Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 39, Fri, 14 Sept 1804, from Lyme

Anne Elliot (Amanda Root), just come to Lyme (1995 BBC Persuasion), joyous in the sunlight

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been three years and 5 months since we’ve heard from Jane (so to speak). (See Letter 38.) I treat this letter in two ways: first, what does the letter itself sheerly show us? It does suggest she has been ill and is recovering. Beyond that, we have the same surface text as we had before.

Second, I take up the theme of Jane Austen’s lack of liberty, in Isaiah Berlin’s two senses: negative: the area in which people can act unobstructed by others; and positive, the freedom to do something for oneself, to lead a form of life one chooses. Neither yields much genuine cheer in this letter. Relief (as in Persuasion), yes, as a prisoner with a break in the sentence.

Anne Elliot (Sally Hawkins), just come to Lyme (2007 ITV Persuasion), wary by the wet sandy beach

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First it’s from Lyme, not Bath. Since we last saw Austen under immense strain or trying to adjust to the move ot Bath and not quite making it, it seems suggestive that the first saved letter is from Lyme. We know from Persuasion Austen liked Lyme. Inference: she can get up a cheering enough letter to save to show to others, to a public (I suspect Cassandra intuited and even wanted a larger public to read these and that’s why the snipping too).

Austen has nicer paper than usual. Small amounts of money, small luxuries are again mattering. Cassandra is not at Bath either; Cassandra has written from Weymouth, another holiday shore spa, and also from Blandford and because this distance was traveled Austen expects to hear she’s at Ibthorpe yesterday evening (Thurs, 13 Sept). So Cassandra on her way to the Lloyds. The same pattern we’ve seen before.

Then back to the continual nervous (in the sense Pope uses the word, spurts of energy through the veins of the intense mind) joking cover-ups we have grown so used to.

A joking paragraph which takes off from the idea Austen was prepared to hear of “every other vexation” could at Weymouth, but the lack of ice is too much. There are folds within folds. Cassandra wanted to glimpse the royals in their rich yacht on Tuesday, but no such luck — Austen has heard from Mr Crawford who saw them in the very act of being late. A scene of comic frustration suggested. “In the act of being too late.” Austen herself not enamoured of his running after so-called numinous people we have seen (and see in the novels). So “Weymouth is altogether a shocking place .. without recommendation of any kind.” The irony could work both ways (it’s actually fun enough), but it seems that Cassandra has not had a good time and Austen expected this since she now says she is glad she did not go there and Henry and Eliza (with Cassandra) also unimpressed.

Persiflage? (Light and slightly contemptuous bantering.) By responding in this comic over-the-top language Austen acknowledges the irritant and minimizes its importance. A game the sisters play.

The references to Weymouth, the insistence on the dominance of minutiae recall or anticipate Emma, as does (paradoxicall) Emma’s longing to see the sea which has been forbidden her.

Emma (Romola Garai) helping her father (Michael Gambon) up stairs after Miss Weston has married, looking after the retreating carriage (2009 BBC Emma)

Then a serious reference: she has not been well and in Cassandra’s letter was considerable anxiety for her health. Diane mentioned that the bathing is pleasant in this letter. It is and perhaps the reason the family of three (Jane is with her mother and father) have come and stayed in Lyme for Austen to bathe. Austen has bathed twice, the letter to Andover said so and now the morning of this letter. It was “absolutely necessary that I should have the little fever and indisposition” to justify this which she had.

And all the fashion in Lyme. Like Bath, illness is the excuse for traveling. So we hear of the other invalids. Miss Anna Cove confined saved “by a timely Emetic” (a scatological joke), Miss Bonham too, and also has a doctor — a “sort of nervous fever” and “thou she is now well enough to walk abroad, she is still very tall & does not come into the Rooms.”

The detail of “tall” is wacky but probably means that the reason Miss Bonham does not come to the room is she is self-conscious; she won’t get a partner to dance with as she is also too tall (and nervous, and probably fringe).

And it is these people Jane visited Wednesday and Thursday night. What a good time she must have had. (Not much in case my irony doesn’t come across)

Mrs Austen enjoyed cards though, with a man whose title was “Le Chevalier” French — an emigre? probably poor which Jane’s arch generosity and dry ironies towards him underlines: “I hope he will always win enough to empower him to treat himself with so great an indulgence as cards must be to him” He did inquire (polite) after Cassandra not knowing she had left.

So Cassandra and Eliza and Henry had been at Lyme.

Then an account of the housekeeping. As the people and entertainment are pretty desperate, so the lodgings are inconvenient, as dirty as they could be (house, furniture, all the inhabitants too).

