Jane and Dorothy Read online

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  or transmitted in any form without the express written

  permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Marian Veevers 2017

  Editor: Moira Forsyth

  The moral right of Marian Veevers to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

  Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910985-77-9

  ISBNe: 978-1-910985-78-6

  Cover design by Two Associates

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  For Peter, with love.

  This book is his because he has consistently believed in it and in me, even when I have had doubts about both.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: The Inward Secrets of our Hearts

  Part One

  1. Gentlemen’s Daughters

  2. Little Prattlers among Men

  3. Original Sin

  4. Fashionably Educated and Left Without a Fortune

  Part Two

  5. Love and Friendship

  6. Ladies of the Rectory

  7. A Happy Command of Language

  8. Considering the Future

  9. Falling in Love

  10. Betrayal

  11. Journeys, Brothers, Freedom and Confinement

  12. A House of My Own

  Part Three

  13. An Experiment in Liberty

  14. My Own Darling Child

  15. A Small Revolution

  16. Poetry and Prose

  17. A Maid Whom There Were None to Praise

  18. Homecoming and Exile

  19. Exercised to Constraint

  20. Our Affections do Rebel

  21. Very Capable of Loving

  22. Marriage: The Settlement We Should Aim At

  Part Four

  23. Writing and Publication

  24. My Father Cannot Provide for Us

  25. Another Exile, Another Homecoming

  Part Five

  26. Beyond 1809

  Epilogue: A Natural Sequel to an Unnatural Beginning?

  Appendix 1: Stanzas from The Minstrel

  Appendix 2: The Forest – Epode

  Appendix 3: Among All Lovely Things My Love Had Been

  Notes and References

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank the Society of Authors and the Authors’ Foundation for their kind grant which made research for this book possible.

  My thanks are due to everyone at Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton who made my visit there so enjoyable and interesting, and particularly to Annalie Talent for tea and answers to my questions. Thanks also to the staff at Winchester Record Office.

  I am very grateful to all my friends and colleagues at the Wordsworth Trust, particularly Jeff Cowton, Rebecca Turner, Anna Szilagyi, Barbara Crossley and Dean Hines for their advice and assistance, but also everyone else who has patiently listened to me and discussed ideas as Jane and Dorothy took shape. However, I should like to mention that any mistakes are entirely my own, and the opinions and theories expressed in the following pages are also my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wordsworth Trust.

  Thanks too to my agent Laura Longrigg at MBA, also to Moira Forsyth, Bob Davidson and everyone at Sandstone Press for their patience and support.

  And finally, many thanks to my husband, Peter, for his endless reading, rereading, discussing and checking of the manuscript, and for resolving all my technical crises.

  Marian Veevers, Grasmere

  April 2017

  Prologue

  The Inward Secrets of our Hearts

  Elinor . . . possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgement . . .  She had an excellent heart; – her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them . . .  Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in every thing; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was every thing but prudent . . .  Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility.

  (Sense and Sensibility, Chapter One.)

  In the story of the two Dashwood sisters which Jane Austen proceeds to tell from this beginning, Elinor’s concern proves to be well-founded. Marianne’s ‘excess of sensibility’ almost destroys her reputation, her health and her happiness, while Elinor’s more guarded behaviour is rewarded.

  But that is fiction; what of real life?

  Eager in everything, knowing no moderation in her sorrows or her joys: this might be a description of the young Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who was destined to become her brother’s beloved companion, muse and housekeeper – and a talented writer herself.

  At fifteen years old Dorothy was far from happy, and the letters she wrote then might have been penned by Marianne Dashwood.

  Dorothy was an orphan and had been separated from the brothers she loved. The children were poor because of an ongoing lawsuit with the unscrupulous Lord Lonsdale, and she was living with her austere grandparents in the Cumberland town of Penrith, in a gloomy house of parsimony and long silences. It was a house in which the drawing room carpet was only laid down for favoured visitors, a house in which long dead ancestors stared forbiddingly from the walls.1 Dorothy’s grandfather did not speak to her except to scold, and she endured long hours sewing shirts under the critical eye of her grandmother without a word spoken. It was enough to make any teenager feel sorry for herself.

  In July 1787, in the oppressive silence of this dull home – alone, late at night by a guttering candle – Dorothy wrote the earliest of her letters that has survived.

