Austen’s Letters to Anna Lefroy: Letter 104, Wed-Thurs, 10-18 August 1814 & Lefroy’s Mary Hamilton

Dear friends and readers,

The third letter by Austen to Anna in Todd and Bree’s introduction (see Letter 103) is a long detailed reaction to Anna’s 6 booklets (put together just as Austen did her manuscripts) in which we can view how Austen consciously thought about her own novels.

My dear Anna

I am quite ashamed to find that I have never answered some questions of yours in a former note. — I kept the note on purpose to refer to it at a proper time, & then forgot. I like the name Which is the Heroine? very well, & I dare say shall grow to like it very much in time — but Enthusiasm was something so very superior that every common Title must appear to disadvantage. — I am not sensi­ble of any Blunders about Dawlish. The Library was particu­larly pitiful & wretched 12 years ago, & not likely to have any­body’s publication. — There is no such title as Desborough­ — either among the Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts or Barons. — These were your enquiries. — I will now thank for your Envelope, received this morning. — hope Mr W. D. will come. — I can readily imagine Mr H, D. may by very like a profligate Young Lord — I dare say the likeness will be “beyond every thing”. –Your Aunt Cass is as well pleased with St Julian as ever. I am delighted with the idea of seeing Progillian again.

Wednesday 17. — We have just finished the 1st part of the 3 books I had the pleasure of receiving yesterday; I read it aloud — & we are all very much amused, &like the work quite as well as ever. — I depend upon getting through another book before dinner, but there is really a great deal of respectable reading in your 48 Pages. I was an hour about it. — I have no doubt that 6. will make a very good sized volume. — You must be quite pleased to have accomplished so much. — I like Lord P. & his Brother very much; — I am only afraid that Lord P’s good nature will make most people like him better than he deserves. — The whole Portman Family are very good — & Lady Anne, who was your great dread, you have succeeded particularly well with. — Bell Griffin is just what she should be. — My Corrections have not been more impor­tant than before; — here & there, we have thought the sense might be expressed in fewer words-and I have scratched out Sir Thomas from walking with the other Men to the Sta­bles &c the very day after his breaking his arm — for though I find your Papa did walk out immediately after his arm was set, I think it can be so little usual as to appear unnatural in a book-& it does not seem to be material that Sir Thomas should go with them. — Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles distance from Dawlish & would not be talked of there. — I have put Starcross indeed. If you prefer Exeter, that must be always safe. — I have also scratched out the Introduction between Lord P. & his Brother, & Mr Griffin. A Country Surgeon (don’t tell Mr C. Lyford) would not be introduced to Men of their rank. — And when Mr Portman is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the Honble­. That distinction is never mentioned at such times; — at least I beleive not.

— Now, we have finished the 2d book — or rather the 5th — I do think you had better omit Lady Helena’s postscript; — to those who are acquainted with P.&P. it will seem an Imitation. — And your Aunt C. & I both recom­mend your making a little alteration in the last scene between Devereux F. & Lady Clanmurray & her Daughter. We think they press him too much more than sensible Women or well-bred Women would do. Lady C. at least, should have discretion enough to be sooner satisfied with his determina­tion of not going with them. — I am very much pleased with Egerton as yet –. I did not expect to like him, but I do; & Susan is a very nice little animated Creature — but St Julian is the delight of one’s Life. He is quite interesting. — The whole of his Break-off with Lady H. is very well done. —

Yes — Russel Square is a very proper distance from Berke­ley St. — We are reading the last book. — They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath; They are nearly 100 miles apart.

Thursday. We finished it last night, after our return from drinking tea at the Gt House. — The last chapter does not please us quite so well, we do not thoroughly like the Play; perhaps from having had too much of Plays in that way lately. — And we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath & the Foresters. There you will be quite at home.- Your Aunt C. does not like desultory novels, &is rather fearful yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequent a change from one set of people to another, & that circumstances will be sometimes introduced of apparent consequence, which will lead to nothing. — It will not be so great an objection to me, if it does. I allow much more Latitude than she does — & think Nature & Spirit cover many sins of a wandering story — and People in general do not care so much about it-for your com­fort. I should like to have had more of Devereux. I do not feel enough acquainted with him. — You were afraid of meddling with him I dare say. — I like your sketch of Lord Clanmurray, and your picture of the two poor young girls enjoyments is very good. — I have not yet noticed St Julian’s serious con­versation with Cecilia, but I liked it exceedingly; — what he says about the madness of otherwise sensible Women, on the subject of their Daughters coming out, is worth it’s weight in gold. — I do not see that the language sinks. — Pray go on.
          Yours very affectionately J.Austen

Postscript: Twice you have put Dorsetshire for Devonshire. I have altered it. — Mr Griffth must have lived in Devonshire; Dawlish is half way down the County —