Miss Bates (Tamsin Grieg) in her lodgings, reading a letter to her mother from Jane (2009 BBC Emma)

Damp too, that’s why it’s so necessary for the “dry season” for their “comfort.” She’s also making fun of statements, parodying from her parents or uncle and aunt: “Hitherto the weather has been just what we could wish; — “. The sort of statement of perfect happiness she made fun of four years ago and before that too.

Well quite settled anyway and Jane taking Cassandra’s place as best she can. She shows her stuff by “detecting dirt in the water De-canter as fast as I can” and giving the cook physic, which she throws off (vomit) her stomach.

Did the cook do this during Cassandra’s administrations? She forgets.

As there are two references to bathing, so the male servants gets a lot in this letter. James seems seriously to be a valued person by Austen — the second reference in the PS especially where she worries about getting him a book he will like and have not read. They are lucky to have him. Male servants did cost more and were a sign of relative affluence and they could do things (heavy stuff). We then get all his great virtues, with Jane’s tone seemingly genial: “James is the delight of our lives” — but maybe a parodic imitation again. Quite a Toby’s annuity (Tristram Shandy), blacks mother’s shoes just tremendously, plates never so clean, “attentive, handy, quick & quiet” .. and he wishes to “go to Bath too”! (from another servant, Jenny). “He has the laudable thirst for Travelling.” then a real mock of the absurdities of Grandison.

Pace Henry’s insistence on how Austen loved Grandison nearly all the references to this book mock its ridiculous pretensions. I do remember the severe lecture on traveling; Richardson was a poor boy and with memories of this and a chip on his shoulder as a result inveighs against grand tours.

It would seem that James is or was a servant of Henry and longed to see to London too. Again Austen is nicer about servants than she is about her so-called peers. She commemorated James too — I’ve no doubt he is partly in mind in Emma as the coachman (as Nanny turns up in The Watsons).

Then a melange of minutiae news meant to please Cassandra because it will fill her in on what matters to her (it seems) and also simply the allowable content Jane has got.

What stands out? That all this news comes from two letters, one of which Cassandra herself wrote to Miss Irvine and which has gotten into Mrs Austen’s hands. That means Miss Irvine gave this letter to Mrs Austen and Austen says (I agree) she would not like this.

Austen is making content from letters. The two letters were inconsistent with the mother exaggerating the possibilities for Charles to the Aunt which Cassandra was much more circumspect in hoping about: Austen says “Never mind. Let them puzzle on together.” Like mice?

Charles will go or not to the East Indies, and Austen does not believe her uncle is “really uneasy.” It’s a feint. Aunt’s letter now exaggerates back: weather violent in Bath; if so, not at Lyme, so they’ll go to Scarlets — a rich fancy house they own, an estate — unless of course put off by the accounts of the book.

Austen mocking again

LeFaye’s index shows LeFaye knows nothing of the Irvines either. So where they got their house at we cannot know (near Scarlett? In Bath), at any rate the remark from the aunt is a Mrs Norris type hypocrisy: she “hopes the kitchen will not be damp,” i.e., she imagines it will and exults. Jealousy. Notice the poverty again: a lid is broken, Anning said it’s worth 5 shillings, and Austen says this appeared to them quite as much as the value of “all the furniture in the room.” They refer themselves to the owner. They want him to pay? I can definitely see them running yard sales today, i.e., cannot be a very nice lodging they are in.

Mr Pyne is the owner of the lodgings at which the Austen are staying in Lyme. It would seem then that he owned this lid that was broken that Austen frets over — and perhaps also the furniture in the room whose value she suggests is less than this lid. I wonder what this lid is.

Emma (Kate Beckinsale) and Harriet (Samantha Morton) climb the narrow stairs visiting Miss Bates (1995 Meridian/A&E Emma)

Then no letter from Charles “which rather surprises me.” Perhaps one of his ingenuities made his letter go wrong (so the ingenuities so celebrated in Persuasion not alway appreciated).

Buller seems to have nothing to do with Charles, but be a separate friend Cassandra wanted Jane to write to, and she did.

Sylvia Plath’s “The Spinster” is a propos, especially the lines:

Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
And heart s frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.

