Jane Austen, the Secret Radical Read online

  Jane Austen The Secret Radical

  Jane Austen The Secret Radical

  HELENA KELLY

  Published in the UK in 2016

  by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.com

  Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

  74–77 Great Russell Street,

  London WC1B 3DA or their agents

  Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

  by Grantham Book Services,

  Trent Road, Grantham NG31 7XQ

  Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

  by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

  PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

  Crows Nest, NSW 2065

  Distributed in South Africa

  by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District,

  41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

  Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,

  7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,

  Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

  ISBN: 978-178578-116-2

  Text copyright © 2016 Helena Kelly

  The author has asserted her moral rights

  Extract from Letter to Lord Byron copyright © 1937 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

  Typeset in Dante by Marie Doherty

  Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  CONTENTS

  1. The Authoress

  2. ‘The Anxieties of Common Life’ – Northanger Abbey

  3. The Age of Brass – Sense and Sensibility

  4. ‘All Our Old Prejudices’ – Pride and Prejudice

  5. ‘The Chain and the Cross’ – Mansfield Park

  6. Gruel – Emma

  7. Decline and Fall – Persuasion

  8. The End

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Index

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Helena Kelly holds degrees in Classics and English from Oxford and King’s College London. She teaches Austen at various Oxford colleges, and on a programme for American visiting students in Bath. She has taught Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Jane Austen, The Secret Radical is her first book.

  To David and Rory

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks are due to Pamela Hunter, the archivist at Jane Austen’s bank, Hoare’s, and to the exceptionally helpful David Rymill at the Winchester archives.

  I’d also like to thank my agent, Sally Holloway, for doing so much to help me shape my rather incoherent ideas into a book, and my publishers, for being much nicer than Austen’s. I’m particularly grateful to Duncan Heath, for his tact and care in editing.

  And thank you too to all my students, and to my family.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Authoress

  England in April. Even here, in Southampton, in a town full of soldiers and sailors, in a country at war, April is still April. Sunlight and shadow chase one another across the sea ramparts, while the waves dance, mischievous, sparkling, to welcome in the yearly miracle of an English spring. The sun shines down on the house in Castle Square, and on the garden behind it. It shines on the careful, orderly rows of the shrubbery; on the young leaves; and on a small child in a pinafore, squawking and flapping her arms like wings, then crouching to scoop up a handful of gravel and offer it to her companion, as astonished and enchanted as if she’s found jewels. Everything seems new at this time of the year, even in this old-fashioned house. Everything seems possible. A few weeks more, and the lilac will be out, and after the lilac, the long yellow fronds of the laburnum, and then the roses. The buds are still furled tight, but, buffeted by the salt breezes, they’re beginning to stir.

  The other inhabitants of the house are stirring, too. They have been a dutiful lot in Castle Square, these three years past. The man of the house has spent much of the time at sea, as an officer in His Majesty’s navy, leaving all his many womenfolk together – his young wife, his tiny daughter, his widowed mother, his two unmarried sisters, and a family friend who had nowhere else to go. A houseful of women, they have been a comfort to each other during his absences. His brothers have helped to support them, but now, at long last, the richest (newly bereaved, newly generous) is offering help of a more practical kind – a cottage for his mother and sisters, rent-free, on one of his Hampshire estates – and, until that should be made ready, a visit to Godmersham, his grand house in Kent. The captain has done his duty. The Southampton household is to be broken up. They remain for only a few weeks more. The lilac, the laburnum, and the roses will flower here without them.

  The child has thrown herself on to the path, legs kicking in fury. Her companion lifts her and, turning towards the house, points up to one of the windows. The little girl exclaims with delight. The woman watching at the window – a brown-haired, brown-eyed woman of 33, caught idling when she ought to be working – waves down at her niece, and mouths an apology to her sister. She turns back to the room, to the neat bed with its dimity cover, the old chair and the small rickety table, which are all that could be spared from downstairs, and to the letter which she hasn’t even begun to write.

  She’s never had any cause to write a letter of business before. At the Abbey school, in Reading, she sat through hours of lessons in French and sewing. A year, did she spend there? It can’t have been much more. The garden, the tall trees, are vivid in her memory; so, too, the view to the ruins of the church; the other girls bundled in shawls giggling round the fireplace, dying of laughter, as they used to say. The big girls had lessons, though not, she suspects, very good ones, in all the usual feminine accomplishments, dancing and drawing and music, but if letter-writing was taught at the Abbey, she doesn’t recall it. And before that, at Mrs Cawley’s … well, of Mrs Cawley’s school, here, in this very town, she remembers little. Only fever-dreams, and her sister Cassandra being sick, too; and their cousin Jane Cooper; and more than anything else the pain that twisted and twisted in her bowels. They nearly died of the typhoid fever.

