Itch to Shine

The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more or less deserving suitor. During this period, she will encounter many examples of successful and unsuccessful marriage, but these are necessarily incidental to her concerns. Once the novel has reached its climax, the marriage that ensues remains unseen and unknown. Emma (1815) is unusual even in describing, in its final paragraph, the heroine’s wedding. But the fact that Austen herself had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He reported that Austen told her family: ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years.’

Most readers of Austen’s fiction feel instinctively that her heroines could not properly be united with anyone other than the men whom they eventually marry. Even if her family is incredulous, we share Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘absolute certainty’ by the end of Pride and Prejudice (1813) that Mr Darcy’s affection ‘was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months’. We are also likely to suspect, quite some time before Emma, that ‘Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’ But the narrator does not always endorse such a conclusion. Family tradition held that Austen and her sister, Cassandra, argued during the composition of Mansfield Park (1814) about whether Fanny Price should or should not accept the rakish – but seemingly reformed – charmer Henry Crawford. She doesn’t, as it happens, but the narrator tells us that she certainly would have, had things played out slightly differently or taken a bit longer to unravel: ‘Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a reward very voluntarily bestowed, within a reasonable period from Edmund’s marrying Mary.’ There is nothing inevitable, in other words, about the marriages which wrap up the novel.

There was nothing inevitable about Austen’s remaining single either. In her earliest surviving letter, she pictures for herself a plot akin to that of her female characters – just as she had, around six years earlier, filled out mock entries for herself and her imaginary husbands in the Steventon marriage register, for which her father, the Rev. George Austen, was responsible (both ‘Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London’ and ‘Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool’ feature as husband to ‘Jane Austen of Steventon’).

In January 1796, Austen wrote to Cassandra about Thomas Lefroy, the man it has been speculated she hoped to marry. She teases Cassandra with an account of their behaviour at a ball the previous evening: ‘I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.’ The dynamic between writer and recipient, clearly long-established, is similar to that between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811), in which the older sister cautions the younger for showing ‘particular’ esteem towards a man she hardly knows, and the younger sister both defends and flaunts her own behaviour. Austen writes to Cassandra that she ‘can expose myself only once more’ (Lefroy was about to go away). Elinor argues with her sister about ‘propriety’: ‘As it has already exposed you to some very impertinent remarks,’ she says to Marianne, ‘do you not now begin to doubt the discretion of your own conduct?’

Marianne is given preferences that belong to her author, such as a love of William Cowper’s poems, a particularity about the right way to read aloud, a sensitivity to ‘hackneyed metaphor’, an aptitude for piano playing and perhaps also ‘the knack of finding her way in every house to the library’. Austen, as we encounter her in many of her letters to Cassandra, seems also to share with Marianne flashes of anger, sympathy and passionate outrage that prove hard to suppress or which she chooses not to conceal, with all the resulting social awkwardness that such displays might entail.

Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (completed 1803) speaks characteristically plainly when she declares: ‘People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.’ Yet of such apparently banal circumstances friendships and other attachments were made and lost – and not just in novels, as Rory Muir demonstrates in his compendious guide to courtship, proposals, engagements, weddings and marriages in late Georgian England. Muir’s documentary survey combines summaries and analyses of fiction, letters, diaries, biographies and other secondary accounts relating mostly to the upper-class experience of matrimony; it also pays some attention to the realities of single life in the period. Examples of happy and not-so-happy matches from Austen’s novels, and within her own family, are interwoven with lesser-known stories recovered from the archives. Although Muir claims to emphasise the ‘ordinary’, historical records inevitably foreground the marriages of well-to-do, literate people. Still, affluent couples also lived through many of the routine trials and consolations of domesticity.

There is a quickness and strength of feeling in Austen’s narration of everyday meetings and conversations, in her sense of the expectations that arise, especially in her female characters, before such meetings and conversations take place, and in the equally intense happiness, disappointment or misery that they provoke and with which they are remembered. Austen’s own feelings for Lefroy have been described by Deirdre Le Faye as ‘poised on the knife-edge between flattered amusement and the exciting apprehension of possible romantic commitment’. She was certainly enjoying his attentions, and not only his – though he appears to have been the leading contender:

Tell Mary that I make over Mr Heartley & all his Estate to her for her sole use and Benefit in future, & not only him, but all my other Admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don’t care sixpence.