On this novel as a note Fanny Caroline Lefroy (Anna’s daughter) wrote:

‘The story to which most of these letters of Aunt Jane’s refer was never finished. It was laid aside for a season because my mother’s hands were so full she lacked the leisure to continue it. Her eldest child was born in October [1815], and her second in the Sept. following [1816] and in the longer interval that followed before the birth of the third [1818] her Aunt died and with her must have died all inclination to continue her writing. With no Aunt Jane to read, to criticise and to encourage it was no wonder the MS every word of which was so full of her, remained untouched. Her sympathy which had made the real charm of the occupation was gone and the sense of the loss made it painful to write. The story was laid by for years and then one day in a fit of despondency burnt. I remember sitting on the rug and watching its destruction amused with the flames and the sparks which kept breaking out in the blackened paper. In later years when I expressed my sorrow that she had destroyed it she said she could never have borne to finish it, but incomplete as it was Jane Austen’s criticisms would have made it valuable.’ Fanny-Caroline Lefroy, MS Family History (Hampshire Record Office, 23M93 / 85 / 2).

By these ‘later years’, however, Anna had evidently forgotten that she did make an attempt to continue with her story, for in a letter to JEAL, dated 26 October 1818, she says: ‘I am in the middle of a scene between Mrs Forrester & Mrs St. Julian — I hope I shall do it tolerably well, because it requires to be done so-I want to get a good parcel done to read to you at Christmas but you know how little time I have for any thing of that sort-‘ HRO 23M93/86/3. Fanny Caroline Lefroy, MS Family HIstory (Hampshire Record Office)

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Possibly Anna Lefroy’s house

Although Which is the Heroine no longer exists, Lefroy’s Mary Hamilton (a short novella, published 1833/34, A Winter’s Tale (1841) and Spring Tide do exist, and I was able to read the first two to get some idea beyond Anna’s continuation of Sanditon, what Anna’s fictional gifts and preoccupations might be.

This short novella is a gem of genuinely felt emotion and examined thought (on Graham’s part, not Ross’s – Ross moves by his good instincts). In comparison to Austen’s Anna’s art is indeed strongly overtly emotional. Austen’s are emotional books, but the emotion is contained and presented through sharp dry ironies. The story is simple and even seems natural until you realize a host of improbabilities are part of it. The narrator, a young man become middle aged (supposed by his early 30s) returns from India after he has inherited one of two estates he grew up on and he re-meets the people he knew 15 years before. Harry Tracey is his name and he has inherited Knightswood. He had been given this place in India to keep him away from a cousin, Julia, now still unmarried. He half-imagines he will find and marry her.

Much of the story is told by Hannah, a servant in the old household arrangements, now living in a poor cottage alone. This makes the feel of the text Bronte-like – the interface, the backward glance taking the narrator up to the present. Through Hannah’s tale, Harry does find his Julia but now in love with a clergyman whom she asks him to help find a place for her young man and Harry does. But he also finds others whose fates surprise him: some marry sheerly for money and to be with someone of high status — the heir to Beauchamps — but the moral lesson is she is a bully (so he’s punished) and cold. One distant cousin, Mary Hamilton, a hanger-on, a kind of Fanny Price character, was shunted off to a distant aunt, and she was probably going to be in trouble. He discovers while she has led a life of deprivation, the aunt has been all kindness and the aunt is now dying, with Mary by her side. Of course Mary is a good person and they fall in love and marry.

Mary Hamilton is not filled with action and contains conventionally idealized the characters. The educational connections with older fiction is strong, there is much easy appeal. They read Mangnall’s Numbers in the nursery and the sense of the world is that of Austen’s: a few people who knon one another and stick together, only since we do have India as perspective and move through a couple of towns this mid-19th century world is not quite so small. It’s more in Anna’s attitudes of mind, the narrow fixation upon courtship and several related themes of money, class that her book harks back to Austen’s.

On the other hand, the mood is so strikingly different from Austen’s that I wonder what was the mood of Which is the Heroine. In the letter I copied out yesterday and shared it seemed that Anna was writing an imitation of Austen: I discern complicated patterns of relationship among many characters and a comic thrust. Sixteen years later (if the book was written just before publication) Anna has moved away from this sort of texture which is found (by the way) in Hubback’s continuation of Younger Sister, first volume as well as Anna’s own continuation of Sanditon

I was filled with sorrow for Anna and a sense here was a woman who had strong gifts which were never give a real chance to flower by coming before the public in any way. But then I discovered that Anna (to coin Caroline’s phrase from her memoir about their aunt on what happened to the family after Aunt Jane died), “lost the thread.” Anna’s A Winter’s Tale written in 1841 is embarrassingly bad, absurd. It’s a tale ostensibly meant for children, but its language is too adult; it’s a Christian parable set in the 1st century AD just filled with anachronisms; the moral is even silly; she is worried about what children will think about how Christianity excludes so many people from being saved and comes up with resignation — at least Pilgrim’s Progress doesn’t go into laments over its cruel eschatology; it has the courage of perverse conviction. So it’s centrally lachrymose too. She has been influenced by historical novels and forgotten Austen’s conjuring her just to write of what she knows, to stay in real experience and probability.

