Jane and Dorothy Read online

  This ability and willingness to follow up on subjects that interested them, and to adapt the heterogeneous content of female schooling to suit their own interests and ends was, undoubtedly, the most useful skill which both Jane and Dorothy acquired from their various teachers. An intelligent and determined young woman could – to a large extent – become her own schoolmistress.

  Untrammelled by the need to learn all that Latin and Greek, girls of the gentry class had time to read a great deal, though, since family libraries were generally collected by men, they might find themselves restricted by the taste of their fathers and grandfathers.

  References in Jane’s novels and letters reveal that throughout her life she read very widely indeed. She began exploring books early, with her father’s collection of over 500 volumes, and during her lifetime her reading was to include a large number of contemporary novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney and Charlotte Lennox; travel books by Joseph Baretti and Lord Macartney; political histories such as that written by Dorothy’s friend, Thomas Clarkson; French works by Madame de Genlis and German ones (presumably in translation) by Johann von Goethe. She particularly admired the prose of Samuel Johnson.42

  In Halifax Dorothy would have had access to that wide-ranging library established by Mr Ralph, but when, in 1787, she was summarily removed by her uncles from Aunt Threlkeld’s care, and sent to live in Penrith with her Cookson grandparents, the opportunities for reading became much more restricted.

  Her brothers seem to have done their best to help. In addition to the works of Milton and Goldsmith ‘I have a pretty little collection of Books from my Brothers’ she wrote soon after her removal, and listed the Iliad and the Odyssey (most probably in Alexander Pope’s 1715 translations), Fielding’s works, and the poems of William Hayley (a friend of Cowper). There was also Gil Blas, a picaresque novel in French, and, rather surprisingly, ‘Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters.’43

  Dorothy did not say which brother had given her this last book, which was a dreary conduct manual advising young women in all the conventional proprieties. Surely it was not William! The young man who was so deeply impressed by his sister’s spontaneous expressions of feeling could hardly have wished her to heed the solemn warning of Dr Gregory who maintained that a lack of reserve ‘would make you less amiable as women.’44

  There is, however, one piece of advice in this volume which William might have approved and which Dorothy may have taken to heart. By confiding in your brothers, Gregory told his daughters, ‘you will receive every advantage which you can hope for from the friendship of men, without any of the inconveniences that attend such connections with our sex.’

  In one way, Dorothy was very well prepared for her role as William’s future friend and housekeeper. At some time before she reached her mid-twenties (perhaps from her Aunt Threlkeld) she learned the practical skills necessary to manage a household on a limited income. When she set up home with William she would confidently tackle laundry and the making of curtains; baking bread and broiling steaks; as well as preparing what was to become almost her ‘signature dish’ – giblet pie.

  The very notion that his Aunt Jane might have acquired such knowledge seems to have embarrassed James Edward Austen-Leigh. He grudgingly admitted that, in the days of his aunt’s youth, ladies ‘took a personal part in the higher branches of cookery’, but he hastened to assure his readers: ‘I am sure that the ladies there [in Steventon rectory] had nothing to do with the mysteries of the stew-pot or the preserving pan.’45

  So it seems likely that Jane’s initiation into the ‘mysteries’ of the kitchen was limited to the theoretical understanding necessary for a supervisory role. Later in life, as her circumstances contracted, she would show signs of irritation at the increasing demands of domestic life on a small income. Dealing with the infuriating ‘Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb’46 that kept her from writing in 1816, cannot have been made easier by the attitude of such people as Austen-Leigh who found something to be apologised for – something shameful – in a daughter of the house knowing too much about what was going on in the domestic ‘offices’.

