Jane and Dorothy Read online

  It is impossible to know exactly what William’s feelings were for Annette but at the time he decided to take holy orders, he cannot have been intending to marry the woman with whom he was sleeping. English law was vehemently anti-Catholic; an Anglican clergyman could not have a Catholic wife. He did not marry Annette even when her pregnancy became obvious – though it would have been possible to do so. They had no money, but marriage would not have made their financial situation worse, and it would have saved Annette from facing the shame and ridicule of childbirth with no ring on her finger.

  William returned to England a few days after Caroline’s birth. If he meant to raise some money and go back, he was prevented by the outbreak of war between Britain and France in February 1793.

  The existence of William’s lover and child was known to Dorothy by March 1793. It must have been a great shock, but she kept any hurt or disappointment to herself. Eager, as always, to love and feel herself beloved, she responded with an open-hearted acceptance of the situation. She assumed that marriage was inevitable and began to include a wife and child for William in the dream home she was still planning to share with him. It seemed she could not, after all, be the centre of her brother’s home, but she had no choice but to accept the situation. She wrote affectionately to Annette and a warm correspondence ensued.

  William urged his sister to break the news of his daughter’s birth to their Uncle Cookson, and Annette deeply regretted that she should have to undertake such a difficult task. She begged William: ‘ . . .  to invite her not to say anything to your uncle. It will be a hard fight she will have to engage in. But you deem it necessary.’30

  It was indeed a hard fight Dorothy had to engage in! William’s reliance on her indicates his emotional need, and Annette’s letter to Dorothy shows how compassionately Dorothy had responded to the distress of a woman she had not met: ‘Your last letter gave me such a powerful feeling,’ Annette wrote. ‘In every line I saw the sensibility of your spirit and that interest, so touching, you take in my sorrows . . . ’31

  Dorothy had involved herself emotionally even in this most intimate aspect of her brother’s life and she did her best to help the couple. She broke the bad news to her uncle, but the result was as disastrous as they had all foreseen.

  The Reverend Mr Cookson was indignant; William’s passionate interlude with a woman he scarcely knew must have appeared particularly self-indulgent to the man who had waited more than six years to be respectably married to the woman he loved.

  All offers of a curacy were withdrawn. William was not welcome at Forncett rectory; the puritanical Mr Cookson probably feared that his company would corrupt his innocent sister. The painful communication had been made by 16th June 1793 because Dorothy then wrote sadly to Miss Pollard: ‘I cannot foresee . . . the Day in which I am once more to find a Home under the same Roof with my Brother . . . ’32

  William now had no prospect of an income. He was in disgrace with all the relations who might have helped him. His conduct in France made him resemble the dastardly lover of a romance. Yet it was now that Dorothy committed herself to him.

  Reverting in her letter to the time she had spent with her brother over two years ago, she declared ‘his Attentions to me were su[ch] as the most insensible of mortals must have been touched with.’ Rather oddly, she described to Jane Pollard those winter walks in the rectory garden as if they had only just taken place: ‘Nothing but rain or snow prevented our taking this walk. Often have I gone out when the keenest North wind has been whistling among the trees over our heads . . . I never thought of the cold when he was with me.’33 In Dorothy’s memory even the weather was conspiring to give significance to the occasion with snow and a keen north wind. When she described the walks soon after they happened, the weather had been ‘unusually mild’.

  William’s outspoken affection for her seems to have first aroused a reciprocal love in Dorothy; but it was his fall from grace, his isolation and his need of a friend, which provided the final catalyst that raised her gradually deepening affection into wholehearted, single-minded devotion. Dorothy did not think of caution; she did not think of herself; she did not consider what the world would think of her. She demonstrated that talent for sympathy which was the very heart of her ‘sensibility’, and responded immediately to her brother’s need for love, even though she knew that she was not the only woman in his life.

  Her passion threw her once more into the role of a novel heroine. By the time she wrote her next letter to Miss Pollard, the innocent visit to Halifax had turned into a clandestine plot. William was to join her in Halifax, but in secret.

