Becoming Jane Austen

Jon Spence

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441153425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Jon Spence's fascinating biography of Jane Austen paints an intimate portrait of the much-loved novelist. Spence's meticulous research has, perhaps most notably, uncovered evidence that Austen and the charming young Irishman Tom Lefroy fell in love at the age of twenty and that the relationship inspired Pride and Prejudice, one of the most celebrated works of fiction ever written. Becoming Jane Austen gives the fullest account we have of the romance, which was more serious and more enduring than previously believed. Seeing this love story in the context of Jane Austen's whole life enables us to appreciate the profound effect the relationship had on her art and on subsequent choices that she made in her life. Full of insight and with an attentive eye for detail, Spence explores Jane Austen's emotional attachments and the personal influences that shaped her as a novelist. His elegant narrative provides a point of entry into Jane Austen's world as she herself perceived and experienced it. It is a world familiar to us from her novels, but in Becoming Jane Austen, Austen herself is the heroine.

1

Legacies

In 1704, the presumed heir to the Austen family fortune, John Austen, lay dying of consumption at the age of thirty-four. He was leaving behind seven children and was troubled by what might happen to his daughter and five younger sons. He was his father’s only son, but he feared that his father, also named John Austen, would now leave everything to the eldest grandson and do little to provide for the other children.

Old John Austen was in the wool trade, as the family had been for several generations, providing wool to weavers, overseeing the processing of the cloth, and selling the finished product to cloth merchants. The business was run from workrooms in their large house in the village of Horsmonden in Kent. But the old man had decided that with his son the time had come to leave the trade behind and had brought up young John as the heir to a large fortune. When, after his son’s death, old John made his last will he referred to himself as John Austen, Clothier, but to his late son as John Austen, Gentleman.

Young John’s widow, Elizabeth Weller, later wrote an account of the family circumstances so that her children would know exactly what had happened. She believed her father-in-law had made the eldest son rich and left the other children ‘but as if servants’.¹ She sketched the scene following her father-in-law’s death: ‘His housekeeper informed where his will was, which was opened in the presence of his daughter and son [-in-law] Stringer, his daughter and son [-in-law] Holman, and also myself. We heard it read though I think myself the only stranger to any former knowledge of it.’² The bulk of the estate was left to her eldest son, Jack. His sister received £400, and his younger brothers £40 apiece for an apprenticeship and £200 each as their stake in life when they reached the age of twenty-one.³

Even in a society in which primogeniture was an established tradition, old John Austen’s will was unusual. Common as it was for the eldest son to inherit the bulk of the estate, younger sons (or grandsons) of a rich man would be left the means to establish themselves in professions – the church, the army, the navy, or the law. Daughters would be provided with sufficient dowries to give them a certain independence (unmarried women generally lived with a married sibling) or to attract husbands who were gentlemen.⁴ Old John Austen, though, was determined to make his eldest grandson rich and to leave the other children to make their own way in the world.

Jack was only nine years old when his grandfather died and would not have personal control of his inheritance until he was twenty-one. Elizabeth hoped that he would undo what she considered the injustice of her father-in-law’s will when he came into the property. This hope must have been her principal motive in writing the document she endorsed as ‘Memorandums for mine and my Children’s reading, being my own thoughts on our affairs 1706, 1707, a rough draft in a retired hour’.⁵ She related that her husband ‘on his death-bed desired his father to consider one child was dear to him as another and though he desired his eldest son might have a double portion [twice as much as the others], yet hoped the others [his father] would well provide for’.⁶ And she makes explicit her reason for recording this: she hoped that her husband’s last wish would ‘open the heart of the eldest son to his brothers and sister, that in some measure he may perform his poor dear father’s desire’.⁷ When Jack reached the age of twenty-one, he would have a choice. He could keep everything for himself as his grandfather had wanted, or he might accept an obligation to provide for his sister and brothers as his father had wanted him to do.

