Some Eminent Women of Our Times

XV

JANE AUSTEN

There is very little story to tell in the life of Jane Austen. She was one of the greatest writers of English fiction; but her own life, like the life she describes with such extraordinary and minute accuracy in her tales, had no startling incidents, no catastrophes. The solid ground never shook beneath her feet; neither she, nor the relations and neighbours with whom her tranquil life was passed, were ever swept away by the whirlwind of wild passions, nor overwhelmed by tragic destiny. The ordinary, everyday joys and sorrows that form a part of the lives of all of us, were hers; but nothing befell her more sensational or wondrous than what falls to the lot of most of us. This even tenor of her own way she reproduces with marvellous skill in the pages of her novels. It has been well said that “every village could furnish matter for a novel to Miss Austen.” The material which she used is within the reach of every one; but she stands alone, hitherto quite unequalled, for the power of investing with charm and interest these incidents in the everyday life of everyday people which are the whole subject-matter of her six finished novels. A silly elopement on the part of one of the five Miss Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, and the fall which stuns Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, when she insists on jumping off the cob at Lyme, are almost the only incidents in her books that can even be called unusual. Her novels remind us of pictures we sometimes see which contain no one object of supreme or extraordinary loveliness, but which charm by showing us the beauty and interest in that which lies around us on every side. There is a picture by Frederick Walker, called “A Rainy Day,” which is a very good instance of this; it is nothing but a village street just by a curve in the road; the houses are such as may be seen in half the villages in England: a dog goes along looking as dejected as dogs always do in the rain, the light is reflected in the puddles of the wet road, one foot-passenger only has ventured out. There is nothing in the picture but what we may all of us have seen hundreds and thousands of times, and yet one could look and look at it for hours and never weary of the charm of quiet, truthful beauty it contains. This is one of the things which true artists, whether their art is painting pictures or writing books, can do for those who are not artists – that is, help them to see and feel the beauty and interest of the ordinary surroundings of everyday life. Robert Browning makes a great Italian painter say —

Jane Austen4 was a clergyman’s daughter, born in 1775 at the Vicarage of Steventon, about seven miles from Basingstoke, in Hampshire. Here she lived, for the first twenty-five years of her life, the quiet family life of most young ladies of similar circumstances; two of her brothers were in the Navy, one was a country gentleman, having inherited an estate from a cousin, another was a clergyman. The most dearly loved by Jane of all her family was her sister Cassandra, older than herself by three years. The sisters were so inseparable that when Cassandra went to school, Jane, though too young to profit much by the instruction given, was sent also, because it would have been cruel to separate the sisters; her mother said, “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate.” The devotion between the sisters was lifelong. Their characters were not much alike; Cassandra was colder, calmer, and more reserved than her sister, whose sweet temper and affectionate disposition specially endeared her to all her family; but Jane throughout her life relied upon Cassandra as one who was wiser and stronger than herself. The quiet family life at Steventon was diversified by one or two visits to Bath, then a very fashionable resort; a short visit to Lyme is spoken of later on; and in the early days in the vicarage the Austen children not infrequently amused themselves with private theatricals. Readers of Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park will find these mild amusements woven into the web of the story; for, as Jane Austen says herself, she was like a bird who uses the odd bits of wool or moss in the hedgerows near to weave into the tiny fabric of its nest. The plays which the Austens acted were frequently written by themselves. This may probably have given to Jane her early impulse to authorship. It is not improbable that it also smoothed the way of her career as a writer in another sense; for at that time very great prejudice still existed in many people’s minds against women who were writers. Lord Granville, speaking in December 1887, at the unveiling of the statue of the Queen at Holloway College, cited a great French writer who had laid it down as an axiom that a woman could commit no greater fault than to be learned; the same writer had said – of course partly in joke – that it is enough knowledge for any woman if she is acquainted with the fact that Pekin is not in Europe, or that Alexander the Great was not the son-in-law of Louis the XIV. Referring to events within his own knowledge and memory, Lord Granville added, “One of the most eminent English statesmen of the century, a brilliant man of letters himself, after reading with admiration a beautiful piece of poetry written by his daughter, appealed to her affection for him to prevent her ever writing again, his fear was so great lest she should be thought a literary woman.”

