May, Lou & Cass Read online

  Nine years later, James Edward would marry Miss Emma Smith, a young lady he met in the year in which he wrote that valedictory poem, 1822. Her aunt would describe him as ‘a very agreeable companion, cheerful, lively, animated, ready to converse, willing to read out loud, never in the way and just enough of poetry and romance to please ... and yet not to overlook sober reason’.24 Mrs Leigh Perrot, having by then forgiven James Edward for taking Orders ‘so far at least as to say at times that she would still leave Scarlets to him, at other times that she would not, but would buy him a living instead’, would be so pleased at his choice that she would double his allowance and announce her intention of leaving him not only Scarlets but also some money of her own.25 Eventually, like Edward Knight, James Edward would take the name of his benefactress after her death and, in 1836, become James Edward Austen Leigh.26

  Whatever life Marianne might have had with James Edward, comfortably settled like her sisters in her own establishment with a man of such similar background and interests, the opportunity was not repeated after 1819. James Edward’s marriage and change of name were still far in the future in the year she came out and, at almost eighteen, elegant, accomplished, pretty and of good family, she was expected to make an early and advantageous match. Yet, Fanny, who had steered Lizzy’s début so successfully, did not seem able to give Marianne the same attention. She was completely absorbed in establishing Lizzy in her role as a married woman, and expected Marianne to be equally so. Fanny accompanied the newlyweds to their new home at nearby Dane Court in Kent and, when Lizzy found she was expecting her first child, her eldest sister remained there well into the spring. ‘Marianne left the schoolroom when Lizzy married,’ Fanny wrote from Dane Court to Miss Chapman in March 1819, ‘and went to one or two winter balls’. She did not, however, go on to describe a programme for Marianne’s season as she had for Lizzy. Instead, she described Marianne’s usefulness to the family, including their Deedes cousins with whom she had gone to stay at Sandling: ‘She is now helping Louisa set up house, & I believe she will accompany Papa and me into Hampshire about the end of April for 3 or 4 months.’27

  A perceptible change was occurring at Godmersham, signalled by Lizzy’s wedding. With the imminent birth of Lizzy’s first child, the focus of Fanny’s attention tended even more towards Dane Court as Lizzy, remembering her mother’s death, became increasingly anxious.28 In December 1819, Fanny indicated her sense of the shift within the family when, in a letter to Miss Chapman, Lizzy was formally referred to as ‘Mrs Edward Rice’: Fanny would never again use the family pet name to her former governess. With the exception of John, she considered none of her charges as children any more, and it was this perception which would accelerate the change already begun. Edward and George, who had returned in July from their grand tour abroad, had not gone home to Godmersham: this marked a shift from another tradition, that of the family Christmas at home. Edward was at Dane Court, and George at Chawton, as was William. Charles was coming from Winchester, Henry going to his regiment at Nottingham, and tearaway John was on his way back from his tutor’s house. ‘Marianne,’ she added, ‘is staying at Sandling during this dispersion of the family, & the only ones at home are Louisa and Cassandra who are almost beyond being called children now, being 15 & 13.’29

  With this first break, the Godmersham family was indeed beginning to disperse and Fanny who, at only twenty-seven, had been its head for so long seemed, like Anne Elliot, to feel the loneliness of the new situation. She had had her share of romantic attachments, notably with Mr Wildman and Mr Plumptre, about both of whom she had had several letters of sound advice from Jane. Mr James Wildman was a neighbour, and his name would recur a few years later in a different and troubling context. In November 1819, however, it was Mr Plumptre’s name which came up, when Fanny heard unexpectedly from one of her Cage cousins that his recent marriage was less than happy, and that he avoided the mention of Fanny Knight’s name.30 Whether or not the knowledge of her former suitor’s unhappiness awakened in Fanny a sense that she should have had or might yet have a life apart from her father and siblings, something changed. By September 1820, everything was changed, for in an announcement which seems to have come almost as a surprise to herself, she wrote to Miss Chapman: ‘I have at present something to communicate ... I am engaged to be married to Sir Edward Knatchbull.’31