The intention to single him out seems plain enough here – despite the knee-jerk denial of anything like affection or love – and the fact that Lefroy, like Catherine Morland’s love interest, Henry Tilney, enjoyed novels can only have added to the attraction. Less than a week after first mentioning him, Austen reports that she is looking forward ‘with great impatience’ to a party taking place the following day: ‘I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however.’ Expecting to ‘receive an offer’ might entail nothing more than accepting or refusing a dance, but it could also mean the more tantalising prospect of a proposal of marriage.

The next day, however, all seems to be finished. Austen writes to Cassandra, almost as if she is embarking upon a diary entry: ‘Friday. – At length the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over – – My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’ The effusive strain of ‘My tears flow as I write’ is indisputably that of sentimental fiction. Much later, in 1812, as a woman confirmed in her choice to remain unmarried, Austen used it again in a parodic letter to her novel-writing niece, Anna: ‘Miss Jane Austen’s tears have flowed over each sweet sketch.’ In the quite different context of writing to Cassandra in 1796, the adoption of such language may have served to guard genuine tears and badly hurt feelings. (One branch of the Lefroy family maintained the view that ‘Tom … behaved so ill to Jane Austen.’) Perhaps something of the seriousness of her private emotions, and of her determined efforts to conceal them, is reflected in the narrator’s awkward phrasing in Sense and Sensibility when Mrs Dashwood and Elinor respond to the news that Edward Ferrars has supposedly married Lucy Steele: ‘[Mrs Dashwood] found that she had been misled by the careful, the considerate attention of her daughter, to think the attachment, which once she had so well understood, much slighter in reality, than she had been wont to believe, or than it was now proved to be.’

Unlike the mature novels, Austen’s earliest works do not necessarily end in marriage (and some of the marriages that do occur are for various reasons illegal). The heroine of ‘Henry & Eliza’ (c.1787-90) raises an army, destroys a prison and thereby gains ‘the Blessings of thousands & the Applause of her own Heart’. Laura in ‘Love and Freindship’ (1790) ends a ramshackle life of theft and adventure alone ‘in a romantic Village in the Highlands of Scotland’. In another tale from c.1793, Anna Parker, ‘a Young Lady, whose feelings being too strong for her Judgment led her into the commission of Errors which her Heart disapproved’, murders her father, mother and sister, perjures herself in court and forges her own will: ‘In short there is scarcely a crime that I have not committed.’

Before she reached her twenties, Austen imagined the wildest range of disreputable lives for her heroines and by extension indulged her own resistance to conventionality. It isn’t hard to understand why. The conduct-book author Thomas Gisborne, whom she read on Cassandra’s recommendation (despite being ‘quite determined not to’), cautioned female readers against nurturing their witty and satirical impulses and the consequent risk of becoming affected exhibitionists:

If wit be continually exercised in ridicule and satire; if it nourish an itch to shine in conversation; if it stimulate the possessor to aim at the manners and reputation of what is called a woman of spirit; if it indisposes her to retirement, to improving pursuits, and to the pleasures of calm and unaffected discourse; is it wonderful that the husband should regret that it had been granted to his associate?

A young Austen, spirited, insubordinate in her imagination and awkward with strangers, would have had good cause to question her future as a married woman if this was the way her talents were to be regarded. In 1796 Austen’s mother wrote to a future daughter-in-law anticipating the prospect of Cassandra moving to Shropshire when she married her fiancé, and of Jane going, by contrast, ‘the Lord knows where’.

Towards the end of 1802, Austen was briefly engaged to the arrestingly named Harris Bigg-Wither, brother of her friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg. She changed her mind overnight. The chief attraction of such a match may have been the possibility of regaining a foothold in her native Hampshire (since 1801, on the retirement of her father, the family had been living in Bath). Harris, who was more than five years younger than Austen, had a prosperous estate near Steventon as well as long-standing mutual connections to recommend him. Austen was almost 27, a perilous threshold in Marianne Dashwood’s view: ‘A woman of seven and twenty … can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife.’