  Any hope that her biographer’s stance was a later, Victorian affectation – an attitude which Jane would not have encountered, or been hurt by – is undermined by the fact that a character in one of her own novels can be heard voicing the same disdain for domestic work. When, in Pride and Prejudice, the tactless Mr Collins asks ‘to which of his fair cousins, the excellence of [the dinner’s] cookery was owing . . .  Mrs Bennet  . . .  assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen.’47

  As Jane and Dorothy entered their teens they could not help but think about their futures – and, like other intelligent women of their time, such as Wakefield, Wollstonecraft and More, they would have come to recognise the particular difficulties faced by women like themselves: genteelly educated, but possessed of no fortune to supply either a dowry or a future support.

  With both her parents dead, Dorothy was taken from her happy home in Halifax to her grandparents’ grim house at Penrith, and there, separated from everyone she cared about, she sat down beside her small candle to write to her friend, Miss Pollard. Her future was not looking bright. The court case to recover money from her father’s old employer, Lowther, was not progressing well. Unless the debt was repaid, Dorothy would have practically nothing.

  She was not despondent, but at this trying time, when the insecurity of her position was painfully apparent, her optimism rested chiefly on her brothers’ affection, and the kind of informal understanding which Mary Wollstonecraft deplored. ‘I am sure,’ she wrote, ‘as long as my Brothers have a farthing in their pockets I shall never want.’48

  In the rectory at Steventon, still surrounded by her own brothers and their friends, Jane’s life seemed much more secure. However, she was already turning to the occupation of Literature and finding that it might indeed ‘beguile many hours’.

  Part Two

  Five

  Love and Friendship

  Much of Dorothy’s unhappiness as she sat writing her first letter to Jane Pollard was caused by the ill-success of the family’s efforts to recover the money Lord Lonsdale (formerly Sir James Lowther) owed them. Dorothy insisted that she was resigned to whatever might happen in this long-running court case – which, with its delays and complications, calls to mind Dickens’ ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ in Bleak House – but she frequently reverted to it in her letters and her comments show that she understood the implications of the dispute.

  ‘Our fortunes will I fear be small,’ she wrote in July 1787, ‘as Lord Lonsdale will most likely only pay a very small part of his debt . . .  My Uncle Kit (who is our guardian) having said many disrespectful things of him . . .  I fear we shall feel through life the effects of his imprudence’.1 She was aware that young men of little fortune such as her brothers – young men who must make their way in trade or professions such as law – could not afford to have enemies in high places.

  At fifteen, Dorothy was not simply emotional and sentimental; she had a shrewd grasp of the way in which ‘pseudo-gentry’ families like hers were dependent for their prosperity on the ‘real’ landed gentry and aristocracy. In the same way, Jane Austen, in her early novels, would create characters like the servile Mr Collins (of Pride and Prejudice) and his benefactress Lady Catherine, demonstrating her understanding of how patronage worked in the world she and Dorothy shared.

  Poor Dorothy! (To give her the title she liked to imagine.) Her natural optimism was put to a severe test during her time in Penrith. Evenings with her grandparents must have seemed endless. ‘[O]ur only conversation,’ she complained in her letters, ‘is about work, work, or what sort of a servant such a one’s is, who are her parents, what places she lived in, why she left them, etc etc. What . . . can be more uninteresting than such conversation as this? Yet I am obliged to set upon the occasion as nota
ble a face as if I was delighted with it . . . ’

  Dorothy’s impatience with chit-chat about work (i.e. sewing) and the neighbours – topics which would have been staples in most gentry parlours – suggests that conversation in Halifax had been more stimulating.

  Certain expressions of her grandmother’s set the teenager’s teeth on edge. That repeated ‘notable’ was so irritating!

  ‘[N]otability is preached up to me every day,’ she wrote – and, more than two hundred years later, we detect the suppressed irritation in her voice. ‘[S]uch an one is a very sedate clever, notable girl says my Gr[andmothe]r. My Gr[andmother]’s taste and mine so ill agree that there is not one person who is a favorite (sic) with her that I do not dislike . . .  I now see so many of those useful people, in their own imaginations, the notables, that I have quite an aversion to everyone that bears that character.’

