The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
engaged in a literary project that centred on the critique of sensibility. James Austen, sophisticated, creative and ambitious, went at the age of fourteen to his father’s alma mater, St John’s College, Oxford. He was already showing some talent as a poet. In 1786 he went on a Grand Tour on the continent, including a visit to cousin Eliza de Feuillide’s estate in Guienne, France. After his return home he took holy orders and was ordained deacon in December 1787. While serving as a curate in Hampshire, but still spending most of his time in Oxford, he launched, with the assistance of his brother Henry, who was himself a St John’s undergraduate by this time, a weekly literary periodical called the Loiterer. It was initially aimed at an Oxford student audience, but James eventually managed to get wider distribution for it, engaging a London publisher called Thomas Egerton and also advertising in the Reading Mercury, the local paper that served Steventon and the rest of East Hampshire. The periodical ran for a little over a year from 1789 to 1790. It eventually closed because, as James put it, the publisher’s bills were too long and the readers’ subscription list too short. James gave up on his ambition to be a published author, though he continued writing poetry for his own pleasure (when he wasn’t riding to hounds) throughout his career in the Church.
The Loiterer contains a lot of undergraduate humour – a typical paper concerns ‘tuft-hunting’, the art of trailing on the coat-tails of an aristocratic student. The essays are witty, but frequently laboured. There is an epigrammatic turn of phrase, but never with quite the crispness of the brothers’ younger sister. Thus James: ‘NOTHING has so often interrupted the harmony of private families, and set the whole genealogical table of Relations in arms against each other, as that unfortunate propensity which the old and the young have ever discovered to differ as much as possible in their opinion on almost every subject that comes in their way.’31
But where there is exact alignment between the Loiterer and the vellum notebooks is in their shared attitude to excessive sensibility and its debilitating effects on novels and their readers:
What I here allude to, Sir, is, that excess of sentiment and susceptibility, which the works of the great Rousseau chiefly introduced, which every subsequent Novel has since foster’d, and which the voluptuous manners of the present age but too eagerly embrace. I shall not here enumerate the many baneful effects which are produced by it in the morals of mankind, when under the mask of feeling and liberality are concealed the grossest allurements of sense … For though these Heroes and Heroines of sentimental memory be only imaginary characters, yet we may fairly presume, they were meant to be probable ones; and hence too we may conclude, that all who adopt their opinions will share their fate; that they will be tortured by the poignant delicacy of their own feelings, and fall the Martyrs to their own Susceptibility.32
Jane says the same in rather fewer words.
The tone is closer to hers in some of the essays written by brother Henry. For example this, on the rules for the education of a fine lady: ‘As soon as she can understand what is said to her, let her know that she is to look forwards to matrimony, as the sole end of existence, and the sole means of happiness; and that the older, the richer and the foolisher her Husband is, the more enviable will be her situation.’33
But the wittiest and most stylish contribution in the entire run of the Loiterer appears in issue number nine. It is written in the voice of a female reader:
To the AUTHOR of the LOITERER … You must know, Sir, I am a great reader, and not to mention some hundred volumes of Novels and Plays, have, in the last two summers, actually got through all the entertaining papers of our most celebrated periodical writers … I assure you my heart beat with joy when I first heard of your publication, which I immediately sent for, and have taken in ever since.
I am sorry, however, to say it, but really, Sir, I think it the stupidest work of the kind I ever saw: not but that some of the papers are well written; but then your subjects are so badly chosen, that they never interest one. – Only conceive, in eight papers, not one sentimental story about love and honour, and all that … Why, my dear Sir – what do you think we care about the way in which Oxford men spend their time and money – we, who have enough to do to spend our own. For my part, I never, but once, was at Oxford in my life, and I am sure I never wish to go there again … Get a new set of correspondents, from among the young of both sexes, but particularly ours; and let us see some nice affecting stories, relating the misfortunes of two lovers, who died suddenly, just as they were going to church. Let the lover be killed in a duel, or lost at sea, or you may make him shoot himself, just as you please; and as for his mistress, she will of course go mad; or if you will, you may kill the lady, and let the lover run mad; only remember, whatever you do, that your hero and heroine must possess a great deal of feeling, and have very pretty names. If you think fit to comply with this my injunction, you may expect to hear from me again, and perhaps I may even give you a little assistance: – but, if not – may your work be condemned to the pastry-cook’s shop, and may you always continue a bachelor, and be plagued with a maiden sister to keep house for you.
Your’s, as you behave,
SOPHIA SENTIMENT.
A young female reader from outside Oxford, who is a passionate reader and has a wicked sense of humour, who takes her name from a character in a play in the library at Steventon (William Hayley’s The Mausoleum), who loves to mock the novel of sensibility (‘let the lover run mad’), and who ends the letter with a joke about being plagued with a sister … There is a very strong probability that the letter from ‘Sophia Sentiment’ to the editor of the Loiterer is the first published work of Jane Austen.34
If Jane really was ‘Sophia Sentiment’, then, remarkably, her first appearance to an audience beyond the Oxford cognoscenti was at the hands of a Dublin ‘pirate’. After the magazine folded, the remaining sheets were bound up and published in Oxford, but in 1792 an independent edition was printed in book form by P. Byrne and W. Jones of Dublin. Patrick Byrne was Ireland’s leading Catholic publisher. He was later accused of involvement in a plot against King George III. He was arrested, accused of high treason and consigned to Newgate gaol, where he became ill. A petition for release was finally successful and he emigrated to Philadelphia, where he ran a successful printing business until his death in 1814, in the middle of the Anglo-American War.35 He was an unlikely first publisher for Jane Austen.
The vellum notebooks exist in a dialogue with the essays in the Loiterer. There are many parallels of both phrasing and theme. At the beginning of Jane Austen’s literary career, as in its maturity, there is a close relationship between her brothers and her path into print. ‘Lesley Castle: an unfinished Novel in Letters’ in Volume the Second is dedicated to Henry, with a joke imagining he has managed to get a very good book deal for her: ‘Messrs Demand and Co – please to pay Jane Austen Spinster the sum of one hundred guineas on account of your Humbl. Servant. H. T. Austen’.36 In later years, he would indeed act as her literary agent.
But the very best writing in the notebooks, the two works in which the modern reader can really see the seeds of the future novelist, were written for the all-important women in her family. One might have expected the dedications to have been the other way round: ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, with its East Indian connection and its political edge, is for Cassandra when it sounds more like Eliza de Feuillide’s fare, whereas ‘Love and Freindship’ is for Eliza when it consists of comic versions of the kinds of letter that would later pass between Jane and Cassandra.
‘Love and Freindship’ is the young Austen’s very best satire on the novel of sensibility. Emotional excess – the indulgence of luxuriance in feeling for its own sake – was the particular target of her satire. Many sentimental novels contained clichés such as lost orphans, swooning heroines, emotional reunions between lost children and parents, improbable chance meetings. ‘Love and Freindship’ mocks all these with