Twenty-seven recurs as an upper age limit for marital prospects in Pride and Prejudice; it is also the age at which Anne Elliot in Persuasion (1817) marries a former lover whose loss had seemed irrevocable. When Charlotte Lucas decides to accept Mr Collins, a man deemed insufferable by the younger, more rebellious Elizabeth Bennet, the narrator offers a series of crisp remarks which may contain some recollections of the short-lived prospect of becoming Mrs Bigg-Wither:

Mr Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. – Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object: it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of 27, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it.

By all accounts Bigg-Wither was himself ‘neither sensible nor agreeable’ and his society might therefore have proved highly ‘irksome’ in the long run, especially to a woman of fierce intelligence. Austen’s niece Caroline described him as ‘very plain in person – awkward & even uncouth in manner – nothing but his size to recommend him’. Another relation thought Aunt Jane could have accepted him only while suffering ‘a momentary fit of self-delusion’. It is possible that Bigg-Wither’s sisters encouraged him to make the proposal to their friend; Austen might, like Charlotte, have decided on reflection that his professed ‘attachment to her must be imaginary’.

Yet Charlotte’s counter-arguments to herself in favour of Mr Collins must have weighed heavily on Austen when she was considering the match. In 1802, like Charlotte, she would have felt tempted to ‘ask only a comfortable home’. Charlotte is a hard-nosed pragmatist, but even if her author were more romantically inclined she would not necessarily have disputed the claim that marriage is the ‘pleasantest preservative from want’ for ‘well-educated young women of small fortune’. Caroline Austen thought that ‘most women so circumstanced would have taken Mr [Bigg-Wither] & trusted to love after marriage.’ More powerful than any of this, however, was Austen’s very serious point in a letter to another niece, Fanny Knight, who was weighing up the merits and shortcomings of a potential suitor. Having said everything she could muster in the young man’s favour, Austen saved her most important argument until last:

And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one side of the question, I shall turn round & entreat you not to commit yourself farther & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection; and if his deficiencies of Manner &c &c strike you more than all his good qualities … give him up at once.

There was also the delicate matter of Cassandra’s position. Jane’s older sister was engaged in her late teens to Thomas Fowle, a young clergyman and former pupil of her father’s. Although he had found a position in Wiltshire, it did not provide enough income to support a wife and family. Their engagement was never publicly announced, and their marriage repeatedly delayed, while he pursued alternative ways of making money. In January 1796, Fowle accompanied his patron and cousin, Lord Craven, to the West Indies as chaplain to his regiment. He died of yellow fever just over a year later, leaving £1000 to Cassandra. She vowed never to marry. No letters between the sisters survive from the year of Fowle’s death, suggesting that they were burned. Perhaps the long-term effects of this catastrophe included a determination on Austen’s part to follow her sister’s example and not marry, a decision that would be tested by the insecure period after their father’s retirement. It’s possible that Bigg-Wither’s proposal briefly seemed a permissible – even desirable – alternative.

In the event, the sisters remained ‘wedded’ (in the eyes of their relatives) ‘to each other’. Always ‘the Girls’, as their father called them, they might, from one point of view, seem never to have become fully-fledged adults. After George Austen’s death in January 1805, several peripatetic years ensued, the three dependent Austen women taking up short-term lodgings with a succession of friends and relatives, until Jane and Cassandra’s brother Edward – who had been adopted by his father’s wealthy cousins, the Knights – finally offered his mother and sisters a cottage in the Hampshire village of Chawton, only sixteen miles from Steventon. Although Austen continued to tinker with the complete but unpublished drafts of her first three novels, these turbulent years seem otherwise to have resulted in writing that was mostly supplementary, bitty or incomplete.

The most interesting​ production of this period may also be the most sustained of Austen’s imaginative engagements with the relative temptations and difficulties of marriage – especially for girls of slender means. At some point in 1803 or 1804 she began but did not finish an 88-page fragment that later became known as ‘The Watsons’. This sparely furnished and sparky tale about disappointment and homecoming describes a group of unmarried sisters as they struggle to maintain appearances despite an ailing father and pinched domestic circumstances.