  She was seven, then. More than 25 years have passed, and what has she done, in all that time? She has no husband, no children – unless she counts the ones nestled, sleeping, about her room. Elinor and Marianne tucked up in a tin trunk under the bed, together with all the foolish stories from her childhood; and Susan in the writing box, half-hidden here at the back of the closet, behind a pile of shifts and petticoats, safe from little fingers. She sets the box on the bed, and, kneeling, turns the key in the lock, folds back the lid, opens, looks, touches the faint roughness of the leather on the writing slope. The wood – smooth and cool as satin under her fingers – warms until it almost feels like a living thing. Here are her pens and pencils, her penknife, her inkwell, waiting to be filled. Paper. Wafers of wax to seal her letters. And Susan.

  It is about Susan that she is to write. Susan, not the most dear of her children, but nonetheless the only one who has shown any promise to date.

  Such a deal of paper, though! The woman – who has not lived for three years in so expensive a town as Southampton without getting to know the price of everything – winces inwardly at the extravagance. To salve her conscience, she leafs through the old correspondence in her writing box, searching for a piece of scrap paper. She finds one sheet which has only a line or two written at the top and, seizing a pencil, scrawls on it the single word ‘Gentlemen’.

  Well then, to the point.

 
‘In the Spring of the year 1803 a manuscript Novel in 2 volumes entitled Susan was sold to you by a Gentleman of the name of—’ What was the name again of her brother Henry’s lawyer, who had helped to oversee the sale? Seymour. That was it. ‘—of the name of Seymour, & the purchase money £10 received at the same time. Six years have since passed, & this work of which I avow myself the Authoress—’

  She pauses. Why not? Why not avow herself an authoress? After all, she has been writing for nearly all her life.

  ‘—of which I avow myself the Authoress has never to the best of my knowledge, appeared in print, tho’ an early publication was stipulated for at the time of Sale.’

  She knows little of the publishing trade but is it not queer – extraordinary, even – to purchase a book and never to publish it? How proudly, how happily, she set to the work of copying out her novel for these men, all those years ago; powdering and polishing the pages, tending her pen nib as carefully as ever she could, worrying over the tiniest smudge of ink. But perhaps publishers, seeing so many manuscripts, don’t cherish them as authors and authoresses do. Perhaps poor Susan is lying forgotten somewhere, nibbled by mice. Maybe a maidservant has used her to start a fire, thinking that one bundle of paper would never be missed among so many. Did they think that the novel was too short, or the title too unexciting? Perhaps it is what Susan says – but surely there is very little in it that could worry even the most anxious publisher. And did not this Mr Benjamin Crosby publish William Godwin’s Things as they Are? If ever there was a novel that criticised the world and everything in it—! Only, of course, that was before the treason trials, and before the publisher Joseph Johnson was sent to prison for printing a book that did not meet with the approval of the men in government. Perhaps Mr Crosby has grown more cautious, since then.

  Well, enough of caution. ‘I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance by supposing the manuscript by some carelessness to have been lost; & if that was the case, am willing to supply You with another Copy if you are disposed to avail yourselves of it, & will engage for no farther delay when it comes into your hands.’

  But when is she to sit and write out another copy? Not soon. There is so much to be done. The house to be packed up – all their belongings – and only she and Cassandra to do it; Frank gone to sea; her sister-in-law Mary expecting again and complaining; their mother; the visit to her brother Edward and his motherless children in Kent; a week lost in travelling there, and another in travelling back again; then setting the new house in order. She loves her family – truly, she does – but the days seem to slip through her fingers. There is always some demand on her time; someone needing to be nursed or entertained, a letter of condolence to be written, paper boats to be sailed on the river, yet another new niece or nephew to sew caps for. The hours of her life that she has wasted, feigning deafness while the women of Southampton drink tea and compare their latest lyings-in; the weeks that have vanished this past ten years, in moving in and out of rented houses and rented rooms, in making new acquaintances and taking leave of them again. Sometimes she thinks that, since they left home, she has not remained in the same place for three months together.

  That part of her life is over now. No more removals. She will stay in Chawton until she is 70 at least, except for visits. And she means to be more particular about visits. She will go and see Henry in London because she loves him, and because his wife, fashionable, fascinating cousin Eliza, makes her laugh. Besides, London has galleries and theatres and all manner of diversions. And she will go and see her brother Edward because he is rich, and she loves to stay at Godmersham, his great estate in Kent, where the grounds are delightful and the cooking very much superior to her usual fare. She’s looking forward to the walks and the dinners she will have soon. Besides, now that Edward’s wife is dead, she has a duty to the children; the little ones will soon grow accustomed, but the older ones will not, and poor Fanny, just turned sixteen, is of an age to feel the loss of her mother most acutely.

  Chawton is not yet home, but it is no more than fifteen miles from where she grew up. She will have her native skies, her native air and, Cassandra has promised her, time for her writing. It is only a question of being firm, of holding fast, as sailors say, to her purpose.

  ‘—It will not be in my power from particular circumstances to command this Copy before the Month of August, but then, if you accept my proposal, you may depend on receiving it.’

  She will sit up at night and copy it out, if need be. She will order working candles every night she is in Kent and then smuggle them to Chawton in her luggage. Writing paper, too. It is not the least of the attractions of Godmersham that there are no quibbles over candles, no complaints about expense. Edward might, perhaps, not even complain about a London publisher addressing letters to her at his house, but he will not care for it. She will instruct the publishers to reply quickly, and to the Southampton post office. It will be easy enough to slip out for half an hour, even in all the bustle of the coming fortnight. But it will have to be soon. They have no idea of time, these people. To hold on to a book for six years and not to publish it! She should have written this letter years ago.

