daughters married first, smoothing the paths of their younger sisters. No one was surprised that Miss Elizabeth Knight, acclaimed as the family beauty, had married so young – Jane herself had been known to praise Lizzy’s looks to the detriment of Marianne.9

  It was not, however, an opinion shared by everyone. In the year following Lizzy’s wedding, when Marianne was herself out in society, her cousin, James Edward Austen, fell in love with her. Known in the family simply as Edward, he was three years older than his cousin. Whether coming from the old family home of Steventon, or from school in Winchester, he had been a frequent and welcome visitor at Chawton Cottage, famous for the ease of his manner, ‘sitting in his quiet comfortable way making his delightful little sketches’.10 In addition to his sketching and writing, he was also renowned within the family for his skilfully executed silhouettes which, without needing to draw them first, he made directly with special little scissors, ‘the points ... an inch long, and the curved handles about three inches’.11 By happy coincidence it was for this artistic young man, in a bid to lift his spirits after he had lost some chapters of a work in progress, that Jane described in similar terms her own unique and equally delicate art:

  Two Chapters & a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, & therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them; — two strong twigs & a half towards a Nest of my own, would have been something. — I do not think however that any theft of that sort would be really useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of Variety and Glow? — How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?12

  Jane enjoyed teasing this clever nephew: ‘I give you Joy of having left Winchester,’ she wrote on the last birthday of her life, 16 December 1816:

  Now you may own, how miserable you were there; now, it will all gradually come out — your Crimes & your Miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London & threw away Fifty Guineas at a Tavern, & how often you were on the point of hanging yourself — restrained only ... by the want of a Tree within some miles of the City ... Adieu, Amiable.13

  There was little chance of James Edward’s throwing away fifty guineas anywhere, for money was in short supply. Although his father James had been the main beneficiary in the will of their uncle James Leigh Perrot, to the exclusion of Jane’s family, the eventual disposition of the property at Scarlets in Berkshire had been left to the discretion of his widow, ‘looked upon by her husband’s relations as a capricious and uncertain person’.14 Jane Leigh Perrot had the use of her husband’s property and money for life and, like Jane’s fictional tyrants Mrs Ferrars, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Churchill, was quite prepared to use her power. ‘The family,’ as James Edward’s daughter Mary Augusta later put it, ‘could feel no assurance that she would leave the property to any of them.’15

  Though James Edward, like his grandfather and uncles, was fortunate to be able to attend Oxford on a scholarship and, like his father and grandfather, considered entering the Church, Jane Leigh Perrot opposed his choice of career.16 ‘She would have preferred his being a smart young layman,’ James Edward’s daughter later wrote, ‘and she threatened to do nothing for him in the future if he persisted in his choice’.17 She could not cut him off entirely, as his father had ensured that, on his aunt’s death, he would have a ‘moderate fortune ... but,’ as his daughter went on to say, ‘she had the power to do a great deal more if she would’. 18 James Edward, however, like Sense and Sensibility’s Edward Ferrars, would not submit to her will. He knew where his own inclinations lay and, though generally quiet and agreeable, was also a young man of passion. ‘The love of acting must have been very strong in the family,’ his daughter later wrote, and like his father and Jane, who had revelled in writing and performing plays and charades for the Steventon Austens, James Edward loved the theatre. Even on his very limited allowance as a student, he tried to see a play every night if he found himself in London, seeking out performances in any town he was visiting and later astonishing his daughter with his knowledge of ‘the quantity of theatres [which] then existed in the land’.19

  Theatre was one passion. By 1819 Marianne Knight was another. At almost eighteen, she was at last enjoying the life of a young girl in society. Her uncle Charles Austen thought her a beauty, and told his brother James so: James Edward, at almost twenty-one, was simply entranced.20 At the end of April 1819 his father, who was by then in the last year of his life, had a visit from his brother Edward, with Fanny and Marianne. Afterwards, James wrote to his son with the clear intention of dissuading him from his opinion. ‘I am afraid you will not think me warm enough in the praise of Marianne’s beauty,’ he wrote. ‘Pretty she certainly is — but not so very bewitching beautiful as I had been taught to expect from you and my brother Charles.’ His daughter Caroline, at fourteen, went further, adding to her father’s letter a waspishly ambivalent remark not unworthy of Jane Austen’s Caroline Bingley: ‘I cannot admire Marianne as much as you do. She is certainly very pretty, but I never saw her look anything like beautiful.’ She added one concession, however, revealing in itself: ‘Her greatest personal recommendation to me,’ she said, ‘is being very like poor Aunt Jane.’21

  Fifty years later, James Edward would write that, after Jane Austen’s death, all her brothers looked ever afterwards for her likeness in their daughters and nieces. Perhaps he too sought his aunt in Marianne. Caroline Austen may have genuinely thought Marianne less than beautiful: their father, however, in trying to curb his son’s interest in Marianne may have been thinking of Mrs Leigh Perrot and her power of veto. In 1819 James Edward, still an undergraduate, could not afford to be in love; he was in no position to marry anyone, let alone an impecunious cousin. Moreover, his father James, knowing himself to be very ill, may have been anxious to avoid a confrontation with the capricious Mrs Leigh Perrot. No record has survived of Marianne’s feelings. Sadly, they could have made no difference. Whether or not she returned the admiration of this gentle, cultured cousin who, with all the benefits of a shared history, might have been an ideal match for her, there was no hope of any development. For Edward Knight, following the crash of Henry’s bank and the challenge to the estate, money was far from plentiful. The Knight sons would all be provided for, either through the property or through well-chosen professions, such as the army, the law, or the church. For the daughters, as for their aunts in Chawton, the choice was simple: they were to marry well, or to manage on the small allowance their father could make them, remaining forever dependent on their father and brothers. The hard fact was that, though Lizzy had married for love at eighteen, she had also married to the family’s advantage. Neither Marianne nor James Edward could marry for love alone.

  The matter may have been settled by the next loss to the family. James Austen, aged only fifty-six, entered his last illness in 1819, and James Edward came home from Oxford some weeks before Christmas to spend time with his dying father.22 James Austen’s death changed his so
n’s position in the family, leaving him more than ever dependent on the good will of Mrs Leigh Perrot. It also took him away from Steventon and its proximity to Chawton, where he might have met or heard news of Marianne. James Edward took his degree in November 1820, left Oxford and, thereafter, he and Marianne seem to have reverted to their original relationship. He may not have forgotten her entirely, however: some verses surviving from that time indicate a certain despondency and just a hint of bitterness, not surprising in a young man who had recently lost his father, his childhood home and, perhaps, his first love. One of these poems was addressed to a boyhood friend, William Heathcote, a nephew of Mr Harris Bigg-Wither, whose proposal Jane had impulsively accepted one evening in 1802 and the next morning, upon reflection, rejected:

  William, A Muse I once possessed,

  A poor but willing maid,

  The inmate of a lightsome breast,

  Though not a weighty head.

  ... She’s fled, or on this day of pride,

  When, not for thee in vain,

  Youth’s quiet vista opens wide,

  On manhood’s active plain;

  Thou sh’dst have heard her joy, her boast

  Her pride from envy free,

  At seeing in my friend, what most

  Myself wd wish to be.23