Elements of Austen’s most recent experiences seem woven into the story, both as the work exists in its present form and as she apparently intended it to develop. The tale begins with its central character having undergone an unwelcome ‘change in her home society and stile of life’, having lost ‘a house, where all had been comfort and elegance’. Austen’s unexpected removal from Hampshire, her fears concerning the loss of her elderly father and her own future, and her acceptance followed swiftly by her rejection of Bigg-Wither, might in various ways have inspired Emma Watson, a heroine who is brought up by a wealthy aunt and therefore has good reason to anticipate inheriting a fortune, only to have it suddenly denied her. Cassandra claimed that her sister had intended Emma to be briefly tempted into marrying Lord Osborne, a rich aristocrat whom she doesn’t love.

Memories of Lefroy may have contributed to Austen’s depiction of Tom Musgrave in ‘The Watsons’; he is the ‘universal favourite’ who seems to many women in the story ‘remarkably agreeable’ and is ‘a great flirt, and never means anything serious’. Elizabeth Watson, the eldest of the four sisters, puts the plight of unmarried women in explicit terms when she openly declares to the heroine: ‘You know we must marry … my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at.’ Emma’s reply is spirited in its resistance to such an argument:

To be so bent on marriage – to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation – is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. – I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.

But then, as Elizabeth points out, Emma has been ‘brought … up to be rather refined’ and may have to adjust her expectations. (Elizabeth, unlike Emma, has ‘been at school’ and therefore knows ‘what a life’ the teachers really lead.)

Patronised and admired by Lord Osborne, who as a wealthy man urges every lady to ride for the sake of her health, Emma gives voice with light irony to what must have been her author’s sentiments concerning those women – not ladies of quality – obliged to live in a ‘very humble stile’, and the limits of their capacity to determine their own fate:

Your Lordship thinks we always have our own way. – That is a point on which ladies and gentlemen have long disagreed. – But without pretending to decide it, I may say that there are some circumstances which even women cannot controul. – Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.

With this concluding point it is impossible to take issue: Lord Osborne is silenced. The idea that ‘even women’ – in Osborne’s argument, the more powerful of the sexes, despite their dependent status – might not be able to arrange the world exactly as they wish is put to the rich landowner in very plain terms indeed. (Anne Elliot amplifies this argument in the climactic scene of Persuasion.) Emma’s tone in this speech, as summarised by the narrator, might describe that of ‘The Watsons’ as a whole: ‘mild seriousness’. A related quality of the work is what the 19th-century novelist Margaret Oliphant identified as Austen’s ‘fine vein of feminine cynicism’:

She is not surprised or offended, much less horror-stricken or indignant, when her people show vulgar or mean traits of character … or even when they fall into those social cruelties which selfish and stupid people are so often guilty of, not without intention, but yet without the power of realising half the pain they inflict. She stands by and looks on, and gives a soft half-smile, and tells the story with an exquisite sense of its ridiculous side, and fine stinging yet soft-voiced contempt for the actors in it … The position of mind is essentially feminine.

Seven months after the death of her father, and some time after she suspended or abandoned work on ‘The Watsons’, Austen wrote to Cassandra in lightly self-mocking terms about her current financial predicament. Here, too, we can detect that ‘fine vein of feminine cynicism’: ‘I find on looking into my affairs, that instead of being very rich I am likely to be very poor … I need not have mentioned this. – It is as well however, to prepare you for the sight of a Sister sunk in poverty, that it may not overcome your Spirits.’ As in her letter concerning the imminent departure of Lefroy, painful realities are narrated in a way that resembles a joke about sentimental excess – what is described in ‘The Watsons’ as ‘a tone of artificial sensibility’.

In Austen’s writing, humiliation can be shielded by comedy, and bruised feelings to some extent mollified, such that anger and grief can be transformed into a kind of sympathetic, knowing, female amusement. Indeed, amusement of this sort might itself help to foster sympathy for and among women, as in Austen’s letter to Cassandra, sent from Bath in April 1805, about a particularly wearisome acquaintance: ‘Poor Mrs Stent! it has been her lot to be always in the way; but we must be merciful, for perhaps in time we may come to be Mrs Stents ourselves, unequal to anything & unwelcome to everybody.’ It was only with her return to Hampshire and a permanent home that she could resume her commitment to novel-writing. From this point on, marriage meant nothing more or less than an act of her powerful and merciful imagination.