  ‘Be so good as to send me a Line in answer, as soon as possible, as my stay in this place will not exceed a few days. Should no notice be taken of this Address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work, by applying elsewhere.’

  She reads over what she has written, her pencil poised above the page. It is a trifle brusque, perhaps, but this is a letter of business after all, and that last sentence should fetch her a prompt answer, at least. It will do for a first draft. She dashes off her signature: her initial – J – and her surname.

  She has always envied her sister Cassandra for having a pretty name. Cassandra is named for their mother, while she is named not for her aunt Philadelphia nor her aunt Leonora – both of whom had names to conjure with – but for her aunt Jane, Jane Cooper’s mother, who caught the typhoid fever from them and died. A plain name, and a common one, too. When she was at school she was obliged to share it not only with her cousin Jane but with any number of Janes besides, so that the mistresses, and the other pupils, assigned them all nicknames and nursenames – Jane A., and Jane C., and Janet, and Janice, and Jenny. She had been Jenny – little Jenny, snotty-nosed. Patted on the head, sent away, forgotten.

  Has he even read her book? This publisher, this Mr Crosby?

  But of course he doesn’t yet know it is her book. Six years ago, she remained decorously in the background. Henry had thought it necessary. So far as Mr Crosby is concerned, Susan is simply a book ‘by a lady’. Once she signs her name to this letter, once he knows who she is, will he put it in advertisements? In catalogues? Will it be printed on the book’s title page or tooled in gold on a leather binding in the grand libraries of grand houses? It is possible. It’s happened to other authoresses. But once it is out it cannot be taken back again. And then, her brothers will be so angry, because after all, the name Austen does not belong only to her—

  She pours ink into her inkwell, spilling out the letters of her name in her mind, shuffling them about like the ivory alphabets you play with on a rainy day, when no better entertainment offers. The letters rearrange themselves into a riddle. Who doesn’t love a riddle? She can hardly help smiling.

  She will create an imaginary husband to give her countenance, and, since he may as well have an elegant name, she will call herself Mrs Ashton Dennis. And she will sign the letter with the initials ‘M’, ‘A’, and ‘D’ – ‘I am sirs, your most obedient humble servant, M.A.D.’ A joke, to make Mr Crosby take notice of her letter. An acrostic, a word puzzle, to show him that he should read her book more carefully.

  A joke, but also a private admission to herself. Ashton is nearly (but not too nearly) her own surname, and Dennis is not so very far from Janice or Jenny. The letter will still be an avowal of sorts – an acknowledgement of her children, a declaration that plain Jane Austen is an author
ess, even if no one outside the family ever reads her.

  She writes over the pencilled draft in ink, to test out her phrases and to try out her new, imaginary signature, and, though she can hear voices downstairs, duties calling, she selects a sheet of expensive, hot-pressed paper and copies out what she has written, slowly, carefully, stopping every few words to dust the page with powder and rub it dry. The next day she cherishes the perfect polished copy all the way to the post office.

  This time the publishers do not keep her waiting long. Mr Richard Crosby’s answer reaches her within the week. Torn open with shaking fingers, read in the street, it sends her back to Castle Square as angry as she has ever been in her life, its phrases sounding in her head: ‘… we purchased of Mr Seymour a Novel entitled Susan and paid him for it the sum of 10£’; that is, it is nothing whatever to do with you, Mrs Ashton Dennis, whoever you may be. The novel is not worth publishing, but it is ours, and ours is a world of stamped receipts and ‘full consideration’, and threatening ‘proceedings to stop the sale’ if you try to take the book elsewhere. These matters are, by far, less simple than you imagine, you empty-headed female. And the final insult – you clearly value the novel, Mrs Ashton Dennis, but because I value it not at all, and because I pity you for your ignorance, you can have it for the £10 that we paid for it.

  That night, in the dark, she lies rigid in her narrow bed, cursing herself for her clumsiness, imagining a dozen ways in which she could have managed the business better. Did she think her punning pen name would charm him? Nothing of the sort – he didn’t even notice it. How can she avow herself an authoress when she cannot write a simple letter? An authoress, when people don’t even bother to read what she’s written? Why didn’t she speak to Henry, as she should have done? What would a few weeks or months more have mattered, after all this time? Where was the hurry?

  The night offers her no answers. Nor does the next day, nor the days after, as she pulls trunks from the box-room, folds clothes, invents games to distract little Mary-Jane, who wanders, cross and bewildered, through the once-familiar rooms. By the time the evenings come she is exhausted, her hands grey with dust. The weather turns chill and damp. Spring, optimism, possibility – all seem far away. It is some consolation to think herself useful, to know that, even if she is a most indifferent kind of authoress, she is a good daughter, a good sister and a good aunt. There is china to be divided between the two households, furniture to be sold or swathed in dustsheets, farewell visits to be made, a last service at the church, a last walk on the sea ramparts.