The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
and Cassandra Austen decided to send their daughters away to school. At the age of seven, Jane Austen, together with her ten-year-old sister, was taken to Oxford by their cousin Jane Cooper. They were to be taught by a Mrs Cawley, a Cooper relation. Seven seems to us an early age for a young girl to be living away from her family, especially from such a warm, loving home, full of life and animation. It must have been a wrench to leave the safety and security of the family home for school in Oxford, though elder brother James Austen was studying there and showed the girls the sights of the city. The arrangement was similar to that in Steventon: it was a case of a family taking in pupils, not a formal school environment. Presumably George Austen had made the financial calculation that the income gained from sending his girls away and creating more space for boy boarders in the rectory would exceed the outlay required to keep them in Oxford.
According to family lore, Jane insisted on accompanying her sister to Oxford. Mrs Austen claimed that if ‘Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate’.21 Hampshire to Oxford is about fifty miles, which the two young girls would have travelled in a stage-coach.
In September, Mrs Cawley moved her ‘school’ to Southampton, only for it to be struck by a typhus outbreak. The three girls fell ill, but Mrs Cawley failed to alert the family. It was Jane Cooper who wrote to her mother and told her the news. Mrs Austen and Mrs Cooper came immediately to take the girls home. Jane Austen was very ill and nearly died. They all made a full recovery, but Mrs Cooper caught the fever and died in October. One can only imagine the shock and distress of the family. Dr Cooper was heartbroken and devoted the rest of his years to bringing up his children Jane and Edward. To commemorate his beloved wife he sent Cassandra a ‘ring representing a sprig of diamonds, with one emerald’ and Jane was given a headband, which she wore to balls.22
The Southampton experience did not deter the Reverend and Mrs Austen from the idea of boarding school. Within a year, Jane and Cassandra, together with their now motherless cousin Jane Cooper, found themselves at a more formal establishment, this time in Reading, a prosperous trading town just over twenty miles from Steventon, on the main coaching routes from London to Oxford and the west country.
It was called the Abbey School and was run by Sarah Hackitt, who went by the name of Madame Latournelle, no doubt because female French teachers were the height of fashion. The school adjoined the remains of the ancient Abbey of Reading: ‘the greater part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful old-fashioned garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees in hot summer evenings’.23 The school was connected to an antique gateway, which looked out on the green and a marketplace beyond. Inside, new girls were received by the headmistress in a wainscoted parlour in which chenille tapestries depicting tombs and weeping willows were hung round the walls.
According to a family member, the school was a ‘free and easy one … In Cassandra and Jane’s days the girls do not seem to have been kept very strictly, as they and their cousin, Jane Cooper, were allowed to accept an invitation to dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper.’24 As the family descendants noted, it all sounds rather like Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma, which ‘had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter [she] dressed their chilblains with her own hands’.25 Madame Latournelle always dressed in the same way and had a cork leg. She encouraged the arts, dancing and theatre in particular. It seems to have been a happy place, full of girlish glee. ‘I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school,’ Jane Austen remarked in one of her letters to Cassandra.26
After twenty months spent in the Abbey School she returned home for good in December 1786, just approaching her eleventh birthday. Her formal education was over. But the home to which she returned was one from which her brother Edward was now permanently absent.
As has been suggested, the transference of children from one home to another by formal adoption, as with Edward Austen Knight, or by a more informal arrangement, as with the fictional Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, was by no means uncommon. If the Knights, like Lord Mansfield and the Chutes, had wanted a girl rather than a boy, then Jane Austen would have been separated from her beloved Cassandra.
Jane Austen reworked the theme of adopted children several times in her novels and uses it to suggest her ideas about nature and nurture, good parents and bad parents, the importance of childhood in relation to the adult. ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,’ as the old Jesuit saying had it.
Jane Austen was close to her father, who supported her ambition to become a published writer. Her feelings towards her mother were far more complicated. There are few examples of effective parenting in the novels. This is partly a plot device: the heroine must make her own choices, judgements and mistakes before reaching maturity and finding an equal mate worthy of her. The exception to this rule of the flawed heroine is Jane Austen’s most disliked (or least well-understood) heroine, Fanny Price. The fictional Fanny is almost the same age that the real Edward Knight was when he was first taken from his home. Mansfield Park is perhaps the first novel in history to depict the life of a little girl from within.27
Jane Austen enters intuitively into the feelings and consciousness of the child as she is uprooted from her family and transferred to Mansfield Park. Fanny’s fear and anxiety, exacerbated by the vicious bullying of Mrs Norris, are brilliantly executed. Told that she must be a good grateful girl and given the treat of a gooseberry tart to comfort her, Fanny dissolves into tears. It is the careless neglect that affects her sensitive spirit: ‘Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.’28
One of the main themes of the novel is the importance of home. The word is repeated over 140 times in the course of the narrative. What does ‘home’ mean? Is it a place or is it a family? What happens when a home is left unprotected or badly governed? When Fanny returns home to Portsmouth she has an epiphany that shakes her to the core:
Her eagerness, her impatience, her longing to be with them, were such as to bring a line or two of Cowper’s Tirocinium for ever before her. ‘With what intense desire she wants her home,’ was continually on her tongue, as the truest description of a yearning which she could not suppose any school-boy’s bosom to feel more keenly.
When she had been coming to Portsmouth, she had loved to call it her home, had been fond of saying that she was going home; the word had been very dear to her; and so it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now the home. Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home.29
The literary reference is crucial. William Cowper was Jane Austen’s favourite poet. The poem to which she refers here, Tirocinium, was extremely well known. It bids a father not to send his son away to school, but to educate him at home so that the natural ties of affection are not damaged and so that the father’s spiritual and moral guidance will be uppermost.
Why hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his!
The indented stick, that loses day by day,
Notch after notch, till all are smoothed away,
Bears witness, long ere his dismission come,
With what intense desire he wants his home.30
Indeed, Mansfield Park shares many of the concerns of Tirocinium. It is a profound exploration of the duty of parents to shape their children’s moral and spiritual development.