If a similar prejudice were in any degree felt by the Austen family, it is not unlikely that it was gradually dissolved by the early habit of the children of writing plays for home acting. We read, indeed, that Jane did nearly all her writing in the general sitting-room of the family, and that she was careful to keep her occupation secret from all but her own immediate relations. For this purpose she wrote on small pieces of paper, which could easily be put away, or covered by a piece of blotting-paper or needlework. The little mahogany desk at which she wrote is still preserved in the family. She never put her name on a title-page, but there is no evidence that her family would have disapproved of her doing so. They seem to have delighted in all she did, and to have helped her by every means in their power. She was a great favourite with her brothers and sister, and with all the tribe of nephews and nieces that grew up about her. She had no trace of any assumption of superiority, and gave herself no airs of any kind. She had too much humour and sense of fun for there to be any danger of this in her case. She was thoroughly womanly in her habits, manners, and occupations. Like Miss Martineau, her early training preserved her from being a literary lady who could not sew. Her needlework was remarkably fine and dainty, and specimens of it are still preserved which show that her fingers had the same deftness and skill as the mind which created Emma Woodhouse and her father, Mrs. Norris and Elizabeth Bennet. She had taken to authorship as a duck takes to water, and had written some of her most remarkable books before she was twenty; and she had done this so simply and naturally that she seems to have produced in her family the impression that writing first-rate novels was one of the easiest things in the world. We find, for instance, that she writes in 1814 many letters of advice to a novel-writing niece; and she advises another little niece to cease writing till she is sixteen years old, the child being at that time only ten or twelve. In 1816 she addresses a very interesting letter to a nephew who is writing a novel, and has had the misfortune to lose two chapters and a half! She makes kindly fun of the young gentleman, and suggests that if she finds his lost treasure she shall engraft his chapters into her own novel; but she adds: “I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour?”

Early in 1801 the home at Steventon was broken up. Mr. Austen resigned his living in consequence of failing health, and the family removed to Bath. Mr. Austen died in 1805, and Mrs. Austen and her daughters lived for a time at Southampton. They had no really homelike home, however, between leaving Steventon in 1801 and settling at Chawton, in Hampshire, in 1809; and it is very characteristic of Jane Austen’s home-loving nature that this homeless period was also a period of literary inactivity. She wrote Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice before she left Steventon, though none of them were published till after she came to live at Chawton. Here in her second home she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. In consequence of having three novels finished before one was printed, when she once began to publish, her works appeared in rapid succession. Sense and Sensibility was the first to appear, in 1811, and the others followed quickly after one another, for her work was at once appreciated by the public, and the great leaders of the literary world, such as Sir Walter Scott, Southey, and Coleridge, welcomed her with cordial and generous praise. One curious little adventure should be mentioned. In 1803, during her residence at Bath, she had sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey to a Bath publisher for £10. This good man, on reconsideration, evidently thought he had made a bad bargain, and resolved to lose his ten pounds rather than risk a larger sum in printing and publishing the book. The manuscript therefore lay on his shelves for many years quite forgotten. But the time came when Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park had placed their author in the first rank of English writers, and it occurred to Miss Austen and her family that it might be well to rescue Northanger Abbey from its unappreciative possessor. One of her brothers called on the Bath publisher and negotiated with him the re-purchase of the manuscript, giving for it the same sum which had been paid to the author about ten years earlier. The publisher was delighted to get back his £10, which he had never expected to see again, and Jane Austen’s brother was delighted to get back the manuscript. Both parties to the bargain were fully satisfied; but the poor publisher’s feelings would have been very different if he had known that the neglected manuscript, with which he had so joyfully parted, was by the author of the most successful novels of the day.

There is a quiet vein of fun and humorous observation running through all Miss Austen’s writings. It is as visible in her private letters to her friends as in her works intended for publication. The little turns of expression are not reproduced, but the humour of the one is very similar to that of the other. Thus, for instance, in one of her letters she describes a visit to a young lady at school in London. Jane Austen had left her a raw schoolgirl, and found her, on this visit, developed into a fashionable young lady. “Her hair,” writes Jane to Cassandra, “is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education.” Who can read this without thinking of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, and the inevitable contempt she inspired in her fashionable cousins because she did not know French and had but one sash?

