Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life

The Chateau de Jourdan, near Nerac, to which Jean Francois Capot de Feuillide took Eliza Hancock & her mother in 1784

Dear friends and readers,

I finished reading Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A life for the second time a couple of days ago, and wanted to record here that it seems to me the best biography of Jane Austen now available. It’s much better than is usually admitted to and (what is sometimes suggested) is by no means just an updating of Elizabeth Jenkins (whose book still has the merit of being the first serious full unbiased one which brings to bear on Austen’s life the matter we find in her novels). Tomalin is much franker than Jenkins, has found out more about Austen’s relatives, friends, milieus. As Park Honan’s book misses the inner reality of his subject, Tomalin’s chief modern rival is David Nokes who did far more original research and thinking than Tomalin, especially in his examination of Austen’s letters; yet when Tomalin treats of Austen’s novels she is much more accurate than Nokes (who perversely seems to prefer the Juvenilia), is less personally reactive to her life (Nokes dislikes the idea that Austen didn’t like Bath because he would have liked it) and thus is more accurate about Austen’s personality.

Tomalin is a gifted writer, a stylist and she writes biographies that feel like novels. Her people come alive and they make sense as interactive characters in an imagined environment, only this one is real, has recorded reality. She did go to France to ferret out the full story of Eliza de Feuillide Austen who (after making the usual bow to Deirdre LeFaye’s defensive pro-family stances) Tomalin treats as Warren Hastings’ biological daughter) Tomalin goes on to it as this explains so much that happened to Eliza in her life.

Tomalin’s retelling puts everything into place, especially de Feuillide’s real motives in marrying Eliza, and hers for marrying him. Eliza was clearly a stigmatized yet protected person (we see this in the way Jane Austen’s family describe and treat her) as the biological daughter Warren Hastings provided for and helped from time to time and yet kept, together with her apparently unperceptive somewhat incompetent mother, briefly his mistress, at a distance from him. Hastings became a source of introduction to desperatgely needed patronage for George Austen’s naval sons. The Mary Crawford character would be a direct reflection of Eliza. The Steventon theatricals lie behind Mansfield Park — Eliza did become seriously involved both with James and Henry Austen (eventually of course marrying the latter who himself pretty quickly preferred to go off to Godmersham alone. Jane Austen was not the only intelligent woman, Edward’s rich wife, Elizabeth did not like. Tomalin does seem to over-rate Jane’s connection with Eliza which from the letters was intermittent and not confidential — Jane has to maneuver her way round Eliza’s needs and assumptions in the way we see her doing Edward and Elizabeth Austen’s to say get permission to leave early to visit the woman she was really attached to, like Catherine and Alethea Bigg.

Plan of Sloane Street, London, where Austen stayed with Henry and Eliza (from 1900 mapping)

Tomalin is particularly good on the De Feuillide connection. This fringe bourgeois hoped for huge sums to conduct a drainage project over lands he actually had little right to enclose: in effect he tried to sluice the money Hastings wrenched from Indian peasants to take over this land (through bribes) and then enrichen himself in developing it. In the event the French revolution put an end to that. Tomalin brings out how Philadelphia Hancock had probably formed a second liaison outside marriage, with Lambert who was the conduit for this marriage, which Hasting’s businessman, Woodcock and George Austen, Philadelphia’s brother, saw in its true light. Both parties (Feuillide and Eliza) presented themselves somewhat falsely to one another. de Feuillide was no count and Eliza knew it some time after marrying him; her lien on Hastings was limited. Hence they did not last.: marriage was indeed a take-in from her experience. At the same time Tomalin does full justice to Eliza’s behavior as the mother of a disabled son, mentally and physically dependent and defective, epileptic. No Lady Susan she. She also clung to her mother as the one person she could count on to be there whose relationship with her was not on some level unaccountable (Hancock’s letters are pathetic attempts to control his wife, Hastings would not acnknowledge actual obligation). She seems to have found the Steventon family a comfort she did not quite belong to either.

The importance of this is the woman was part of Austen’s central growing up experience and as a comparative woman’s life. Tomalin provides a similarly rich portrait of Eliza Chute who is another perceptive sensitive unconventional type to some extent whom we might wish Austen had formed a close relationship, who we feel she ought to have (like Emma with Jane Fairfax), but whom Austen makes nasty cracks about: when Eliza proposes to visit, Austen says she knows ‘a trick or two of that’ as if the visit is meant aggressively. Austen seems to be jealous of, and avoid Chute; I suggest a deeper look and thought tells us that like Anna Austen but not Fanny Austen Knight, and and perhaps like Henry or James in certain moods, but not Frank, Chute threatened the older Austen’s conventional carapace thickened to protect her from hurt (from the mother? Cassandra even).