  The 1803 edition of Johnson’s dictionary defines ‘notable’ as ‘memorable, bustling, careful’, with ‘notableness’ meaning ‘diligence, contrivance’. This gives some idea of the practical, thrifty qualities which old Mrs Cookson valued in her neighbours and which, no doubt, she wished to foster in her granddaughter.

  Dorothy’s years at the Halifax schools had not prepared her for this kind of life. She felt herself better educated than her new acquaintances:

  ‘I could bear their ignorance well enough,’ she wrote of the Miss Custs, some young ladies her grandmother particularly admired, ‘if they did not think so exceedingly well of themselves; for it cannot be expected that those who have not had the advantages of Education can know so much as those who have.’2

  Perhaps this irritated adolescent made her feelings of superiority too evident and her grandmother believed her to be educated above her station. It may have been Mrs Cookson, rather than Aunt Threlkeld, who instilled in the young Dorothy those practical skills which would later prove so useful when she and William dedicated themselves, for the sake of poetry, to a simple rural life in Somerset and the Lake District.

  Her grandmother evidently disapproved of Dorothy neglecting the all-important ‘work’ in order to read. For, though Dorothy told Jane Pollard that ‘I am determined to re[ad] a great deal now both in French and English,’ it had to be done by subterfuge. Her grandmother, she explained, ‘sits in the shop in the afternoons’ but it seems Dorothy was expected to sew for all the time she was absent. So she planned to work very hard for one hour, thus making time to read for an hour, and hoped that she would not be ‘discovered’.3

  Despite the dramatic complaints in her letters, Dorothy’s life was not uniformly miserable. Most importantly, she was now able to see her brothers when they came to the Penrith house for school holidays. ‘They are charming boys,’ she enthused to Jane Pollard after they had left her in August 1787, and then made an interesting qualification: ‘particularly the three youngest’. Even at this early age there seems to have been a little distance between Dorothy and her eldest brother, Richard, who was already articled as a clerk to his lawyer cousin and beginning to make his way in the world.

  These three youngest – William, Christopher and John – were all ‘just the boys I could wish them . . . so affectionate and so kind to me as makes me love them more every day.’4 William, the brother who was to become all-important to Dorothy, was about to go to university at Cambridge, funded by his uncle, Richard Wordsworth, and was hoping to be a lawyer ‘if his health will permit’. He had not yet become the centre of Dorothy’s attention and affection, but there was already a hint that he was regarded as troublesome by his guardians. ‘My uncle Kit . . . has taken a dislike to my brother W[illia]m’5 Dorothy reported – a prejudice for which the loyal sister ‘absolutely dislike[d]’ Uncle Kit.6

  The boys’ presence animated Dorothy and, even in their absence, she had time for the little matters which concern most young women. The hair which in her pathetic picture of herself was ‘hanging about my face’ was to be curled before she could go to sleep. She described the style of it: ‘curled about my face in light curls friz’d at the bottom and turned at the ends.’ She was eager to know how her friend wore her hair, and fascinated to hear of her high-heeled shoes.

  There were balls too, though these were not very satisfactory, for Dorothy encountered a problem which Jane Austen also lamented in her letters. ‘There was [an assembly] on Wednesday evening,’ Dorothy wrote in December 1787, ‘where there were a number of Ladies but alas! Only six Gentlemen, so two Ladies are obliged to dance together.’7

  Here was a young woman not quite so taken up with her own sorrows as to be indifferent to fashion, or not to regret missing a little physical contact with the opposite sex.

  There were friends to walk with when she could escape from the tedious shirt-sewing, including Mary Hutchinson who was eventually to become her sister-in-law. And it was while she was living with her grandparents at Penrith that she formed a friendship with another woman who would influence her life, providing a more passive and conventional role-model than the energetic Miss Threlkeld.