Reference has already been made to the high appreciation of Miss Austen’s genius which has been expressed by the highest literary authorities in her own time and in ours. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal: “I have read again, and for the third time, Miss Austen’s very finely-written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the descriptive and the sentiment is denied to me.” Lord Macaulay, the great historian, wrote in his diary: “Read Dickens’s Hard Times, and another book of Pliny’s Letters. Read Northanger Abbey, worth all Dickens and Pliny put together. Yet it was the work of a girl. She was certainly not more than twenty-six. Wonderful creature!” Guizot, the French historian, was a great novel reader, and he delighted in English novels, especially those written by women. Referring to the women writers of the beginning of this century, of whom Miss Austen was the chief, he said that their works “form a school which, in the excellence and profusion of its productions, resembles the cloud of dramatic authors of the great Athenian age.” The late Mr. G. H. Lewes said he would rather have written Pride and Prejudice than any of the Waverley novels. George Eliot calls Jane Austen the greatest artist that has ever written, “using the term ‘artist’ to signify the most perfect master over the means to her end.” It is perhaps only fair to state that some good judges do not entertain so high an opinion of her work. Madame de Staël pronounced against her, using the singularly inappropriate word “vulgar,” in condemnation of her work. If there is a writer in the world free from vulgarity in its ordinary sense, it is Jane Austen; it must be supposed that Madame de Staël used the word in its French sense, i. e. “commonplace” or “ordinary,” such a meaning of the word as is retained in our English expression “the vulgar tongue.” Charlotte Brontë felt in Miss Austen a deficiency in poetic imagination, in the high tone of sentiment which elevates the prose of everyday life into poetry. She found her “shrewd and observant rather than sagacious and profound.” Miss Austen’s writings were so essentially different from the highly imaginative work of her sister author, that it is not surprising that the younger failed somewhat in appreciation of the elder writer.

Jane Austen’s failing health in 1816 caused much anxiety to her family. It is characteristic of her gentle thoughtfulness for all about her that she never could be induced to use the one sofa with which the family sitting-room was provided. Her mother, who was more than seventy years old, often used the sofa, and Jane would never occupy it, even in her mother’s absence, preferring to contrive for herself a sort of couch formed with two or three chairs. A little niece, puzzled that “Aunt Jane” preferred this arrangement, drew from her the explanation that if she used the sofa in her mother’s absence, Mrs. Austen would probably abstain from using it as much as was good for her. Her last book, Persuasion, was finished while she was suffering very much from what proved to be her dying illness. Weak health did not in any way diminish her industry, and she exacted from herself the utmost perfection that she felt she was capable of giving to her work. The last chapters of Persuasion were cancelled and re-written because her first conclusion of the story did not satisfy her. In May 1817 she and her sister removed to Winchester in order that Jane might have skilled medical advice. Here she died on 18th July and was buried opposite Wykeham’s Chantry, in the cathedral. Her sweetness of temper and her gentle gaiety never failed her throughout a long and trying illness. When the end was near, one of those with her asked if there was anything she wanted; her reply was, “Nothing but death.”

XVI

MARIA EDGEWORTH

It will be impossible, in the short limits of these pages, to give anything like a full account of the long life of Maria Edgeworth. She lived for nearly eighty-three years, from 1st January 1767 to 22d May 1849; and through her own and her father’s friends she was brought into touch with nearly all the leading men and women connected with the stirring political and literary events of that period. What this implies will be best realised if we consider that her lifetime comprised the whole period of the French Revolution, the War of Independence in the United States, the long wars of England with Napoleon, the landing of the French in Ireland (her native country), the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, the Abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions, the passing of the first Reform Bill, the Irish Famine of 1847, and the outbreak of revolutionary socialism on the Continent in 1848. These are some of the most burning of the political events of which she was a witness; the literary and social history of the same period is hardly less remarkable. She lived in the centre of a world made brilliant by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Burns, Keats, Scott, and Jane Austen. She knew Mrs. Fry, Wilberforce, and Sydney Smith, as representing some of the most important of the social movements of her time; among her friends in the scientific world were Ricardo, the political economist, Darwin, the naturalist, whose fame has been overshadowed by that of his grandson, the great Charles Darwin of our own times, Sir Humphry Davy, the Herschels, Mrs. Somerville, and James Mill. She knew Mrs. Siddons, and heard her recite in her own house the part of Queen Katherine in the play of Henry the Eighth. She was the intimate friend, and connection by marriage, of “Kitty Pakenham,” the first Duchess of Wellington, wife of “the Great Duke.” She lived to see the old stage coaches supplanted by our modern railways; she was the interested eye-witness of the gradual introduction of the steam-engine into all departments of industry, a change which Sir Walter Scott said he looked on “half proud, half sad, half angry, and half pleased.” She might well feel, as old age approached, that she had “warmed both hands at the fire of life.” No life could have been fuller than hers of every sort of interest and activity. She said in a letter to a friend, written after a dangerous illness: “When I felt it was more than probable that I should not recover, with a pulse above 120, and at the entrance of my seventy-sixth year, I was not alarmed. I felt ready to rise tranquil from the banquet of life, where I had been a happy guest. I confidently relied on the goodness of my Creator” (Study of Maria Edgeworth, by Grace A. Oliver, p. 521).