Very waspish I’d say. If getting over a bad patch, she has now that she’s better returned to making her heart “a frosty discipline” if not quite “Exact as a snowflake,” no over-speaking and pretenses here

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Let’s step back just a bit to see what we have here: Deja vu all over again. I don’t say one expects much of a given person’s letter, but this time through going so slowly and carefully so that we do not miss the losses, anger, what are her victories (very few thus far), I am (to be truthful) dismayed to see the same kind of (excuse the expression) crap fill Jane Austen’s letter. We have the exaggerated play of fantasy, complaining about ice, all terrors and tragedies she had been prepared for, but to be without ice …

Then the inane card playing, how they are coping in their lodgings (small and damp), household duties made fun of, the usual deprecating allusion to someone else’s book (Grandison), squabbles, resentments against petty losses (the sign on their once door is replaced), and then again a ball, who danced with who, some allusion to male flirtation, and then her flirting, an endurable woman (Miss Armstrong) …

One would think 4 years had not gone by, that there had been no development of psyche, no maturation, no traumas. We know of at least one ravaging of the self: the offer of partner who would have provided house and security for her mother and sister, Harris Bigg-Wither. But unlike Charlotte Lucas like, Jane fled. Not much in terms of time it must be admitted but feeling. And the nostalgic improbable romance by the seashore told many years later by Cassandra. These were probably the least of what she had endured. We also (I do) know of books written and sent out: NA as Susan in 1803, and The Watsons.

Prologue to Miss Austen Regrets: Jane Austen (Olivia Williams) confronted by Cassandra (Gretta Scacchi): is she sure she wants to marry Harris Bigg-Wither (2009 BBC Miss Austen Regrets): opens with traumatic incident of rejection

I’d like to put this down to Cassandra; she threw out what registered what counted. But I have to admit when I read this after 4 years I remember Q. D. Leavis’s famous set of articles arguing for the endless sameness of the novels, the permutations of a narrow set of plot-designs, character types, events. She’s not wrong there even if we can extrapolate nuances and depths from what we’re given, there’s no evidence that Austen saw further. Austen’s remarks are on literal verisimilitude or whether something is up-to-date.

I admit there is some change. She does worry about the servants, feels she must please them. That is new: Jane’s efforts to please the servants to keep them in countenance. She has been subjected to their company and her dependence on them in close quarters and paying little money. They would not hence keep their tongues silent enough. And I feel Cassandra’s anxiety over Jane’s physical and mental health in all Jane’s reassurances. Jane has been ill or just under the weather. She has been advised to take the waters (to bathe as we see her do at the end) That’s why she’s there ….

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Then we get the usual ball or dance. Austen and her family are still going to these. She’s now 29.

Emma (Gwyneth Paltrow) dancing with Frank (1996 Miramax Emma)

There’s something striking about the picture she conjures up of her father walking “home with James & a Lanthorn, tho’ I believe the Lanthorn was not lit, as the Moon was up.” That the ball was “pleasant” “but not full”, they went “at eight” and the father stayed an hour an one half, she and her mother two and one half hours. She had no partner for the first two, Mr Crawford for the second 2 and had she stayed longer would have danced with Mr Granville. Then that someone she didn’t know tried to dance with her: “a new odd looking Man who had been eying me for some time, at last without any introduction asked me if I meant to dance again.” She guesses him to belong to the Barnewells whom LeFaye treats with a snobbery equal to Austen’s own. A potboy is someone who worked at an inn serving and LeFaye mentions someone who claimed to be an heir to this family who has so worked and LeFaye says his previous life could “well account” for Austen’s description of him” (!). Austen gives us several slurs: “he must be Irish by his Ease”, calling the Barnwells “bold, queerlooking people, just fit to be Quality at Lyme.”

The pot calls the kettle black here. She sneers at this man and these Barnwells but who and where is she? Here she is still cataloguing who she is dancing with.

We leave the dance (I take the next sentence to move on) to people who have left Lyme (Mrs Feaver and the Schuylers) “last tuesdays” and Schuylers to return.

Then a call on Miss Armstrong. Another unmarried genteel woman — she is still filling her social hours with these. Again LeFaye’s note shows her taking on these snob values again: she finds an Armstrong who is attached to a warehouse and writes “could this be Miss Armstrong’s less than genteel family”? A snob is originally someone unsure of their status so all the more anxious to separate him or herself from someone else whose status is insecure. Austen fits that.

Here we get the idea we see repeated in Persuasion that the younger generation is more “genteel” than the older, but unlike Persuasion Austen is not sympathetic to the older people. Mrs Armstrong sat darning and Austen fears if Cassandra tells her mother or aunt will sit darning openly (oh dear oh dear). She went walking with Miss Armstrong on the Cobb for an hour: “very conversable in a common way; I do not perceive Wit or Genius … Sense and some degree of Taste, & her Manners very engaging.” Like Bingley in the Pride and Prejudice “She seems to like people rather too easily” (so Austen has the outlook of Darcy here; so too Elizabeth); she thought the Downes pleasant.

So much for her, and then yet more of this minutiae about people Austen cares nothing for as she wastes her time away. Mrs Holder was mentioned in a previous letter, a Mr and Mrs Mawhood. My guess is Eliza envies the man at Madeires because she has a spirit of adventure and would like to go there herself.