Here is one example of what Tomalin intuitively does quickly so well again and again in detailed expositions that other biographers do not. Two poems Austen wrote to Catherine Bigg on the occasion of Bigg’s marriage have been printed numerous times. In the Todd and Bree Cambridge edition (Later Manuscripts), while they begin with the disparity in age between bride and prospective bridegroom (she 33, he in his sixties) and quote Austen’s line to Cassandra on the day before this wedding; “tomorrow we must think of poor Caroline” (25 Oct 1808) and then four years later when Catherine was pregnant for the 4th (!) time, “there is a melancholy disproportion between the Papa and the little Children” (2 Sept 1814), the latent insight about the tone and mood of the poem that could have arisen and explanation for the imagery is lost amid a welter of detail on Austen’s great skill as needlewoman, talk about hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, because Austen sent such a memento to Bigg with the poem. Southam resembles Chapman in just saying the poem was part of a wedding gift and leavimg it at that (nothing about the man Bigg married, her pregnancies, the beautiful house she got), and implying Catherine was a not-so-close friend who happened to live at Manydown Park, the very place where Austen almost married Catherine’s brother.

Jane too could have been mistress of Manydowne, and she saw the price that Catherine Bigg had to pay for this

Tomalin’s way of telling this calls our attention to the disparity in age and Austen’s feeling of real distaste and pity for her friend. The embroidered square of cloth is secondary. Tomalin places the incident of Catherine’s marriage in immediate context: it occurred in time just after Austen saw herself defeated in one of her many plans to gather women friends together, and was trying to retrieve the plan by uncharacteristically begging Edward to provide the needed carriage. He yielded after she gave him and Elizabeth (still alive then) a “private reason” for wanting this and then did it grudgingly.

(Digressive. Tomalin also tells us in another place how when Edward would come home at 11 in the night, he would demand Fanny get out of Elizabeth’s bed so he could get in. Asserting his rights over this perpetually pregnant woman. I rather think that her keeping Eliza out of the house (Eliza may not have wanted to visit, but Henry did a lot – theirs was not exactly a close marriage it emerges in this book) and Jane and sister and mother no offer of a place to live might have seemed to her a small enough thing not to endure these smart women.)

Back to Catherine Bigg’s Charlotte Lucas-like selling of herself. Tomalin then shows from a couple more of Austen’s passages from letters in in 1808-09 (written in Southampton) that Austen had become more explicit (less indirect) about describing her spinsterhood as freedom and liberty. Austen was no longer hurling bitter filips against births, marriages, but rather openly feels sorry for women getting married (this is the tone of her “poor animal” about Anna after a few years, a couple of births and miscarriages), identifying with some of the servants around her (eating together before the fire) and intensely aware of how other women were coping or failing to cope with their dependent marginalized status.

Then Tomalin goes over the imagery and tone of the poems:

Cambrick! thou’st been to me a good,
And I would bless thee if I could.
Go, serve thy mistress with delight,
Be small in compass, soft and white;
Enjoy thy fortune, honour’d much
To bear her name and feel her touch;
And that thy worth may last for years,
Slight be her colds, and few her tears.

Tomalin points out as no one else does that this one was not sent, but rather a weakened self-censored second version:

Cambrick! with grateful blessings would I pay
The pleasure given me in sweet employ! —
Long may’st thou serve my Friend without decay,
And have no tears to wipe, but tears of joy!-

There are no tears of joy to be expected in the first version. Because Tomalin situated the poem so, I for the first time took a look. I noticed for the first time that the poem has intimate imagery. The handkerchief will be against her friend’s skin, feel her “touch” live in close proximity, physical. This reminds me of other poems — by Anne Finch and Katherine Philips — to other women which have a strong erotic component. In other words it’s the lesbian impulse coming out. Suddenly this is not some vacuous stuff sent with a pretty nothing but a statement as genuinely felt as her poems to Anna, to Mrs Lefroy, on her headache and on the frivolous happenings in Winchester as she lay dying but had (she hoped) made herself immortal in her writing however overlooked for such a long then and then undersold.

You could read Austen’s to Catherine Bigg in the three editions and dismiss them as empty nothings pinned to an overwrought gift (a waste of time better spent writing or reading or walking with a friend), but not in Tomalin is my point. Suddenly they come alive.