Maria Edgeworth’s family was one of English origin, which had settled in Ireland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Edgeworths intermarried into Irish, Welsh, and English families, but always maintained strong Irish sympathies.

There were many remarkable men and women in the Edgeworth family before the birth of our heroine, but space forbids the mention of more than one, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose name and fame are intimately associated with those of his daughter. Mr. Edgeworth was a most extraordinary man; at one moment one admires him, at another one laughs at him, but one must always be astonished by him. “To put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” would have been a congenial task to him. He made clocks, built bridges, raised spires, invented telegraphs, manufactured balloons, ink, and soap, constructed locks on his bedroom doors of such a complicated nature, that his guests were afraid to shut their doors lest they never should be able to open them again.

When on a journey in France about 1770, he stayed at Lyons, and carried out a plan for diverting the Rhone from its course, thereby saving a large tract of country that had previously been inaccessible; for this service the city of Lyons rewarded him by a grant of land; this property, however, was confiscated a few years later during the Revolution.

He raised a corps of volunteer infantry in Ireland, to which Roman Catholics as well as Protestants were admitted, although at that time the sentiment of religious equality was regarded as akin to infidelity and disloyalty. He was born in England, and educated partly here and partly in Ireland; like most of the Edgeworths, he came of a mixed race, his mother being a Welsh woman of considerable literary acquirements and faculties; his first remarkable performance was a runaway marriage, which he contracted at the age of nineteen, with a Miss Elers, a lady of German origin, whom he appears rather to have disliked than otherwise. A runaway marriage with a girl whom he really loved would have been too commonplace a proceeding in those days for this eccentric young gentleman. Speaking of this lady, Mr. Edgeworth wrote: “My wife was prudent, domestic, and affectionate, but she was not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles; and the lamenting of a female, with whom we live, does not render home delightful.” It is not recorded if Mrs. Edgeworth found the lamenting of the male with whom she lived any more delightful, nor indeed is it evident that her husband devoted much of his overflowing energy to lamentation. As he did not find his home delightful, he spent very little time in it, and was not long before he found pleasant society elsewhere.

One can never think of Mr. Edgeworth apart from his extraordinary domestic history. He had four wives, one after another, in rapid succession, and twenty-two children. There were four children, of whom Maria was one, by the first marriage with the “lamenting female.” The eldest of these, born when his father was under twenty, was brought up on the principles advocated by Rousseau, which may perhaps be summarised as never forcing a child to do anything that he does not wish to do. One experiment of this kind appears to have sufficed for the family; the other twenty-one children, or such of them as survived infancy, were treated according to other theories. Indeed, it seems to have been part of Maria’s education that she was to undertake, for a part of every day, some study or occupation that was uncongenial to her. Mr. Edgeworth’s theories of education seem to have been almost as numerous as his family; a story is told in the book already quoted, of the visit of a gentleman to Edgeworthstown House in Ireland; on rejoining the ladies after dinner, the guest was imprudent enough to exclaim on the beauty of the golden hair of one of the younger girls. Mr. Edgeworth instantly took his daughter by the hand, walked across the room, opened a drawer, held her head over it, and with a large pair of scissors cut off all her hair close to her head. “As the golden ringlets fell into the drawer, this extraordinary father said, ‘Charlotte, what do you say?’ She answered, ‘Thank you, father.’ Turning to his guests, he remarked, ‘I will not allow a daughter of mine to be vain.’”