  Dorothy began her letter with a dramatic warning: ‘None of this is to be read aloud, so be upon your guard!’ and she once more set herself into a scene as she had years ago by her small candle in Penrith. ‘The evening is a lovely one,’ she wrote, ‘and I have strolled into a neighbouring meadow where I am enjoying the melody of Birds and the busy sounds of a fine summer’s evening . . .  But oh how imperfect is my pleasure! I am alone . . . ’

  In this extremely long letter – much of which was written with the paper resting on her knee as she sat in that meadow – Dorothy set out the plan which she and William had evidently devised together. With no employment in view, William had agreed to act as travelling companion to a wealthy friend, William Calvert but, as soon as he was sure Dorothy was in Halifax, he intended to make his way there.

  In between the detailed planning and a lengthy detour in praise of her beloved (‘but enough he is my brother, why should I describe him? I shall be launching again into panegyric’) Dorothy made only a brief reference to the disastrous events in France. ‘I have not time or room to explain to you the foundation of the prejudices of my two Uncles against my dear William;’ she wrote, ‘the subject is an unpleasant one for a letter, it will employ us more agreeably in conversation, then, though I must confess that he has been somewhat to blame, yet I think I shall prove to you that the Excuse might have been found in his natural disposition.’

  Instead of offering further explanation, she turned to a quotation from James Beattie’s popular poem The Minstrel, Or The Progress of Genius (see Appendix 1).

  ‘“In truth he was a strange and wayward wight fond of each gentle etc etc.[”] That verse of Beattie’s Minstrel,’ she wrote, ‘always reminds me of him’. 34 Dorothy’s use of Beattie’s poem to excuse William’s treatment of Annette is enlightening. Edwin – the minstrel whose progress is related in the poem – belongs to the distant past, to what Beattie, in his preface, calls ‘a rude age’. So Dorothy, while asserting her belief in her brother’s calling to be a poet, was also placing him outside eighteenth century expectations of morality and respectability, in a world of wildness and emotion.

  Jane Austen would have ridiculed this affectionate attempt to claim moral impunity for a sensitive soul. It comes dangerously close to Love and Friendship’s heroines ‘majestically removing’ banknotes from their host.

  Dorothy’s generous excuse for her brother seems to be a gesture of freedom, a protest against the restrictive morality of the time. However, challenging Christian sexual morality at this time did not prove liberating for most of the women who had the courage to attempt it.

  Annette bore her child in disgrace. Soon after the birth she had lost not only her lover but her daughter too, for the baby must be sent away to nurse to avoid bringing shame on the family. Seeing her child carried away by another woman ‘caused me a whole day of tears’ Annette confided to Dorothy. Her letters reveal the heartbreak of a mother divided from her baby. She wrote that, if William would but come back and marry her – even if he must, for safety’s sake, leave immediately afterwards – ‘her [Caroline’s] poor mother might enjoy the delight of always having her near. I should myself give her the care I am jealous to see her receive from other hands. I should no longer cause my family to blush by calling her my daughter . . . ’35

  Annette and her family lived through t
he violent aftermath of the Revolution in poverty and danger. After her brother came close to losing his life on the guillotine, Annette seems to have embraced a passionately Royalist stance and to have risked her own safety in helping others condemned by the revolutionary government to escape execution. The turmoil of the times at least seems to have allowed her to pretend to a marriage which she never achieved. She adopted the name of Madame Williams, regained her daughter and struggled to bring her up according to her own standards of respectability.

  Stories like hers were common. In 1793 – just after William abandoned Annette – another English radical, adrift in the revolutionary chaos of France, acted upon the new ideas that advocated an end to the institution of marriage, and quickly formed a passionate alliance. But, for this individual, it was not possible to flee the consequences, nor to retreat into a more conventional lifestyle as William did.