  He was a widower and a distant relative: his father, Sir Edward Knatchbull, 8th Baronet, was first cousin to the same Catherine Knatchbull who, as Mrs Thomas Knight, had been Edward Austen’s adoptive mother and Jane’s trusted friend and patron. The 8th Baronet died in 1819, leaving his son in a position to take up his father’s seat in Parliament, and to remarry. The Knatchbull family home was reasonably near Godmersham, nine miles away at Mersham le Hatch, near Ashford in Kent. Yet, while there had been social meetings throughout the years, there had never been until 1820 any indication of a special attachment. By the summer of that year, however, Sir Edward Knatchbull was a dinner guest of Edward Knight at Godmersham, and by the end of August he had proposed, writing not only to Fanny but also to her father. On the same day, 28 August 1820, Edward Knight accepted for his daughter by letter, thanking Sir Edward Knatchbull for ‘the honourable distinction which you have shown her as well as the handsome and flattering terms in which your offer is contained’.32 It was, for the family, another suitable and advantageous match. Within days, Sir Edward Knatchbull had introduced Fanny to his two eldest children, Mary Dorothea and Norton, who at thirteen and twelve, were almost of an age with Cassandra Jane and John Knight. This coincidence was not lost upon Fanny, who would shortly see a suitable and convenient way of completing the education of her youngest sister. Yet, as events would prove, she was not going to find it as easy to manage Mary, or any of her stepchildren, as she had her own siblings. In the summer of 1820, however, such problems lay ahead. By her own admission, Fanny accepted Sir Edward’s proposal ‘as much from a sense of duty as from inclination’ and ‘had made up [her] mind ... to grow attached to [him] in time’.33 As the summer of their engagement progressed, however, she did become attached to him, even taking the trouble to assure Sir Edward that the whole Plumptre episode – including a recent visit from his wife and baby – had meant little to her.34

  Though these were heady, sometimes alarming days for Fanny, there was one other member of the family for whom the marriage would have enormous consequences. For Marianne, while Lizzy’s wedding had spelled the end of childhood, Fanny’s altered her entire future. Fanny, shopping in 1818 for wedding clothes for Lizzy, had wondered ‘when I should have to perform the same office for Marianne, little imagining it would be required for myself’.35 Now, unexpectedly and joyously shopping for her own wedding, Fanny’s plans for Marianne, who was not yet nineteen, no longer assumed an early marriage for her: ‘Marianne is a dear good girl & is ready to assist me in every possible way —,’ she wrote to her fiancé. ‘I took her with me today for the first time to order dinner & I mean she should be in the room everyday in future whilst I am making this & other domestic arrangements.’36 These were the same domestic arrangements which Fanny continued to find arduous and exhausting. Even in 1820, after twelve years’ experience, she wrote that she had been struggling with household accounts, and had found the linen stores in ‘a fine confusion’. The household was large: when Edward Knight stayed in Chawton in 1820, he had nineteen servants – and this was in his second home. He had gradually devolved to Fanny almost full responsibility for the running of the house, including not only the organisation of entertainment, but also the engagement and dismissal of staff, the management of linen and other household stores, the purchasing of household necessities and the regular payment of wages. With Fanny’s wedding imminent, Marianne was now expected to learn all this between August and October. Far from enjoying the round of engagements and outings which Fanny had considered essential for Lizzy, even within a month of her aunt’s death, Marianne seems to have spent the summer of 1820 preparing to take over
as her father’s housekeeper. Perhaps only half in earnest, Fanny described her in one letter as ‘idle’, though it is hard to see how she could have found time to be so, and seems to have pressed her at once into making cravats for Sir Edward.37

  It had been taken for granted in the previous generation that Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra would care for their mother and that, as in Sense and Sensibility, their brothers need have little responsibility in the matter beyond the provision of gifts of money and, after several rootless years, a house. Similarly, it seems to have been assumed that Marianne, at nineteen, would simply take over where Fanny left off. While Fanny had herself stepped into her mother’s role at only fifteen, she had had a great deal of help from the generation above, and was constantly encouraged to meet other young people and to think of her own future, as was Lizzy. However much Marianne might have worn her white dancing slippers in the brief period of girlhood allowed to her between the weddings of her two sisters, there seems to have been little opportunity after Fanny’s engagement for her to go dancing. Fanny herself indicated as much to Miss Chapman in September 1820, in what reads like a description of her final handing over of responsibility to Marianne:

  I have been very little at this dear place since April, when we all went into Hampshire for three months. Mrs Edward Rice has suffered sadly all the summer with her teeth — has at last been obliged to have them out, which I hope relieves her. She is to be confined again in November and I believe I shall spend that month with her ... I expect her here in about a fortnight to accompany me to London to buy wedding clothes. Edward & William are at present at Chawton for some shooting — they got a few weeks’ leave lately but returned last week to join their regiment in Norfolk — Charles returned lately to Winchester & my little Johnny is still with Mr Smith, though not at Eltham ... George is the only one of my brothers at home at present. We like Miss Dickinson, my sisters’ new governess, very well, & I think she will remain with them. Marianne is rather young to be at the head of a family — only 19, but she is steady, & it is a great comfort to me to collect that I shall be within reach of rendering her much assistance, Hatch being only nine miles from this place.38

  No doubt Fanny did mean to help Marianne, as she had Lizzy, but she could not have anticipated the extent to which not only Lizzy’s concerns, but also those of her new family would occupy her mind and energy. Quietly and inexorably, Marianne was assumed into Fanny’s position. In December 1820, Fanny wrote that after Lizzy ‘was brought to bed the 7th November of a little girl ... Marianne came from Godmersham where she had been staying on Wednesday, & will remain till near Christmas, so that Lizzy will have a good succession of companions to assist her in regaining her strength’.39 Her father echoed the sentiment in a letter to Edward Rice in 1821, following the birth of Lizzy’s second son: ‘Marianne is already as anxious to nurse her little Nephew as if it were the first she had ever had’.40 Their praise for Marianne’s goodness and steadiness was genuine, like the general praise of Persuasion’s Anne Elliot as the best possible person to nurse Louisa Musgrove after her fall at Lyme: there is no doubt that the party at Lyme did consider Anne the best nurse for Louisa, and equally, there is no doubt of the deep attachment of the Knights to Marianne. Yet, as with Anne Elliot, everyone had stopped thinking of her as a young woman with prospects of her own. This was true of Fanny, in particular. Perhaps because she herself had had to make duty her watchword, Fanny expected no less of Marianne, and Marianne was not accustomed to questioning her sister’s judgement.

  The perceptive Lizzy, whose own husband was ten years her senior had commented during Fanny’s engagement to Sir Edward that their ‘united ages amount to nearly seventy’ and said she had thought of ‘presenting [them] each with a gold-headed cane when [they were] married’. Fanny’s reaction – ‘it delights me that she can treat the subject in an amusing light’ – suggests either that she could then shrug off the age discrepancy, or that her sense of humour, not in adulthood her most prominent characteristic, was already in decline.41 Yet, it does not seem to have occurred to her that in appointing Marianne her successor as housekeeper she had severely limited her sister’s chances of finding the same happiness she herself had sought. Her inability to give Marianne the opportunities she had allowed Lizzy may have been the result of indifferent health in the first few years of her marriage: Fanny spent five weeks in 1821 taking the waters at Leamington Spa, the resort made fashionable by the Prince Regent. While this might have been a chance for her sister to meet other young people, Marianne was not Fanny’s chosen companion. Instead, she was accompanied by George, still considering his role in life, and Louisa.42 ‘All my family are in Hampshire except my sister Louisa,’ Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman in September 1821. ‘[She] has been dividing the summer between the houses of her ... friends & is at present here, but goes to Dane Court tomorrow. They are all pretty well except my father, who has lately been suffering from gout, quite a new complaint for him.’43 Though only in his early fifties, Edward Knight seemed to be slipping into the clichéd role of elderly gouty gentleman while Louisa, not yet seventeen, was considered old enough to be at a spa for five weeks rather than in the schoolroom with her governess. If Louisa was now ready to be out in society, where did that place Marianne, not yet twenty? She seems not to have been much involved in social outings. She may have been much too occupied with her duties as mistress of Godmersham, or she may yet again have been with her sister Lizzy, who was expecting her third child at only twenty-one. A letter of family news from Fanny to Miss Chapman, dated 12 March 1822, sheds some light:

  [Charles] ... is now at Cambridge, and is intended for the law ... Wm took his degree at Oxford in November and is now studying for Orders, which I hope he will receive in June and he will I believe take a curacy in Hampshire immediately. My two eldest brothers are at present in town for a few days only, & Henry nominally at Canterbury with his regiment ... My little darling John is still at Mr Smith’s but he will go to Winchester I believe at midsummer ... Mrs Edward Rice has just weaned her baby — it is unfortunate that her children never thrive till they are weaned. Marianne has been staying with her and has just returned home. Louisa is now grown & is a very nice girl — she has already been to several balls & will probably come out at the Races. Cassandra is with me. Their last governess, Miss Dickinson, left them in the summer ... and as we have a governess for Miss Knatchbull, it was arranged that their education be finished together — you may imagine what a pleasure it is to me to have the dear child always with me. She and Mary have several masters and go on very nicely with their studies.44

  In other words, the brothers were fairly firmly on their career paths, and it was now Louisa, Cassandra and Mary Knatchbull – not Marianne, the ‘dear, good girl’ – whose futures concerned Fanny. Nonetheless, despite her relegation to the role of housekeeper and companion, Marianne was once more touched by romance. It happened in 1822, the same year in which the cousin who had been so struck by her was writing despondent verses about lost love. The gentleman was a Mr Billington, who had attended Win- chester College with Marianne’s brother, Edward, and in 1809 and 1810, while Marianne was still away at school with Lizzy, was one of the schoolfellows who dined with the Knights when Edward was returning to Winchester. Later, in 1813, he hunted with the young Knights at Godmersham, and once again joined the family at dinner. It seems most likely that he was Mr John Billington, who was born in 1798, and ordained in 1821, becoming Rector of Kennardington and Vicar of Kennington, two parishes near Ashford in Kent. This young clergyman, who dined on more than one occasion at Fanny’s house in 1822, proposed to Marianne in November of that year. Fanny’s diary records the event without comment: ‘I heard that Mr Billington proposed to Marianne the other day and was refused’.45

  Perhaps Marianne refused John Billington because she did not love him; perhaps, with her father to attend, two sisters of only eighteen and sixteen and a lively fourteen-year-old brother still in need of care and guidance, she f
elt she could not. To do so would have left Louisa or Cassandra in the same position as herself. She was only twenty-one, yet it was already too late. Her only real chance of marrying without abandoning her family had been between the weddings of Lizzy and Fanny, and her only chance of romance at that time was too slender to survive family disapproval. Now, whatever her feelings towards Mr Billington, it was once more irrelevant. Duty came first. There would be no more proposals for Marianne and gradually, as her sister’s children were born, she began to become Aunt May – like Jane Austen before her, a lively, much-loved, but unmarried aunt in her early twenties. ‘I am sorry I shall not be at your races, for all your sakes,’ the witty Henry Knight wrote to his sister Lizzy from Brighton in June 1823. ‘I daresay we should have had very good fun. Does not Marianne know yet, that she is not to go?’46 Henry at Brighton, and Lizzy, just returned from London, were having a busy summer between town and the seaside. Marianne was at Godmersham and not, apparently, going anywhere.

  Fanny, meanwhile, was beginning to find that her stepchildren and her own brothers gave her more than enough anxiety to keep her occupied. At first, she was relieved and content that Cassandra could be placed with Mary Knatchbull’s governess, Miss Verney. When a successor to Miss Verney, a Miss Atkinson, arrived in 1821 she too seemed, at first, a success. Sir Edward Knatchbull described her as ‘tall — very well-looking — without being handsome — her manner — good and Ladylike ... very much the sort of Being I best like for a governess’.47 If Fanny had to be absent from home, Miss Atkinson was entrusted with the care of the two young girls, and frequently met visiting members of the Knight family. One of these was William Knight, who had delighted his aunt Jane first as a child, working a footstool for her, and again in the last year of her life, when he stayed at Chawton Cottage. After taking his degree at Oxford and making the customary trip abroad, he had decided on the church. In the summer of 1823, he was ordained, and was to become rector at Jane’s first home, Steventon. His future was clearly marked: Edward Knight had within his gift the living at Steventon, and Henry Austen’s late vocation to the priesthood meant that he could hold the living until William was ready to take it over.48 Meanwhile, William spent the summer of 1823 with the Knatchbulls in Kent, assisting the rector of Mersham in his duties. By August 1823, however, there was a problem: it emerged that he and the ladylike Miss Atkinson had, in the parlance of the day, ‘formed an attachment’. Miss Atkinson was immediately dismissed.