The some anxious lines about Martha Lloyd. She wants “Everything kind’ to be said to Martha; Mrs Lloyd must be beyond remembering them. The line suggests the Austens have not been in touch with Mrs Lloyd of late. The upside down postscript that Cassandra was not looking well the last time Martha saw her at Bath. Cassandra is now 31. Perhaps she was not happy at Bath either — we never did get a letter by Austen describing what life was like once Cassandra joined them at Bath.

Emma and Harriet now have their hair done by maids (1996 Emma): in Davies’s film, everywhere the obedient unacknowledged servants

Then a reference to Austen’s lady’s maid: one of their tasks was to do the mistress’s hair; and we get a slight sarcasm about how Jenny did Austen’s hair the way she “used to do up Miss Lloyd’s, which makes us both very happy.”

So Jenny is doing Austen’s hair the way she once did Martha’s? or Mary’s? she is an ex-maid of the Lloyds And perhaps Austen is glad to look like Martha or not glad to look like Mary.

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The shining waters, often photographed in the 1995 BBC Persuasion

On Friday evening an added passage which is the most simply written section of the letter. It has the least subtexts of irony or static guardedness and posing.

“The Bathing was itself so delightful this morning & Molly so pressing with me to enjoy myself that I believe I staid in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, & shall not bathe tomorrow, as I had before intended.”

She has come to Lyme to improve her health. Molly may be another servant, this one deputed to help Austen get into the water. It’s cheering to see Austen enjoying this physical activity. She can’t swim apparently, just bathes.

The two servants — Jenny and James — walk to Charmouth — which in Persuasion Austen says is lovely, and this anxiety to make James comfortable. I don’t think this is ironic, she really does want to keep this male servant contented. She’s “glad” to see him walk with Jenny, “anxious for his being at once quiet & happy. — He can read, & I must get him some books.” Alas the circulating library has a meagre selection of obvious hits” vol 1 of Robinson Crusoe. This reminds me of how one summer Antony Trollope was left alone to cope for himself in London and had two books, a Shakespeare and one volume of a James Fennimore Cooper so read them over and over. The Austens can add “Pinckards Newspaper” to James’s reading matter.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an image of the 1719 first edition

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From this letter we can gather nothing of what mattered to Austen in these years or her visit to Lyme. We see the constraints and limitations of how she has to spend her hours while there.

So to my second perspective: Jane Austen I’d say lacked both negative and positive liberty, the two basic types as defined by Isaiah Berlin in a famous essay called “Two concepts of liberty.” Positive liberty is a vexed or hard-to-understand idea which has been criticized by Quentin Skinner (among others) as muddled. But on first blush (reading) I feel Berlin is right and the traditional or Mill idea of liberty as a kind of “negative freedom” is not sufficient: the area in which people can act unobstructed by others (that’s negative liberty). We need to have positive liberty to act too.

One example: Jane Austen can’t travel far at all, not outside walking distance. She is obstructed by her brothers and father who will not permit her to travel alone — without a man or chaperon; plus she acquiesces in this and agrees it’s necessary that she not travel in conveyances which carry people beneath their gentry class. So she lacks negative freedom to travel. She has no area where she can act unobstructed to get onto a carriage to travel. But if they didn’t forbid, could she go where she wanted? No. She lacks the money. She is not free in a positive sense since all the arrangements around her have been set up to prevent her from earning enough; she has no self-mastery, she lacks the wherewithal.

Now both her lack of negative and positive liberty are connected to another aspect of our experience of liberty discussed by Berlin: our status. Just as one might expect he never brings in gender among the things that affect status: religion, race, ethnicity, class, but gender, no.

It’s her gender that forbids the traveling alone and her gender that the society has refused to provide a way of earning a real living for. It’s that inflection of negative and positive liberty that totally hems her in and makes it impossible for her traveling.

Why is she at Lyme? Because her parents have agreed to be there. Why is Cassandra at Weymouth – or was, because Henry and Eliza were there. Where can she go? to a friend who lives an equally circumscribed existence.

If they were lesbian in orientation they had precious little space and time to act it out.

Most importantly of all: Jane Austen can’t choose at all where she’ll live and that constrains intensely how she’ll spend her days from getting up in the morning until rest at night.

No wonder she’s under immense strain for she also fits Mill’s category of a person who needs negative liberty especially to (I just use my old phrase but there are much better ones provided by Mill) to live out the individual life that is within her. Waspish? we just touch the surface there of what it was.

See Letters 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 and 34, 35, 36, 37, 38

Ellen