The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne
importance of home, the nature of good education, the alienation of sons from their father, the importance of conscience: ‘In early days the conscience has in most/A quickness, which in later life is lost.’ At the centre of the book is a timid, shy displaced child with an unshakeable sense of conscience.
Fanny is a heroine who is deeply sensitive, and loves nature, poetry and biography, especially Shakespeare, Crabbe and Cowper. She is religious and her spirits are easily depressed. As well as quoting from Tirocinium she also loves Cowper’s The Task, a poem inspired by his muse, Lady Austen (a distant relative of Jane’s), an elegant and attractive widow who set him ‘a task’ to write a poem about a ‘sofa’. This extraordinary poem in six books is the eighteenth century’s great celebration of the retired and religious life. ‘God made the country, and man made the Town’ is among its most famous lines. Cowper undertakes a fierce assault on contemporary society, condemning the slave trade, French despotism, fashionable manners and lukewarm clergymen. ‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still –/My country!’ writes Cowper, and the sentiments could have been Austen’s own.
It was Henry Austen, Jane’s brother, who revealed that Cowper was her favourite poet. But one could have guessed as much from her portrayal of Fanny Price and of Anne Elliot in Persuasion. As much admired by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth as by Jane Austen, Cowper was a brilliant but deeply troubled man, a depressive who tried to kill himself at least three times and was for a time confined to a lunatic asylum before finding refuge from his despair in a profound Christian faith. He was a friend of slave trader turned Evangelical preacher John Newton, the author of ‘Amazing Grace’. Cowper’s poetry was pioneering because he wrote about everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. For Jane Austen, his work embodied love of the country as Dr Johnson’s embodied the energetic life of the town.31 He transformed English poetry rather in the way that Jane Austen herself would transform English fiction.
Though Jane Austen was to return to the theme of the adopted child in Emma, there she does not enter the mind of the child as she does in Mansfield Park. In that novel, Fanny’s transference into the great house is a blessing and a final redemption, especially to Sir Thomas: ‘Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself. His liberality had a rich repayment.’32 The child of the impoverished branch of the family redeems the materially more prosperous but morally bankrupt household. By accepting Fanny, the Bertrams become more human.
Mansfield Park is not a retelling of the story of Jane Austen’s wealthy relatives, the Knights of Godmersham Park. Her brother Edward Austen, who became Edward Knight, is not the ‘original’ of Fanny Price. But the theme of the bond between branches of a family with very different prospects came close to Austen’s own experience. The liberality of the Knights eventually made it possible for her to become a novelist. Mrs Knight, her only patron, was described by her as ‘gentle and kind and friendly’.33 And, crucially, it was through the Knights that Edward was to give his mother and sisters a home. Had he not been adopted, he would not have grown up to inherit the great house at Chawton, from where he was able to give his poor relations the modest property near by in which Jane lived the last eight years of her life and wrote her novels.
Shawls had been hand-woven in Kashmir since the eleventh century. The finest examples were made under Mughal patronage to be worn at court or presented as ostentatious gifts. They could take many months to complete, requiring the skills of spinners, dyers, pattern designers, craftsmen responsible for arranging the warp and weft, weavers and finishers. The best were made from the underbelly fleece of the wild central Asian goat, whereas pashmina, second-grade wool, came from domesticated goats. Many such shawls were brought back to Europe, where they became a popular fashion item in Jane Austen’s lifetime. Western demand duly affected Kashmiri production: by the time the shawl illustrated here was made, the classic boteh design, derived from flowering plants, had become more formal and stylized. This particular ‘moon shawl’ is square, like most Kashmir shawls, and was intended to be worn over the shoulders.
In January 1772, Jane Austen’s Aunt Phila was sent ‘a piece of flowered shawl to make a warm winter morning gown’ from her husband, who was living in Calcutta.1 Seventy years later, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra mentioned in her last testament ‘a large Indian shawl’. It had once belonged to the woman she had hoped would become her mother-in-law.2 Jane Austen herself once gave a shawl to a Steventon neighbour. She observed her niece Cassy in a fine red shawl and a Bath acquaintance in a yellow one.3 And in her house at Chawton today the visitor can still see a cream silk shawl that was a gift to her from Catherine Knight, her brother Edward’s adoptive mother.
‘Fanny,’ says Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park, ‘William must not forget my shawl, if he goes to the East Indies; and I shall give him a commission for any thing else that is worth having. I wish he may go to the East Indies, that I may have my shawl.’ She hesitates for an instant, then ends with characteristic indulgence: ‘I think I will have two shawls, Fanny.’4
When Jane Austen saw or wore or wrote about an Indian shawl, she entered a whole new realm of cross-cultural exchange, a world far from that of her own Hampshire village. Through her family connections, she became aware of that wider world and it entered subtly into her imagination, shaping her novels to a far greater extent than is often realized. Thanks in particular to a charismatic female cousin, there is a thread connecting Jane Austen to places we do not usually associate with her: not only the East Indies, but also the streets of revolutionary Paris.
The East India Company, with its many trading activities, was developing into a significant economic and political force within the global economy. Cottons and silks, indigo dyes and spices, not to mention diamonds and opium, were imported in vast quantities. As goods came west, so people went east. The Indies became the place to make your fortune when hope was lost at home.
A young woman, an orphan called Cecilia Wynne, leaves her home in England for Bengal. Her journey to the East Indies takes six months, the passage fraught with dangers and privations. She is going with one object in mind: to find a husband. Left penniless by her father, she is travelling at the behest of a rich relation who is eager to marry her off. The girl’s younger sister, also destitute, has been offered a placement as a lady’s companion in England.
When Cecilia arrives in the East Indies, her good looks ensure that she soon finds a rich husband. He is older than her, and very respectable: she is considered to be ‘splendidly but unhappily married’. Back in England Cecilia is regarded by those who know her as a lucky girl. All except one friend, who harbours no such romantic illusions: ‘Do you call it lucky, for a Girl of Genius and Feeling to be sent in quest of a Husband to Bengal, to be married there to a Man of whose Disposition she has no opportunity of judging till her Judgement is of no use to her, who may be a Tyrant, or a Fool or both for what she knows to the Contrary. Do you call that fortunate?’ Another girl replies, cynically, ‘She is not the first Girl who has gone to the East Indies for a Husband, and I declare it should be very good fun if I were as poor.’5
This story is fictional. It is called ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ and it was written by the young Jane Austen in 1792 when she was sixteen. But the facts of the story replicate almost exactly the fate of her own aunts: Philadelphia, elder sister of the Reverend George Austen, did indeed go to the East Indies for a husband, while Leonora, his younger sister, became a lady’s companion at home in England. Even in her teens, the young Jane Austen