  A neighbour, Miss Dorothy Cowper, was attached to Dorothy Wordsworth’s uncle, William Cookson (her grandparent’s second son who was nine years younger than her guardian, Uncle Kit). By 1786, an engagement official enough to authorise the couple’s correspondence had existed for six years.

  It was a relationship which required a large degree of patience. ‘I was calculating the other day,’ wrote Miss Cowper to her beloved, ‘ . . . how many months we have spent together during the course of six years, and found they amounted to nearly eleven – Ah my friend! who would have thought at the commencement of our attachment that we should at this day be under the necessity of conveying our sentiments to each other upon paper.’8

  It says much for the tenacity and determination of this lady that the long-distance relationship had survived. Less than a sixth of their time spent together with only the slow, unreliable medium of letters to connect them!

  This was not an unusual experience among those gentry classes who inherited little property and depended on trade and professions to make their fortunes. Sensible women such as Persuasion’s Mrs Croft and Mrs Musgrove might deplore long engagements, but they were frequently unavoidable. Like many other young men, William Cookson had his fortune to make before he could reward himself with a respectable marriage. He was at present away at Windsor working as a tutor to the young princes. The appointment sounds grand – and it certainly provided him with useful connections – but it was not a suitable basis for marriage and the couple must wait. Their best hope lay in his taking holy orders if he could secure, from a wealthy patron, one of those much sought-after good livings.

  His gentle, loyal, long-suffering lady, holding tenaciously to her engagement through such a prolonged separation, appealed to the younger Dorothy much more than her acerbic grandmother or the self-important Miss Custs. ‘I often go to Mr Cowper’s,’ she wrote, ‘and like Miss D.C. better than ever. I wish my uncle and she would but get married.’9

  William Cookson was a little at variance with his parents and his brother, Christopher, at this time. ‘I have written to Kitt to tell him that if I thought I should meet with a welcome at Penrith I intend to visit it,’ he told Miss Cowper in 1786.10 This state of exile would almost certainly have endeared her younger uncle to Dorothy, but she probably had no idea how important a role he and ‘Miss D.C.’ were to play in her life.

  Unlike Dorothy, Jane had her brothers always with her. Steventon rectory was full to overflowing with family and pupils during her childhood and early teens. In May 1786, when Jane was ten years old, cousin Eliza had to seize her chance for a visit there because, ‘my uncle informs us that Midsummer and Christmas are the only seasons when his mansion is sufficiently at liberty to admit of his receiving his friends.’11 These would have been the times when the pupils went home for their holidays and, at Christmas in particular, the family took the opportunity to fill the place with lively entertainment, the favourite bein
g amateur theatricals. ‘My uncle’s barn is fitting up quite like a theatre,’ reported another cousin, Philly Walter, at Christmas 1787, ‘and all the young folks are to take their part.’12

  These family productions, which took place nearly every winter from the time Jane was seven years old until she was thirteen, were organised by James, the eldest of the Austen sons. In the winter of 1787, the family was alive with acting.

  Eliza was paying another long visit to Steventon and she wrote to Philly, pressing her to join them, but she warned her cousin that she could only come to the rectory if she would agree to take a part in the plays, ‘for my Aunt Austen declares that “She has not room for any idle young people”’.

  There was certainly parental support for the scheme, but Philly’s remark that ‘all the young folks’ were participating in the performance of 1787, is the only evidence that Jane herself took part in any of these plays13. If she did, she may not have enjoyed the experience, and this might be one of the subjects on which she and her mother were not in accord.

  In Mansfield Park, Jane would present a very negative picture of the kind of amateur theatricals which were fashionable during her lifetime. The novel portrays them as dangerous, introducing ‘licence’ among the actors, breaking down barriers which are necessary to keep young people safe from their own passions. This has made many commentators on the book uncomfortable. Acting seems to us such a harmless pastime and the notion of Jane Austen as a puritanical killjoy does not agree with what we see of her elsewhere in her work and letters.