  Her fifteen-year-old voice bursts from the page, eager and emotional. ‘Has not my dear [friend] accused . . . me of neglect? Believe me I am not deserving of these repro[a]ches. However great may have been my dear Friend’s disappointment at not having heard from me it cannot equal my distress at being prevented writing to her . . . ’2

  Dorothy found exquisite relief from her misery in pouring out her feelings to her friend, Miss Pollard. ‘What is uppermost in my mind I must write’, she declared, and promised that she would, ‘ever lay open the secrets of my heart . . . ’3

  It is the same language of unrestrained emotion that Marianne uses. And both Dorothy and Marianne would have learned this form of expression from the novels that were popular at the time. In fact, as Pamela Woof has observed, Dorothy, in her earliest letters seems sometimes to step outside herself and identify herself as a character in a story. ‘Imagine me’, she wrote, ‘sitting in my bed-gown, my hair out of curl and hanging about my face, with a small candle beside me, and my whole person the picture of poverty . . . ’4

  As a teenager Dorothy Wordsworth was a keen reader of fiction, and she had particularly enjoyed Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa 5 – a vast narrative of unmitigated misery. Its nine volumes detail the trials of the eponymous heroine as she is pressured by her family to marry a man she dislikes and, upon escaping them, is pursued by the libidinous Lovelace who tricks her into trusting him, imprisons her in a bro
thel and finally rapes her; after which Clarissa takes the only action possible for a truly ‘virtuous’ female and dies.

  Dorothy was not quite in such dire straits but, orphaned and impoverished, and living with unsympathetic grandparents, she certainly saw similarities between herself and the heroine she admired. She relished being an object of pity. ‘You cannot think how I like the idea of being called poor Dorothy’, she wrote, ‘ . . . I could cry whenever I think of it’6.

  She was (in her own mind, at least) as thoroughly persecuted as any novel heroine, and not only by her grim grandparents. Like Clarissa, who suffers surveillance and rudeness from, ‘that bold creature Betty Barnes, my sister’s confidant and servant’,7 Dorothy was convinced that her grandparents’ entire household was ranked against her. ‘[T]he servants,’ she confided to Miss Pollard, ‘are every one of them so insolent . . . as makes the kitchen as well as the parlour insupportable.’8

  All nine volumes of Clarissa (which is one of the longest novels in the English language) are written in letters, many of them sent by the heroine to ‘Miss Howe, [her] most intimate friend, companion and correspondent’.9 Indeed, there are so many letters that, had she been real, poor Miss Howe might have become a little impatient with having to pay for them all, for at this time the recipient, not the sender, paid postage.

  Letter writing was so common in novels of the eighteenth century that, if a young woman was to be persecuted, it was all but obligatory for her to have an intimate friend, companion and correspondent in whom she could confide her troubles. Dorothy had determined that Miss Pollard should fill this role, and her account of herself reveals just that ‘excess of sensibility’ which makes Elinor Dashwood apprehensive about her sister’s future.

  Just four years younger than Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Austen also enjoyed Clarissa and, by the time she was fifteen, she too had read her share of the fashionable novels which gloried in an extreme depth of feeling – but their effect on her was very different from their effect upon young Dorothy. From the age of about ten Jane had been writing stories, and, just a few months short of her fifteenth birthday, she penned her most ambitious tale to date. The voice which emerges from this story is far removed from the earnest Dorothy’s.

  It came from a very different place. Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, nearly 300 miles south of Penrith, was filled with Jane’s brothers, her good-humoured parents, her sister, and the pupils whom her father taught. For her there was no sitting over a candle late into the night, pouring out her sorrows. In fact there would have been little space or peace in which to do that.

  Even Jane’s earliest work was written for publication, to be shared by as large an audience as she could get. At fifteen, her family was the only available audience, so, sitting under the low beams of the crowded rectory parlour, she confidently read out her new tale, Love and Friendship,10 beginning with an exaggerated version of that interesting background every heroine ought to have:

  ‘My father was a native of Ireland & an inhabitant of Wales; My Mother was the natural Daughter of a Scotch Peer by an italian (sic) Opera-girl – I was born in Spain & received my Education at a Convent in France . . . ’

  This opening would have been enough to signal to her audience the kind of novel she meant this to be – except Love and Friendship is not exactly a novel of sensibility; it is a parody of such a novel.

  It is the tale of Laura, a woman who, like Clarissa, has suffered ‘the determined Perseverance of disagreeable Lovers and the cruel Persecutions of obstinate Fathers’11 – or so at least she believes. The plot of this short satirical novel is preposterous, Laura’s sufferings entirely self-induced; she marries a man upon a first meeting and he, with ‘heroic fortitude’, refuses to be reconciled to his father. In her ensuing poverty Laura and her companions are persecuted for such virtuous behaviour as ‘majestically removing’ banknotes from one of their hosts.

  Far from imaginatively entering into the experience of a heroine, Jane set out to mock the whole business of sensibility and those novels in which a girl’s emotions were all-important. The tone is set early in the story as Laura describes her own refined feelings, claiming that she had, in her youth, ‘A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends, my Acquaintance and particularly to every affliction of my own’. But Laura finds that, after all she has gone through, ‘Tho’ indeed my own misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other.’

