Jane and Dorothy Read online

  The Doctor himself seems to have been a little captivated by young Tom. He wrote gratefully of the young student’s ‘endearing attentions to me and my family,’ declaring, ‘Of my dear Thomas I cannot speak without emotion.’ And even went so far as to say, ‘I feel for his absence more than his family can do’.6 Which, since this letter was addressed to Tom’s father, seems a little excessive and tactless. There was certainly something appealing here, not something brash or false, but a charm which had remained consistent over the years in which Tom had been intimate with his tutor and his family.

  Jane might have fallen headlong into love, but it would seem that her good sense had not entirely deserted her. Her well-honed skills of observation enabled her to detect suitable husband material when she saw it. For this was no unprincipled Willoughby out to ruin a girl’s happiness and reputation. Tom Lefroy was a solid, honest, hard-working young man.

  The ‘endearing attentions’ which he no doubt paid to his dancing partner during the parties that marked the Christmas season of 1795/96 would have been exhilarating and flattering – but there was more to this encounter than common flirtation.

  There was no shortage of young men to flirt with in Hampshire. Writing again, four days after her first letter, Jane mentioned some of her former favourites. With her head still full of the charming Irishman, she told Cassandra to pass a message to their friend Mary Lloyd. ‘I make over Mr Heartley and all his Estate to her . . . ’ she wrote, ‘and not only him, but all my other Admirers . . . even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me’. The reason for this magnanimity? ‘I mean to confine myself in future to Mr Tom Lefroy . . . ’ – followed, of course, by the inevitable twist of irony – ‘for whom I do not care sixpence.’7

  Intelligent and genuinely affectionate, Mr Lefroy possessed one more characteristic which would have made him stand out from the general run of beaux at the Basingstoke balls. It was a characteristic he shared with the rather flushed young woman who sat beside him as the dancers and the fiddle music of the Christmas parties swirled about them; it was that ‘happy command of language’ which Lady Susan puts to such dangerous use. Tom Lefroy was a skilled debater. He had revived the Historical Society at his college and shone in it as a public speaker. His great uncle Langlois acknowledged his ‘talent for oratory’ 8 even though he was anxious it should not disrupt the course of his studies.

  For Jane, the ‘sitting down together’ would have been as delicious as the dancing if Tom engaged her in genuinely interesting discussion. We have no record of what they talked about; but, despite the levity of the letters, it is hard to believe that conversation was nothing but teasing about such inconsequential matters as his white coat. Jane could have joked about morning coats with any young man in Hampshire.

  There is only one clue to the topics they discussed. Jane had learned that her Irish friend was a ‘very great admirer of Tom Jones’. (She jokingly attributed the pale morning coat to the fact that the fictional Tom wore ‘the same coloured clothes’.)9 Novels provided a common ground of experience on which men and women could meet, and it is easy to imagine that a studious young man who had had little time to spare for socialising might resort to them when called upon to entertain his partner in a ballroom. And Jane, incidentally, seems to have been perfectly comfortable with the discussion of Tom Jones – a slightly risqué work. Samuel Johnson was shocked when Hannah More told him she had read this story; he said it was ‘a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.’10

  A touch of immodesty would have added a certain frisson to a conversation made private only by the music and clamour of a ballroom, but once on the subject of novels, Jane would have had interesting, perceptive remarks to make – remarks which her companion would have had the intelligence to value.

  Dr Burrowes’ comments indicate that Tom was able to make himself pleasing to his companions. The common small-talk of a ballroom might not have pleased Jane particularly, but a genuine exchange of ideas – verbal sparring with a skilled debater – could soon have engendered a sense of closeness and connection such as she never achieved with any other man. Here would have been something entirely new to her; someone who was not all bland, polite agreement; someone who did not think argument should be avoided. She might have experienced something like Dorothy’s ideal of discussion without fear of ridicule or censure.

  All her life Jane was to struggle to find other people agreeable. Her intelligence, her talent for observation – her genius – made her impatient with people whose minds were less agile. But something significant happened during those four Christmas balls. Rapid though her fall into love was, she may not have surrendered entirely to emotion and sexual desire, nor have abandoned completely her conviction that love should be founded on friendship. Maybe, that Christmas, she came to believe that she had really found a man who could ‘meet her in conversation, rational or playful’.11

  For an intelligent woman, confined in a society which denies her a higher education and restricts her existence largely to the home, the male companion with whom she shares her life is her chief provider, not only of security and affection, but also of intellectual stimulation.

  Jane Austen’s fiction demonstrates a keen awareness of that evocative phrase of St Paul’s, ‘unequally yoked’. Poor Emma Woodhouse dragging out the long winter evenings with her father who fails to understand her conversation and becomes ‘nervous’ when she tries to explain herself, and sensible Charlotte Lucas doomed to pass her life with the ridiculous Mr Collins, act out on the page a fate which must have been all too common in Georgian England.