Elizabeth’s father-in-law had foreseen the possibility that she might try to persuade Jack to diminish his wealth by helping his siblings, and he designed his will to prevent this. The will demanded that the boy be removed from his mother’s care and placed under the guardianship of his uncles Stringer and Holman. If Elizabeth refused to give Jack up, which she had a legal right to do, the boy would receive no income from his inheritance until he was twenty-two. In her already straitened circumstances, with six other children to bring up and very little money for the purpose, Elizabeth could not afford to undertake the support of her eldest son, so she had to agree to his being separated from her and the other children.

The will is a cold, clever document. It is carefully, subtly, even cunningly, constructed. Elizabeth rightly observed that in the will she herself was ‘never mentioned unless as it seemed necessitated to make me appear as no friend, nay rather an enemy to the family’.⁸ In her father-in-law’s eyes she was the enemy because she wanted Jack to provide for his sister and brothers. As Jack’s mother she would have the power to influence him to consider this his duty. Having Jack removed from her care was meant to put an end to her influence. But it also cut Jack off from his siblings, leaving little opportunity for forming bonds of affection that would make him want to help them. The deepest evil of the old man’s will was not its material injustice but its studied intention of destroying the affection that unites a family into a single entity. The scheme was successful.

Jack seems to have been indifferent to the plight of his brothers and sister. He alone was his grandfather’s heir; he alone was to be rich; he alone was to be a gentleman. He was educated by tutors and was sent to Cambridge, as befitted a gentleman of means. At the age of twenty he married his first cousin, a daughter of his guardian uncle Stringer. He died even younger than his father had, and left only one son, who inherited the fortune. Jack’s only son was long-lived, not dying until 1807 at the age of ninety-one. He had failed to produce a son, and his only child, a daughter, had died unmarried. He left the fortune to a grandson of his father’s second brother.

When Jane Austen heard about the will of Jack’s son (also, as usual, called John) in 1807, she wrote to her sister, Cassandra:

We have at last heard something of Mr [John] Austen’s will. It is beleived at Tunbridge that he has left everything after the death of his widow to Mr Motley Austen’s third son John; & as the said John was the only one of the family who attended the funeral, it seems likely to be true. Such ill-gotten Wealth can never prosper!⁹

Jane seems to have known the whole sorry story, begun when the family fortune had been in one stroke transformed into the ‘ill-gotten’ wealth of a single individual.

Elizabeth Weller’s widowhood was hard, but she triumphed and emerges as a figure who accomplished much without sacrificing her integrity. She had great strength and ingenuity. She put off the brocade and pearls she had worn for a portrait painted in her earlier days, and providing for her children became her life. She perceived that her husband’s plan to see that the children were well-educated was not just desirable but now essential. She made their education her duty:

It seemed to me, as if I could not do a better thing for my children’s good, their education being my great care, and indeed all I think I were capable of doing for them for I always thought if they had learning, they might the better shift in the world, and that small fortune was allotted them.¹⁰

Educating the children was not easy. There was no school in the neighbourhood so they would have to move to a town with a school. To pay for the move and meet the school fees, she had to find a way to supplement her income. With few possibilities of earning money open to a woman, she decided the only feasible way would be to take in boarders.

An elegant solution to her problem presented itself. Sevenoaks School offered its ‘schoolhouse’, as she calls it, for rent to anyone who would agree to board the master and a few pupils. She undertook to keep the school boarding house at Sevenoaks and negotiated an agreement with the school for her sons to receive free tuition. The boys got a solid education, and Elizabeth later scraped together the money to pay the difference between the £40 their grandfather had left each boy and the real cost of a good apprenticeship. Of the four apprenticeships recorded for the boys, three cost more than £100 and the fourth £60.

Elizabeth’s daughter, Betty, the eldest child, probably received little if any formal education. The school was only for boys. Already about fifteen when they moved to Sevenoaks, Betty’s main role was probably to help her mother with the housekeeping. There is no indication in Elizabeth’s account books that the girl received any instruction. Limited as the prospects of her brothers might be, Betty was in the most difficult position. With hard work the boys might eventually achieve economic security, even affluence, but as a woman in the early eighteenth century Betty could not expect to earn anything beyond her keep. Her only real prospect was to marry.