  Jane Austen’s meaning is clear. She distrusted claims to deep feeling, suspecting that they might be an excuse for selfishness.

  The heightened language of sentimental friendship, which Dorothy was happy to adopt for her correspondence, is mercilessly ridiculed in Love and Friendship. Here is Laura meeting for the first time Sophia, a woman who is ‘all Sensibility and Feeling’: ‘We flew into each others arms and having exchanged vows of mutual Friendship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts.’

  The satire is cutting – and seems especially so when we consider the sensitive lonely girl in Penrith finding relief and a way of understanding her own wretchedness as she wrote late into the night beside her small candle. Dorothy Wordsworth’s determination to ‘ever lay open the secrets of my heart’ was just the kind of language Jane was targeting in her mockery.

  Dorothy was probably not alone among the young women of her time in interpreting her own experiences through the vocabulary and sentiments of the novels she read. There were, no doubt, self-indulgent girls who gloried in a show of sensibility, pretending to emotions they did not experience and putting on airs of sensitivity. But there must also have been many other young women like Dorothy Wordsworth, who (though they might not have been subjected to the extreme trials of novel heroines) suffered real loss and misery. It is not surprising that those girls should use the style of popular novels to express their woes in a language which at least legitimised and made them bearable.

  Dorothy had already begun to experience the insecurities and the injustices of the world in which she lived. Jane knew nothing of them yet.

  But, by the time they were fifteen years old, Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth had identified themselves with those two different approaches to life – Sensibility and Reason – which Jane would dramatise in the Dashwood sisters.

  How would things turn out for these two very different girls, poised on the edge of womanhood, preparing to encounter all the difficulties and excitements of life in a society which offered women little opportunity for independence, creativity or self-expression?

  Jane and Dorothy never met, though they came close to doing so and, had circumstances been just a little different, they might have become acquainted. If they had met they probably would not have liked each other very much, but there are several important parallels in their lives: financial insecurity, a reliance on the support of brothers, intelligence, a certain rebelliousness and, of course, literary talent.

  They did inhabit the same troubled, unequal world. The years through which they lived have been called an Age of Revolution. During their lifetimes America won independence, the Bastille fell and idealistic men talked of radically changing the British government – but there was no revolution in the lives of women.

  ‘Family life,’ wrote one observer in 1779, ‘makes Tories of us all . . . see if any Whig wishes to see the beautiful Utopian expansion of power within his walls.’ The historian Amanda Vickery has concluded, after an extensive study of letters and journals from the period, ‘I have yet to encounter a single gentleman musing on whether it might be possible to reconsider his domestic rule in the light of the new political ideas.’12

  Most women remained under the control of men all their lives: fathers, husbands, brothers. For women like Jane and Dorothy, born into genteel families, there was little hope of living independently. ‘Few are the modes of earning a subsistence,’ wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in 1788, ‘and
those very humiliating.’

  Marriage was considered to be a woman’s only proper career. It was, according to Anne Donnellan, ‘the settlement in the world we should aim at, and the only way we females have of making ourselves of use to Society and raising ourselves in this world.’13 The problem, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu pointed out, was that men believed ‘the end of creation of women is to increase and multiply’, so ‘Any woman who died unmarried is looked upon to die in a state of reprobation.’14 It was an enormous challenge for any woman to find a meaningful life outside that prescribed destiny.

  This is the story of two very different young ladies who tried to do just that. It is a story of the world they shared. It is a story of how women, as they grow up, negotiate a passage through an unjust society: the different ways of opposing, of complying and of simply surviving. It is a testing of the vision Jane Austen had when, at just nineteen, she began to write Sense and Sensibility. Her intuition was that exposing her feelings and acting upon her emotions put a woman in danger, while exercising a strict control would steer her more safely through the perilous waters of Georgian society.

  Was she right?

  The following chapters trace the growth to womanhood of that impetuous fifteen-year-old, Dorothy Wordsworth, and set it beside the more cautious youth of Jane Austen. The story follows their trials and triumphs and takes us into their thirties to discover the remarkable individuals they became. Parts One and Two trace the joys and challenges of their young days and compare their experiences of that crucial rite of passage in a woman’s life: falling in love. Both young women are betrayed by men they love and trust. But their reactions to that betrayal are very different, setting them off on widely diverging courses. In Parts Three and Four Jane and Dorothy are grown women and the four-year difference in their age is less significant. Now the women are living with the decisions they have made, and both begin to see the things that matter most to them slipping away. Jane loses her ability to write, and, possibly, her ability to love, while a cruel twist of fate destroys the peace of the home Dorothy has established with her beloved brother.