  When Mary Wollstonecraft’s love for the American, Gilbert Imlay, ended in pregnancy, she was, of course, left holding the baby. Imlay, like William, decamped, and Mary waited for her lover at Le Havre – as Annette waited at Blois – with fading hopes and a broken heart, so emotionally damaged that she would go on to make two suicide attempts. Unable, like William, to simply catch the next packet back to Dover and pretend to friends that the affair had never happened and the child did not exist, Mary had somehow to deal with the situation and support herself and her daughter.

  This affair not only ruined Mary’s happiness, it tainted her reputation as a writer. Although her work had originally been respectfully received, when the details of her personal life became known after her death, public opinion turned violently against her. Her ideas were mocked; Horace Walpole called her a ‘hyena in petticoats’. Richard Polwhele opined that ‘a woman who has broken through all religious restraints [as Wollstonecraft had] will commonly be found ripe for every species of licentiousness’, and took a sadistic satisfaction in her agonising death from puerperal fever after the birth of her second child.36 ‘I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence [i.e. God] is visible . . . in her death . . . as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable . . . ’37 Or – in more modern terms – Mary was a mouthy woman who had got her comeuppance.

  No such opprobrium ever attached to William Wordsworth; no-one ever questioned the validity of his ideas because of perceived moral failings. He was able to keep his French affair a secret beyond a very close circle of family and friends, but had it become known it is highly unlikely that it would have impacted at all on his career. Men’s work and private lives were allowed to be separate. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy was respected despite his cruel, irresponsible treatment of the children he fathered and, although the world loved to gossip about and be scandalised by Byron’s colourful sex-life, it still bought his poetry.

  Though Dorothy was never to suffer the humiliation that Mary Wollstonecraft endured, her love for William pitched her into a risky disregard for the proprieties which defined a Georgian woman’s life. Her love had been a long time growing, but now that it was established it would rule her actions for the rest of her life, and make her vulnerable in surprising ways.

  Just getting to the rendezvous at Halifax presented difficulties. The plan was long delayed by the problems which always beset a single female when she attempted to move from one place to another. A young woman was not supposed to travel alone, and Dorothy’s plans depended upon the movements of an acquaintance, Mr Griffiths, who would, at some uncertain time, be making a journey in the right direction and would be able to provide the necessary escort.

  12However, Dorothy’s love made her rebellious. In the end she became impatient with waiting and probably dispensed with the services of Mr Griffiths altogether, thus taking the daring step of travelling alone. She had begun to think and act for herself and, by the time she arrived in Halifax in 1794, she could dismiss her Uncle Cookson – who had once been a ‘dear friend’ – as ‘extremely indolent and does not blend much instruction with his conversation . . . ’38

  The passive home-building example of her Aunt Dorothy Cookson had, in the end, failed to appeal sufficiently to the young Dorothy Wordsworth. Inspired by love, she was taking matters into her own hands, more in the manner of her Aunt Threlkeld, and doing what she believed to be right. She would never return to Forncett. The rest of her life would be lived with, and for, William.

  With her love impetuously launching her into unguarded behaviour (and a plot which was almost an elopement) Dorothy Wordsworth resembled Marianne Dashwood. In the novel her passion almost kills Marianne and, over the years to come, Dorothy’s devotion to William would test her gift for self-sacrifice to its very limits. She would struggle to supply all the love and support that his genius demanded, until, at last, a cruel twist of fate defeated her.

  Eleven

  Journeys, Brothers, Freedom and Confinement

  There was no elopement for Jane. After Mr Lefroy’s departure, she continued to live in the heart of her family, socialising in the neighbourhood and travelling to visit relations, but something had changed. Never again, in any of her surviving correspondence, would she write as she had written in those first two letters. No ball would ever be remembered with the same thrill, no dancing partner would ever produce the same excitement as ‘my Irish friend’, never again would there be any hint of romantic or sexual turbulence. Two years later, she was too ‘proud’ to even mention Tom’s name to his aunt.