Mary Hamilton makes a striking contrast to the book Austen describes. Which is the heroine has several groups of characters, they are variously and comically related. Rank. ceremony, money count enormously; we have grotesque characters in Which is the Heroine, and sentimental grave ones.

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Though I cannot get back to Which is the Heroine since it’s been destroyed, I can say now that in Mary Hamilton Austen’s niece was concerned to justify and say how just fine and even better it is to be poor and deprived, to live a life of retreat such as is forced on genteel fringe women like herself (and also Austen) as long as you act generously for then you will have peace, and the fiction shows the world will reward you.

This is a laugh realistically. I remember in Dickens’s Bleak House how Mr Jarndyce tells Skimpole that the whole universe turns out to be a cruel parent to children with no kind responsible near ones right there. But it is in fact the topic Austen has at her core, only what she does is present fairy tales of rich men coming along much more persuasively and at the same time shows the vexations, poisons, distresses, and miseries of such existences stroke by stroke. In her letter to her niece she appears oblivious of any deeper theme in her niece’s (or for that matter) her own work.

Austen’s third letter then does prompt Austen’s own salutary self-appraisal in the words of Elizabeth (P&P, 3:12):

Jane: But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I acknowledge?”
Elizabeth: That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing …

What Austen is instructing her niece on are surface elements; there are some underlying assumptions (about how necessary it is to get a reader to believe in, immerse him or herself in a fiction), but all of a grossly literal kind. Austen concentrates on rank and class and literal probability, and she does not at all go outside an immediate apprehension of what is happening in the scenes she alludes to. It’s a narrow perspective relatively barren about themes or content in Anna’s or her own fiction.

Like Jane Austen herself, Anna’s characters wandered around the seacoast of southern England, the spas. Austen treats of these only as problems in verisimilitude. Anna’s female characters must not risk any untoward or too inviting behaviors. They should be above all discreet. Ireland won’t do but some of Anna’s Irish characters will.

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Steventon Parsonage (Back view)

I also studied a number of Austen’s other letters to Anna, the letters right before and after letters 76 and 104 and discovered much alienation between Austen and Anna (indeed Austen did favor Fanny Austen Knight). they were not congenial in character; Austen does not care for Anna’s emotional character and genius and either ignores or wants to change it. Austen does worry about Anna’s future with some responsible caring words to her brother, Francis, but these are offset by words which blame Anna without taking into account why Anna makes the choices she does.

Indeed she burlesques Anna’s nature in a poem Selwyn is right to say is “mock panegyric” delivering “a mild rebuke” and “gentle warning.” I wonder if the girl saw it as mild and gentle. Austen uses geographical imagery to make fun of Anna. Her judgement “sound’ is also “Thick, black, profound.” She accuses Anna of being too friendly, lending herself out easily to people — a no no for a woman. In the memoir Anna’s brother did not tell who the poem was about. This poem was written right around the time of Letter 71 (Thursday 25 April 1811 Sloane St); Letter 71 uses the same language as the poem about Anna.

The later letters of Austen are cheerful, and many even ebullient. The characterization of them one comes across in most of the biographies as crabbed, old maid jealousies, and rebellious, and the like show people tire of them and don’t go through the second half. Indeed she is reveling with the “fun” she finds with Fanny (just like in Miss Austen Regrets). Nokes may have gotten his ideas about Austen’s character by concentrating on the second half.

But this by no means ends the wry and sharp and cold remarks, the hard satire, and these later letters show an older woman willing to inflict press on Anna what was pressed on her. She wants a community of women all right, but women that are like-minded with her, and that does not include Anna at least not as yet.

