The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
Henry’s reproving speech to his sister blames female imagination for the misunderstanding:
‘My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain … You [Catherine] talked of expected horrors in London – and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the hopes of the nation,) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents.’
Henry’s graphic description recalls a series of violent insurgencies on the streets of London: the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots back in 1780, the Mount Street riots witnessed by Eliza, and also the Bread riots of 1795, when hungry mobs seized flour and bread, damaging mills and bakeries. The threat to the Tower and the image of the streets of London flowing with blood inevitably conjure up the Bastille and the September Massacres.
‘Catharine, or the Bower’ ends abruptly with Edward Stanley’s return to France. The events that winter, culminating in the execution of Louis XVI and later Marie Antoinette, perhaps contributed to Jane’s decision to leave it unfinished, though she continued making adjustments to the fragment until at least 1809. Many critics have complained that she ignored the historical events of her times. In 1913, the historian Frederick Harrison described her to his friend Thomas Hardy as ‘a heartless little cynic … penning satirettes about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces, and consigning millions to their graves’.47 This kind of accusation ignores the evidence of ‘Catharine’ and Northanger Abbey, where anxiety about revolution is clearly part of the narrative. And it neglects the fact that, because of her cousin Eliza, Jane Austen was brought exceptionally close to the events of revolutionary France. Why do Austen’s novels not engage more frequently and directly with ‘the Dynasts tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves’? Could it have been not so much because she knew and cared little about it all, but because she knew too much and cared all too deeply? Loving Eliza as she did, it would have been too painful to let her pen dwell on the guilt and misery of revolutionary Paris.
There are three of them. Each is inscribed on the cover in careful handwriting, in imitation of a three-decker novel or a set of complete works: Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third. The first – a collection of little stories, plays, poems and satires – ends with the date 3 June 1793, but it is clear that some of the pieces were written much earlier, at the age of as little as eleven or twelve, and then transcribed in a fair hand when the author was in her eighteenth year. The notebook, purchased ready-made from a stationer, is bound in tanned sheepskin over marbled boards. It is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Volume the Second, illustrated here, is another miscellany, including two epistolary novelettes, a parodic ‘History of England’ and various ‘Scraps’, all probably composed when the author was in her mid-teens. It is another stationer’s notebook, this time headed with the acknowledgement, in Latin, ‘a gift from my father’. In small quarto format, it is bound in full parchment – vellum – pasted on to millboard. It is now in the British Library, London. So is Volume the Third, which is very similar in size and also covered in vellum, the front disfigured by a water-stained splodge. This final volume contains only two works: a fragmentary story called ‘Evelyn’ and the much longer, though still unfinished, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’. The first page is signed and dated ‘Jane Austen – May 6th 1792’. A pencil note on the inside of the board opposite, in her father’s hand, sounds a note of paternal pride: ‘Effusions of Fancy by a Very Young Lady consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new’.1
These are the earliest works of Jane Austen, copied in her best hand and preserved by her. Why did she write them out in this way? First and foremost, for the amusement of her family. Pasted to the inside front board of Volume the First, the most worn of the three, is a note penned by Cassandra after her sister’s death: ‘For my brother Charles. I think I recollect that a few of the trifles in this Vol. were written expressively for his amusement.’ But Jane Austen also took the trouble of creating these books, which involved much labour with goose quill and inkwell, so as to present herself, at least in her own imagination, as a professional author. Though written by hand, the volumes have the accoutrements of proper published books: contents lists, dedications, chapter divisions. Even as a teenager, Jane Austen knew what she wanted from life: to be a writer.
Her literary career began in 1787, the year that she turned twelve. One could almost say that, like Mozart, she was a child prodigy. Throughout her teens she continued to write stories and plays, sketches and histories, burlesques and parodies. Their original manuscripts are lost, but the fair copies in the vellum notebooks amount to some ninety thousand words. This body of work has become known as her ‘juvenilia’. Though the contents of the vellum notebooks are now well known to scholars, they are still often neglected by readers and even biographers. Yet these early works provide extraordinary insight into the vivid and often wild imagination of the real Jane Austen.
Virginia Woolf was the first to observe that Jane Austen’s juvenile writings were ‘meant to outlast the Christmas holidays’. That, at the tender age of fifteen, she was writing ‘for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own’. Woolf’s admiration for the sheer exhilaration and breathless energy of Austen’s earliest comic sketches expresses itself in the adjectives ‘astonishing’ and ‘unchildish’.2 What do we make of a sentence such as this from Austen’s first ‘novel’, which has an endearingly youthful spelling mistake in its title, ‘Love and Freindship’? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her – she was only an Object of Contempt.’3 Good girls the object of contempt? Not exactly the image of Austen that her family members sought to establish in the memoirs of her that they wrote after her death. ‘The girl of fifteen is laughing, in her corner, at the world,’ observed Woolf. ‘Girls of fifteen are always laughing,’ she adds – to which we might add: especially when like Austen and Woolf herself they are one of a pair of sisters in a household full of boys.
Very near the end of her life Jane Austen passed on a message to her niece that her one regret as a writer was that she wrote too much at an early age. She advised her niece to spend her time reading rather than taking up the pen too early.4 So perhaps she would not be entirely pleased to know that her early teenage work is now widely read. But although the early stories were not intended for public consumption, she continued to enjoy and indeed to amend and edit her youthful writings well into her thirties.5 Because she was writing for herself and her family, she allowed herself a lack of restraint unthinkable in the published novels. In this sense, the vellum notebooks give access to the authentic interior life of Jane Austen, free from the shackles of literary convention and the mask of respectability required by print. If the child is father to the man, as her contemporary William Wordsworth claimed, then the girl is mother to the woman. The not so secret life of Jane Austen aged eleven to seventeen is as a writer of wonderful exuberance and self-confidence. She also shows herself to be a young woman of firm opinions and strong passions.
A turning point was being allowed a room of her own. Shortly after Jane and Cassandra returned from boarding school for good in 1786 they were given the use of an upstairs drawing room, adjoining their bedroom. In her letters she referred to it as her Dressing Room. It had blue wallpaper and blue striped curtains and a chocolate-brown carpet. The room contained Jane’s piano and her writing desk. There was a bookcase and a table for the sisters’