  Jane’s family did not wish her acquaintance with Tom to be discussed. ‘I think I need not warn you against raking up that old story of the still living Chief Justice’ 1, wrote Caroline Austen to her brother when he was collecting material for his memoir of Aunt Jane. But, more than fifty years after Jane’s death, the story was still remembered and, much to Caroline’s alarm, freely canvassed by some members of the Lefroy family. Tom himself admitted to having loved the girl he partnered at those Christmas dances and Anne Lefroy was angry with him for using her young friend ill. Jane could only have been hurt by his behaviour if that love was mutual.

  In sharp contrast to those first two letters, the rest of her correspondence with Cassandra during 1796 is muted, with little to suggest her feelings. The letters are, however, outwardly cheerful. She was probably determined to keep up her sister’s spirits for in January of that year Cassandra was forced to bid farewell to her fiancé, Tom Fowle. An opportunity had arisen for him to sail as private chaplain to Lord Craven on an expedition to the West Indies and, fearful of offending so rich and powerful a patron, Tom had accepted the appointment without revealing his engagement.

  Such a journey in a time of war was dangerous, and one of its purposes was brutal in the extreme – to put down a slave uprising. It is hard now to envisage just what the role of chaplain could be in this violent mission which succeeded in restoring the institution of slavery in St Lucia, but the Austen family – with their wide naval connections – probably found nothing disquieting about a young couple’s future domestic happiness resting on such an ugly foundation. It was hoped that the appointment would improve Tom’s future prospects and Cassandra could only wait and hope.

  In the meantime, Jane continued to live the life of a young woman in search of a husband: dining and dancing and making prolonged visits to relations in other parts of the country in order to form new acquaintances. But now she knew what it was to love a man and this may well have made her more exacting in her choice, less willing to give her heart and risk it being broken again.

  In August she was in London and by 1st September, she had begun a long visit to her brother Edward, his wife Elizabeth and their three children at Rowling in Kent. There were balls and dinner visits and the interminable sewing of shirts which occupied so much of Georgian women’s days. This time the shirts were for Edward and Jane was ‘proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party’. 2

  There was also
some rather unenthusiastic attention to her youngest nephew – ‘I have taken little George once in my arms since I have been here, which I thought very kind.’ Such a cool response to the new baby cannot have endeared Jane to Elizabeth. The relationship between the sisters-in-law was probably not improving.

  Like Dorothy waiting upon the convenience of Mr Griffiths, Jane found herself unable to make her own plans. Everything depended upon the wishes of her brothers, Frank and Henry, who were also staying in the house, and there was no predicting what they would do. ‘Since I wrote last, we have been very near returning to Steventon so early as next week,’ she told Cassandra. ‘Such was our dear brother Henry’s scheme, but at present matters are restored, not to what they were, for my absence seems likely to be lengthened still farther. I am sorry for it but what can I do?’ 3

  What indeed, could she do? Jane’s situation at Rowling that September is an example of the way in which her life was constrained by the bonds that Dorothy had shaken off in her escape from Forncett. With no money of her own to hire a chaise and restricted by the perceived need for a male travelling companion, a spinster could only wait upon the convenience of other family members. Jane tried to be patient about her brothers’ insistence on the proprieties of the business. ‘As to the mode of our travelling to town,’ she wrote at one point, ‘I want to go in a Stage Coach, but Frank will not let me.’ 4

  It must have been frustrating to have so little control and she admitted that, ‘I should be glad to get home by the end of the month.’ 5 In fact, Henry was pursuing an agenda of his own as the travel arrangements were discussed. He had recently become engaged to a Miss Mary Pearson who lived at Greenwich and who had not yet been introduced to his parents. It was his plan that Jane should return home via Greenwich so that Mary could travel with her back to Steventon. Then Jane’s visit was thrown into confusion by the plans of Frank, who was now a captain in the Navy and who, on 18th September, received orders for his new posting to HMS Triton. He must leave to join his ship almost immediately. Jane now wrote urgent letters, hoping to make arrangements so that she could travel with him when he left.