Elizabeth believed that with just £400 as a dowry Betty lacked one of the most important assets in the marriage market. When she heard how little her father-in-law had left to Betty, she had exclaimed: ‘Sure my father takes her for a bastard.’¹¹ She feared ‘he had cut [Betty] off from any prospect [of] future hopes’.¹² This was no exaggeration, and in fact Betty’s situation was even worse than her mother suggests. If a woman had no money and didn’t marry, she was dependent on her brothers to support her and give her a home. By leaving so little to five of Betty’s brothers, their grandfather made it impossible for them to take responsibility for her. Jack was the only one in a position to help her, and he no longer figured in the family as a brother in anything but name. Betty was going to have to make her own way.

Elizabeth’s account books tell at least part of the story of what she did for her daughter. When Betty reached the age of eighteen she began to receive a special allowance for clothes, and the amount doubled from one year to the next. Decked in her finery, Betty had to go out and find a husband. She married a man from Tonbridge, the town where Elizabeth had grown up and where she still had family and friends. Elizabeth seems to have turned to her friends there to help find a suitable husband for her daughter. We know nothing about the man Betty married except his surname, Hooper, but the fact that she did marry relieved her mother and brothers of one of their most pressing cares.¹³

Tonbridge was the last of Elizabeth Weller’s many gifts to her children. Not only did Betty marry a Tonbridge man, two of her brothers went to the town to pursue their careers after they had finished their apprenticeships. When Elizabeth died in 1721, she was buried in Tonbridge and left behind the abiding influence of her extraordinary character. In the lives of her children and even her grandchildren we find over and over again signs of Elizabeth’s legacy: her determination, her belief in the benefits of education, and above all her belief in the importance of family affection and her abhorrence of the destruction of family ties.

Jane Austen’s grandfather William Austen was Elizabeth Weller’s fourth son. He was apprenticed to a surgeon and then set himself up in his profession at Tonbridge, where his brother Tom, an apothecary, soon joined him in his medical practice. At twenty-six William married Rebecca Hampson, the daughter of Sir George Hampson, a Gloucester physician, and the widow of William Walter, who had also been a physician. It was a good match for William, better than might have been expected. He was a thriving young surgeon and had married a baronet’s daughter. His prospects looked good.

Over the next five years he and Rebecca had four children, three of whom survived. After the birth of the fourth child, Rebecca died, leaving thirty-one-year-old William a widower with three children under the age of three, and a stepson (the child of Rebecca’s first marriage) of eleven. He married again four years later. William’s second wife was thirteen years older than him, an advantage because at forty-nine she was very likely already past childbearing. But it was a needless precaution. A year after he remarried, William died, probably believing his children had a mother to care for them.

His will shows how conscious he was of his grandfather’s injustice and reflects his mother’s belief in the importance of education.¹⁴ He named as trustees the two of his brothers who were still childless and requested they use his money to ‘Educate and bring up in such sort as shall seem most convenient to them my said Trustees my three children’.¹⁵ When the children reached the age of twenty, the trustees ‘shall in as equal manner as possible having no respect to sex or eldership divide all the residue and remainder of my said estate after the charge of educating my said children and all other necessary expenses are deducted and paid for between my said three children’.¹⁶ The girls got the same as their brother; the younger children the same as the eldest. To make the division absolutely fair, he asked that his property first be sold and the money apportioned equally.¹⁷

The will was made before William remarried and was still valid, but his second wife had the legal right to live in the house and to receive the income from his property during her lifetime. The children would not come into their inheritance until she died. In the meantime, she was in control and apparently declined to keep her stepchildren with her. Someone else had to provide the children with a home.

William’s stepson, William Walter, now went to live with the Walter family until he came of age and received the substantial fortune his father had left him. His half brother and half sisters, aged five, six and seven, were for the time being destitute, and someone among their own relatives had to assume responsibility for them. The care of orphaned children was often split along lines of gender. The father’s family took in the boys; the mother’s the girls. William, however, had made no mention of his wife’s family in his will, and there were plausible reasons for the Hampsons not offering Rebecca’s daughters a home. When William died, Rebecca’s only brother, now Sir George, had just married and was about to leave for Jamaica where he would spend the rest of his life. Only one of the Hampson sisters was still living, and she had two children of her own as...