  By the time she was twenty, Dorothy Wordsworth understood the misery of an uncongenial family circle. She had experienced it for herself in the dreary Penrith parlour. It seems likely that, when they came to fall in love, Jane and Dorothy’s needs and preferences were very similar. Both these keen observers of human nature sought a man who could match them in intelligence, a man with whom they could talk. While Jane was drawn to the intellectually brilliant and conventionally ambitious Lefroy, Dorothy’s affections settled on a young man whose remarkable talents made him a fascinating companion, but who, sadly, had not Tom Lefroy’s glittering career prospects.

  In the retirement of Forncett rectory Dorothy can have met few young men and probably none to equal in intelligence and interesting conversation one lad whom she already knew. William, the brother who was just over a year older than herself, had been entirely lost to her for ten years and, when he re-entered her life at the age of sixteen, her loving heart had been ready to receive him. But he was only one among the four brothers who lit up her dull life in Penrith. She was delighted by the affection which they all showed for her and – apart from a little reservation about Richard – all her brothers were equally dear to her at that time.

  However, by June 1793, a deeply significant change had come about. Dorothy would write then to her friend Jane Pollard, ‘the last time we were together he [William] won my Affect[ion] to a Degree which I cannot describe.’12

  After that, William was to be the emotional centre of Dorothy’s world for the rest of her life. Her love was so all-absorbing, so central to everything she became, that, brother though he was, it is impossible to describe the formation of this relationship as anything but ‘falling in love’. Ten years later – during their life together at Grasmere – observers would question the nature of this extremely close relationship and ‘there was an unnatural tale current . . . of Wordsworth having been intimate with his own sister’13. The exact nature of Dorothy’s love has been questioned ever since, but there is nothing to suggest that it was – at its beginning – a sexual attraction. It developed mainly in letters, and tracing its development reveals that there were contradictions and caution mixed with that depth of feeling for which Dorothy was celebrated.

  The beginning of a special relationship between brother and sister is first apparent in a long letter of September 1790. Willia
m was spending the university vacation walking through the Alps with a college friend, and Dorothy was his only correspondent in the family: ‘When you write to my Brothers . . . tell them I am sorry it has not been in my power to write to them,’ said William. He also admitted that he had deliberately avoided Richard for some time before setting out, because this elder brother would ‘look upon our scheme as mad and impracticable.’14

  William was living up to his uncles’ opinion of him as irresponsible, but he seems to have had no fear that Dorothy would disapprove of this extended jaunt across Europe. Already he was turning to his sister with an expectation of sympathy. ‘[N]ever have my eyes burst upon a scene of particular loveliness,’ he wrote, ‘but I have . . . wished that you could . . . be transported to the place where I stood to enjoy it.’ This was a style of writing to appeal to a sensitive young woman, hungry for affection.

  After his return to England William stayed at Forncett rectory for six weeks in the winter of 1790/91. Now Dorothy could get to know him properly as an adult. There had been only brief meetings since Penrith days – as she passed through Cambridge on her way to her new home in October 1788, and when William came for a short stay at the rectory in June 1789.

  Now they walked for hours together, talking and talking, so Dorothy too might have been taking part in an exhilarating exchange of ideas. From this point on, there is certainly a change in the way she thought about William.

  ‘I confess you are right in supposing me partial to William,’ she wrote in June 1791. But she was aware it was a long time since she had seen her other brothers and she thought that ‘probably when I next see Kitt, I shall love him as well.’

  The same letter which describes William’s visit ends with that light-hearted postscript about her chances with Edward Swain. Her affection for her brother was not yet dominating her life. Through 1791 she praised William, but was honest about his failings, particularly the failure to apply himself to mathematics which had already lost him the chance of a fellowship and a secure academic career. She was objective enough to admit that his attachment to poetry was ‘not the most likely thing to procure his advancement in the world.’15

  However by June 1793, this objectivity would be abandoned and Dorothy would begin writing of William as if he was a conventional lover, describing his ‘attentions’ and saying that he had won her affections. She began then to look forward to a future which sounds very much like marriage: a future in which she would be ‘united to my dear William.’16

  Brother and sister did not meet between the winter of 1790/91 and 1793. The strangest thing about Dorothy’s fall into love, is not that she fell in love with her brother – but that she fell in love with a man in his absence. So who was this extraordinary young man who could – even at a distance – engender such whole-hearted loyalty?

  Like Jane Austen, Dorothy could not help but talk about the man with whom she was falling in love. She described this delightful brother as having ‘a sort of violence of Affection . . . which demonstrates itself every moment of the Day when the Objects of his affection are present with him, in a thousand almost imperceptible attentions to their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness . . . a Tenderness that never sleeps, and at the same Time such a Delicacy of Manners as I have observed in few Men.’17

  He sounds a very pleasant companion, but, to the older members of his family, the most striking thing about young William was probably vacillation and indecision – and, possibly, a certain rebelliousness. William’s biographer, John Worthen, believes it is impossible to know ‘whether Wordsworth developed republican political sympathies whilst a student’,18 but points out that he was enthusiastic about the French republic when he visited it during his walking tour in summer 1790. So there may have been the first stirrings of republican ideas in the boy who came to Forncett in 1790. If Dorothy detected them, she made no mention of them in her letters.

