The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
of sensibility.
Her heroines Laura and Sophia lie, cheat and steal – all in the name of sensibility. It was, after all, a code of conduct that unashamedly placed the individual first. When Sophia is caught stealing money, or in her words ‘majestically removing the 5th bank-note’ from a drawer, she responds in the injured tones of a virtuous heroine: ‘The dignity of Sophia was wounded; “Wretch (exclaimed she, hastily replacing the Bank-note in the draw) how darest thou accuse me of an Act, of which the bare idea makes me blush?”’37 The heroines are overcome with excessive ‘feeling’. When they witness an emotional reunion, they faint alternately on a sofa. At a moment of distress, one of them shrieks and faints on the ground, while the other screams and runs instantly mad.
‘Love and Freindship’ is in part a parody of Jane’s cousin Cassandra Hawke’s novel Julia de Gramont (1788), a book that contains many of the clichés that she satirized with such clear-eyed precision. Austen mirrors the plot-lines and sentimental language of Julia. She also borrows the name of the hero, Augustus, for her own unprincipled leading man.
Another of the clichés of the sentimental novel that Jane Austen parodies is the use of natural settings as a place of solace. In Julia, the heroine enters a shady grove which reminds her of the frequent visits that she made there with Augustus. ‘Each seat, each shrub, recall[s] a dear idea to her mind.’38 In ‘Love and Freindship’, Sophia and Laura enter a shaded grove, and turn to thoughts of their lovers:
‘What a beautifull Sky! (said I) How charmingly is the azure varied by those delicate streaks of white!’
‘Oh! my Laura (replied she, hastily withdrawing her Eyes from a momentary glance at the sky) do not thus distress me by calling my Attention to an object which so cruelly reminds me of my Augustus’s blue Satin Waistcoat striped with white! In pity to your unhappy freind, avoid a subject so distressing.’39
After reading this sort of thing in ‘Love and Freindship’ it is hard to take the eighteenth-century sentimental novel altogether seriously.
Jane Austen loved burlesque and never altogether abandoned it. From her earliest full-length satire on the Gothic and sentimental novel, Northanger Abbey, to her final uncompleted novel, Sanditon, she continued to use elements of it in her work. But her critique of sensibility is serious as well as playful. Shortly after the vellum notebooks were completed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lectured in Bristol on the slave trade:
True Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare – what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family – Her own sorrows like the Princes of Hell in Milton’s Pandemonium sit enthroned bulky and vast, while the miseries of our fellow creatures dwindle into pygmy forms, and are crowded, an unnumbered multitude, into some dark corner of the Heart where the eye of sensibility gleams faintly on them at long Intervals – a keen feeling of trifling misfortunes is selfish cowardice not virtue.40
As will be seen, Austen was a great admirer of Coleridge’s friend, the leading abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Coleridge’s argument that ‘sensibility’ was fundamentally selfish and thus an impediment to that true ‘Benevolence’ which guides Christian behaviour – and which should make every true Christian an abolitionist – is one with which Jane Austen heartily concurred.
This is a novel in five duodecimo volumes, dated 1796. The title page reads Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth. By the Author of Evelina and Cecilia. It was printed for two publishers, T. Payne at the Mews Gate, and Cadell and Davies in the Strand. A dedication to Queen Charlotte carries the name of F. d’Arblay, who some years earlier had been employed by Her Majesty as Second Keeper of the Robes. Madame d’Arblay was known to her friends as Fanny Burney, daughter of Dr Johnson’s friend, the famous musical historian Charles Burney.
There was a huge sense of anticipation in the fashionable literary world for the third offering of one of the nation’s favourite female authors. What increased the sense of excitement was Burney’s shrewd decision to publish Camilla by subscription, with purchasers paying upfront in order to underwrite the production costs, guaranteeing that ‘its sale becomes almost instantly as quick as general’.1 The Morning Chronicle had made the first public announcement on 7 July 1795: ‘PROPOSALS for printing by Subscription a NEW WORK, in Four Volumes, 12 mo. By the AUTHOR of EVELINA and CECILIA: To be delivered on or before the 1st day of July, 1796. The Subscriptions will be one Guinea; to be paid at the time of subscribing.’
Burney herself alphabetized her list of subscribers for the printed edition. She freely admitted that she also kept a sharp eye on protocol and title: the most elite subscribers were given due prominence. The list of names, which followed the Dedication and Advertisement, ran to thirty-eight pages. Royalty, aristocracy, politicians and writers were there – a thousand subscribers in all. Edmund Burke signed up for five sets and the widow of the renowned actor David Garrick for two. Warren Hastings promised to ‘attack the East Indies’ on the novelist’s behalf. Mrs Hannah More, Miss Edgeworth and Mrs Radcliffe of Babington, leading novelists of the day, all put down their names, as did the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, the actress Sarah Siddons, the landscape gardener Humphry Repton, various members of the Leigh family of Adlestrop and, sandwiched between ‘George Aust, Esq.’ and ‘Mrs Ayton’, a certain ‘Miss J. Austen, Steventon’. She was in her twentieth year; the guinea was paid by her father, a sign of his commitment to her literary interests. This was Jane Austen’s first appearance in print. Indeed, since her novels would be published anonymously, it was one of only two occasions on which her name appeared publicly in her lifetime. The other was in a subscription list to a volume of sermons.
Jane Austen’s copy of Camilla was bought in boards, uncut, and was later half-bound, probably by Cassandra, who inherited the volumes after her sister’s death. Though Jane cherished her novels, she was not averse to defacing them for the sake of a good joke. As a fledgling writer, she just couldn’t resist scribbling, even in places where it was rather inappropriate. On the back of the novel there is an inscription, its final word obscured by the half-binding: ‘Since this work went to the Press a Circumstance of some importance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that Dr Marchmont has at last [?died].’2
Jane Austen’s joke here refers to the meddling Dr Marchmont, who is the chief obstacle to the union of the lovers. For five long volumes, he manages to keep Camilla and Edgar from marrying, despite the fact that they adore, and are suitable for, one another. Austen knows perfectly well that the story is fictional, but the characters have been made to seem so real that she cannot resist imagining their continuing life after the end of the book. In its tiny way, her intervention on the endpapers of Camilla is a licence to those many lovers of Jane Austen’s novels who have taken it upon themselves to imagine how the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy might unfold.
Austen was forced to sell many of her belongings when she moved to lodgings in Bath, but this was one novel that she was never going to sell. It stayed in the family and was eventually given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Austen’s father, who held an account at John Burdon’s bookshop in College Street, Winchester, owned a library of several hundred books, but that resource dried up when the family left their home and much of the library was sold. When Jane visited Kent there was always her wealthy brother Edward’s well-stocked library, which included many novels. And when she eventually joined the publishing house of John Murray, Murray himself loaned her books.
Most of the dozens of novels that Austen read were