Some examples,

In Letter 75 (Thurs, 6 June 1811) we find Austen (tireless in this) trying to set up a community again but failing: “I have given up all idea of Miss Sharpe traveling with You & Martha, for tho’ you are both all compliance with my scheme, yet as you knock off a week from the end of her visit, & Martha rather more from the beginning,the thing is out of the question. It begins with disappointment that Martha cannot leave town until after the 24th (it’s 6 June) and how she hoped to see Cassandra at Chawton the week before. Miss Benn has written. On the other hand she likes Cassandra and Fanny’s bonnets and think “Fanny’s particularly becoming …”

Again at end “Anna does not come home till tomorrow morning – She has written I find to Fanny – but there does not seem to be a great deal to relate of Tuesday …

But there is this: Henry has visited and we are told it was “a great distress” to Mrs Austen that “Anna should be absent, during her Uncle’s visit — a distress I could not share. — She does return from Farringdon till this evening, — and I doubt not, has had plenty of the miscellaneous, unsettled sort of happiness which seems to suit her best” (LeFaye, 4th, p 201)

She would rather not have Anna here. Austen’s individuality did not suit. Nor did her stepmother want Anna when Anna was young. Austen is repeating the behavior of her sister-in-law (rejected in The Watsons in the portrait of the nasty sister-in-law of Emma who leaves her daughter home and lies to her to get out the house).

Letter 90, to Francis Austen (Sat, 25 Sept 1813, from Godmersham):

I take it for granted that Mary has told you of Anna’s engagement to Ben Lefroy. It came upon us without much preparation; — at the same time there was that about her which kept us in a constant preparation for something.-We are anxious to have it go on well, there being as much in his favour as the Chances are likely to give her in any matrimonial connection. I beleive he is sensible, certainly very religious, well connected & with some Independence. — There is an unfortunate dissimularity of Taste between them in one respect which gives us some apprehensions, he hates company & she is very fond of it; — This, with some queerness of Temper on his side & much unsteadiness on hers, is untoward. (p. 241)

Letter 94 (To Cassandra, Tues, 26 Oct 1813, Jane at Godmersham):

“I have had a late account from Steventon, & a baddish one, as far as Ben is concerned. — He has declined a Curacy (apparently highly eligible) which he might have secured against his taking orders — & upon its’ being made rather a serious question, says he has not made up his mind as to taking orders so early — & that if her Father makes a point of it, he must give Anna up rather than do what he does not approve. He must be maddish. They are going on again, at present as before — but it cannot last. — Mary says that Anna is very unwilling to go to Chawton & will get home again as soon as she can …”

Reading this Fanny Caroline Lefroy was driven to defend her mother and father:

My father although deeply attached to my mother was far
too high-principled and conscientious to take Holy Orders for the sake of being immediately married. Possibly he had not yet quite decided on his profession, at all events he was not ordained until three years afterwards. As to my mother’s reluctance to go to Chawton, sent away as she was to mark my GodMother’s anger with him, it was not possible she should go with any other feelings.’ —Lefroy Notes.

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Miss Austen Regrets: Jane (Olivia Williams) and Fanny Austen (Imogen Poots) confiding in one another (movie based partly on Nokes’s reading of Austen’s letters)

Jane Austen does enjoy herself enormously with Fanny (Letters 9192, 11-12 Mon-Tues & 14-15 Oct 1813 p 245, 247, 249). There are many many references to Anna, and also to Fanny. Sixteen extant letters to Anna Austen Lefroy; 30 altogether to Fanny with only 5 surviving. They do show Austen’s loyalty to Fanny and a duplicity to Anna.

One example:

Shortly after Anna married, Austen had been to visit Anna and Anna, the newly wed, had gotten a piano and so proud showed it to her aunt. On 29 November (Letter 112) Austen writes Anna putting her off — Austen just has not one moment at all to visit Anna again. Perhaps not but I recognize something there in the overspeak she suddenly does several days before: a fragment on 24 November (111), Austen had begged off with the common excuse that you know how it is when you are in someone else’s house, not a minute your own. Really? The 30 November letter (113) which is the last of the series to Anna printed in Later anuscripts opens I now realize with Austen responding to what Anna perceived as disapproval: “I am far from finding your book an Evil I assure you.” Jane insists she read it right away and “with great pleasure.” Since we’ve not got Anna’s letter that prompted this we are left to grasp how bad Anna must’ve felt about something that got back to her. Like “why do you bother your aunt with this nonsense novel writing” — are you not satisfied with your husband so quick?

The rest of Austen’s letter seems so confidential and reassuring and goes on about Anna’s novel as if it were a budding masterpiece, but that same day she writes Fanny and betrays Anna (Letter 114). Totally other view: Fanny wanted to know what Jane thought of Anna’s house. Jane says papa will say and then we get this real niggardliness: “I was rather sorry to hear she is to have an instrument; it seems throwing money away. They will wish the 24G in the shape of Sheets & Towels six months later – and as to her playing — it can never be anything.” As if Jane’s playing was anything. One would think her own anguish when she lost her pianoforte might not have been forgotten. She goes on to
exclaim against Anna’s “purple pelisse” but of course she does not mean to “blame’ her — “nothing worse than it’s being got in secret, & not owned to anybody. She is capable of that you know …”

See Jane Austen’s Letters

Ellen