I am a therefore little nonplussed at how Tomalin does not pick up on Martha Lloyd. She will remark as an afterthought that Martha was there living with them, traveling with them, but never seems to click in her mind – or did it not. She sees it was Martha who had First Impressions by heart. Tellingly she takes out time to deny that when Jane and Cassandra might have slept together it meant “anything” more than forced sleeping arrangements. She does see that once Martha and Jane threw a housemaid out of a bed and got in together and read (we are told) and another time spent the night on the floor together. Probably an urge to stay away from GBLT and also a preconceived idea it was Cassandra who was everything all the while she does see how often they are apart, and brings forward Anne Sharp as an important (in the literature) underrated friend. Here it’s her liberal leftism wanting to find Jane preferring the governess to everyone else in Godmersham. so she sees the importance of the governess at Godmersham (the one Austen had her most real relationship with), Anne Sharpe.

Still she is otherwise alert to discomfort, misery, lies in heterosexual sex. Similarly, she does see how Frank was apparently the most valued and least uncomfortable relationship with her brothers for Austen. She suggests Henry may be seen in Henry Crawford. There’s a good sum up of Jane’s ambivalent relationships with Henry and Edward (pp. 195-98), but again she does not go far enough on what her evidence is showing. I have not myself mentioned how Frank tried to impose his will and control her traveling (not simply himself not take her), just the sort of thing a possessive male lover might do.

Again and again an instinct made Tomalin stay away from material that would be explosive if emphasized to her wider audience. The way her books sell is she has a sliding upbeat sort of take on things (candid in the sense of Jane Bennet), only at turns now and again showing the bleakness of what she says. What she does in this book (as in others) is to go up to a threshold of where disquiet begins, comment briefly and then move on.

Where Tomalin falls down is her perfunctoriness. I really felt her tone that of someone writing this biography because it’s in her way, as someone who knows this era very well, as a famous biographer of women’s lives and as a money-maker. She is getting Austen out the way, punching her ticket, and moving on. She does not regard Austen as writing sufficiently centrally wide-reaching major books. This leads to not to investigate some stereotypes about Austen used to cover over aspects of her life that would make people uncomfortable: Tomalin’s analyses of the novels which like some of her analyses of aspects of Austen’s innermost creative life misses Austen’s continual obsessive composition and revision, and minuteness; her really meaningful relationships outside her immediate family beyond her friendships with women who were in effect servants: Tomalin overlooks the curious asociality which made her briefly confide in Stanier Clarke as a rare chance to talk to a professional literary person. She also misses out on Austen’s real relationship with Edward Bridges — to Tomalin the love of Austen’s life remains Tom Lefroy; Southam sees that the later books show her intense love for Frank Austen and emotional investment with her brothers.

One of Jane’s poems to Frank

She misdates Lady Susan (again really simply accepting Southam’s prejudice against this book), but she does then make it fit into her trajectory of Austen’s development. There is a very modern turn she gives it, especially the idea that it’s the study of a character “who knows herself to be wasted on the dull world she is obliged to live in” — that is Tomalin’s take on Austen transposed to the character. In fact the character is mean and awful and not from Merteuil of LaClos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses but rather a Madame de Vernon of Delphine (1804) much closer to the novel as Madame de Vernon succeeds in coercing her daughter into a miserable marriage. For someone who goes so thoroughly into the French sources for Eliza, she is very weak on Austen’s French reading.

Tomalin has explored Jane Austen’s library, and discovers various books in French, including presents of the multi-volume L’ami des enfants by Arnaud Berquin

Not one mention of Genlis. She has read Brunton, Smith and Radcliffe, but the political and travel books Austen devoured. No sign of knowledge of Grandison or Clarissa. Perfunctory mentions of Rousseau. Tomalin prefers the Fielding line of novels more, the ones that lead to Dickens and Hardy whom she writes so well on in other books.

Not to overdo where Tomalin has gaps. I loved how she brought home where we find Jane Austen loathing when she is coerced (gently but firmly) into having that long ludicrous dedication to the Prince Regent. She has evidence to suggest the Prince regent never read Austen’s novels. They went quickly into his library for show. In the last chapter of Tomalin’s book. Tomalin points out how Jane left a sum to Madame Bigeon to whom she was not at all related and who had no status whatsoever, and that Cassandra kept up small payments as far as she could throughout the life of Bigeon’s daughter, “Mrs Perigord.” Tomalin liked that the origin of the British Jane Austen society was a single woman, Miss Darnell who wanted to preserve Chawton cottage which by 1940 was knocked up into wretched flats and on the way to being torn down.

I recommend reading both Nokes and Tomalin as a kind of diptych.

Ellen