  William was certainly not popular with his uncles. He had already annoyed them by refusing to pursue a college fellowship, and by his alleged over-spending. ‘I think your Bro[the]r W[illia]m very extravagant,’ wrote a grumpy Uncle Christopher to Richard Wordsworth in December 1789, ‘he has had near £300 since he went to Cambridge w[hi]ch I think is a very shameful sum for him to spend, considering his expectations.’19 His guardians were clearly watching William carefully – and they had reason to. They had advanced the money for his education, and they were probably already beginning to worry about when and how it would be repaid.

  William caused more offence by gaining an undistinguished degree in January 1791 and by then hesitating over his choice of career, a choice which seemed obvious to his elders. Since he had destroyed his own chances of an academic appointment, he must become a clergyman. His uncle Cookson and his father’s cousin John Robinson, MP for Harwich, were both willing to help him get a curacy. But William was unenthusiastic about the scheme.

  He equivocated with his relations, pointing out that he could not, in any case, take holy orders until he was twenty-three. His Uncle William Cookson proposed (for unfathomable reasons) that he should fill in the time by studying Oriental languages at Cambridge. William made a feint of complying, returning briefly to Cambridge; but soon he had removed to London and, by the end of the year, had changed the subject of his studies to French. In November he set sail for France, protesting to his anxious relatives that residence in a family there was the cheapest and most effective way of learning the language.

  However, a fluency in French was not to be the most significant result of William’s twelve month sojourn in that country.

  Ten

  Betrayal

  Even affectionate, well-meaning young men can have secrets – as Elinor Dashwood discovers when news of Edward Ferrars’ previous engagement bursts upon her. Before long, both Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth would learn that the men they loved were not being entirely honest with them.

  Although these two young women had read widely and scrutinised their fellow human beings intently, their experience was limited. Theirs was the female existence which Anne Elliot describes to Captain Harville in Persuasion: ‘We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.’1 Jane had lived in one home all her life with only short visits to friends and relations; Dorothy, though she had had four different homes, had mixed even less in ‘society’. For both of them the beloved was a meteor shooting through that quiet, confined home and lighting it up. These young men did not belong in the domestic world; they were en-route between unknown masculine territories: universities, law-courts and London lodgings.

  This partial understanding of their lovers was an experience Jane and Dorothy shared with hundreds of other well-brought-up girls at a time when men and women were expected to occupy the separate spaces of public and private life. Their perception and intelligence could protect both girls to a certain extent: neither of them succumbed to the charms of a villain or a fool. But they both took their young men on trust, and both were betrayed.

  Tom Lefroy left Hampshire soon after Jane’s second letter was written, and there is no evidence that she ever saw him again. The imminent departure was announced with characteristic melodrama: ‘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.’2

  Did Jane, when she wrote that letter, expect to hear from, or see him again? Almost certainly she did: the hurt pride she would later demonstrate suggests that there was hope mixed with the melancholy of the parting.

  Tom had probably given her reason to hope. Mrs Anne Lefroy thought that the young man had misled Jane; her own sons remembered many years later that ‘their mother had disliked Tom Lefroy because he had behaved so ill to Jane Austen.’3 Then there is the testimony of Tom himself. In later life the staid Lord Chief Justice of Ireland confessed to a nephew that he had once felt a ‘boyish love’ for Jane Austen.4

  ‘Mrs Lefroy sent the gen
tleman off at the end of a very few weeks, that no more mischief might be done,’5 wrote Jane’s niece Caroline. The reason for Mrs Lefroy’s determination to end the affair is often said to have been mercenary: Jane’s lack of fortune made the union impossible. Tom, the eldest son of a large and not very wealthy family, was being educated at the expense of his great-uncle Langlois, who, having seventeen great nephews and nieces, was calculating that, ‘On such a sure total, the chance is great that one or two should rise into distinction and there haul up the rest’.6 Tom – it is usually believed – was one of those who must do the hauling.

  Caroline certainly seems to have believed that the cause of Anne Lefroy’s intervention was the financial imprudence of an attachment for, in her account, she adds a comment which might have strayed from the pages of Persuasion and describe the disappointment of Anne Elliot rather than her creator. ‘If his love had continued a few more years, he might have sought her out again – as he was then making enough to marry on . . . ’

  However, the ponderous prose of the memoir written by Tom’s son reveals another reason why the growing affection between these two young people had to be abruptly terminated. This is what the memoir says about young Tom Lefroy’s love life:

  ‘A warm friendship which existed between him [Tom Lefroy] and one of his fellow students, during their college course [at Trinity College Dublin], opened the door to him as an acquaintance and guest in the family of Jeffry Paul Esq of Silverspring, in the county of Wexford, the father of his fellow student, and, very soon, an attachment sprung up between him and Mr Paul’s only daughter.’

  That ‘very soon’ strongly suggests that this attachment was formed during Tom’s days as a student in Ireland, thus pre-dating his introduction to the captivating Miss Jane Austen in Hampshire. This dating is made more certain by what follows in the memoir: