Henry Thomas Austen (1771-1850): a 4th son & a shrewd, individual mind which dwelt on money; he published his sister’s novels

On heraldry and the military ethos it flatters: “Of course there was seldom any opportunity of signalizing personal courage amidst the regularity of systematic murder” (HTA), The Loiterer No 20

Thoughts on the real education given children (HTA adapting Genlis satirically): “I fear [‘few’] will set a proper value on, and still fewer bring to Perfection … that callousness of Heart, and that engaging Apathy, without which Impudence is vulgar, and Effrontery alarming … let her know that she is to look forwards to matrimony, as the sole end of existence, and the sole means of happiness … [finally] I must approve of that delicate species of [social skill] which hides its venom under extravagant praise of the person whom we wish to wound” (HTA), The Loiterer No 27)

It is better to be lucky than wise — Henry to James Edward Austen-Leigh accounting for the Austen family financial history

An effective likeness of an aging worn sensitive man, as clergyman, Henry Austen

Eliza Austen (nee Hancock, previously de Feuillide), when young, before smallpox — despite the obvious poor ability of the artist we can see a family likeness in the high foreheads, shape & expression of eyes, oval face

Dear friends and readers,

I preface Part 2 of this diptych portrait of Eliza and Henry Austen with the same two images I prefaced Part 1 with as they are all we have, show the family resemblance between the eventual husband and wife, and provide a genuinely sensitive and apparently accurate portrait of the man. In the case of Henry there are his letter (not published separately), his sermons (quoted and described) and at least 10 numbers of a periodical work he wrote with his eldest brother, his mother and father’s heir, James Austen, The Loiterer, successful enough to have been published in various places in the UK, a decade later bound up for sale, and has come down to us.

The goal of this portrait is the same as that of Eliza Austen: to correct a way of framing Henry, which through continual series of not-so-subtle dismissive, marginalizing and fault-finding insinuations misrepresents him. In Eliza’s where Jane Austen is presented as looking at Eliza considerably askance (as seen in characters said to be centrally based on her, viz. the Frenchified Mary Crawford, and abusive mother Lady Susan (!); from 1913 on since Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh declared (with no source to back him up, just his sudden view) Henry is presented as Jane’s “favorite brother.”

My sources for this blog-sketch are those I used for the first and Warren Hastings, to which I’ve added Henry’s writings.

The place to begin and end is the unconquerable obstacle: Henry Thomas Austen was the fourth son of a man with a tiny vicarage stipend. Enough enemy of promise there. George Austen had a wife whose income from her funds was not enough to support her; neither had any effective connections of their own to place or to forward any one beyond the first son, the heir, James Austen (1765-1819), to whom Mr Austen gave his own house and most of his income. They were dependent on the tenuous (and in the event) not forth-coming help of Mrs Austen’s brother (James Leigh-Perrot), relationships from Mrs Austen’s male relations of a previous generation had at the university (no certain thing — Henry’s succession to a Founder’s Kin place was contested). There was the generosity of the one wealthy uncle of Mr Austen, Francis (who left everything to his son), who had paid to have his nephew educated in accordance with real gifts. And of course whatever Mr Austen’s sister’s ex-lover, father of Mr Austen’s niece, Warren Hastings, could get up for him. Hastings told Mr Austen (whom Hastings liked and respected) he could only lead him to the right names whom he could mention Mr Austen’s two younger sons for the navy, nothing more. And as Hancock sneered, they kept having children. Money had to be found to support the mentally disabled or elliptic second brother, George (whom Edward was still providing for late in life), and dowries for two sisters. All on 300£ plus what Mr Austen could collect as tithes and make on his farm. Luck came in the form of the adoption of Edward by the Knight couple: we must not underestimate Godmersham, Chawton and the rents. The Austens didn’t.

But individually Henry was on his own. A unqualified family-centered patronage system confronted him at every turn. He was not even the third son.

Money mattered. Although Austen probably did not read Henry’s letter to Frank at the time of the father’s death when Henry (a la Fanny Dashwood) suggests how little the women can live on, and neither Frank (nor he nor Charles) has to give them more than they can afford, the talk of the letters echoes what she must’ve heard or overheard said. Thus Chapter 2 of S&S.

I have now read his Loiterers, his life of his sister and the briefer memoir, what excerpts of his sermons are available, what letters left and in print. From his Loiterers: the man was as gifted as James, the eldest brother (and that means considerably) when it comes to perception of experience. But far from gaiety, all sunshine, shallow in feeling, he is saturnine, disillusioned, and prophetic about his own future. He is himself hard. Like James (and Tallyrand) he suggests language is there to cover up lies. Early on Henry predicts he’ll end up a clergyman on a very small income. He is as ethically aware as Edmund Bertram when it comes to who’s on the take and for what and what is the price of being there. It is he who quotes Rousseau in The Loiterers, but (pace what the most recent essay on this work asserts) there is nothing there to suggest he or James or their collaborators read Rousseau; Henry is reacting satirically to Felicite de Genlis’s deliberately naive complacencies in her advice on what to teach your child. If James’s portrait of Cecilia, is a brilliant novel in little, Henry’s of Clarissa ends in bitter irony with no happy ending, quite modern in feel (in line with Johnson’s Misella both these portraits).

There is nothing at all “mercurial” about his true character what his job resume looks like or how he may have had to perform. Looking at the years at each occupation and his rise, he is intense, stubborn, and sticks to what he has as long as it’s going well, and when each time it was not, it was the outward social and political world that changed (war, no war), or was inexorable (primogeniture, property rights), not he.. Henry’s letters (as his nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh bravely avers to his vengeful resentful aunt (whose legacy he desperately needed) show a man of “feeling” (“he does feel” says JEAL, risking all).

Jonny Lee Miller as the stalwart, stubborn and now awakened Edmund Bertram: he confronts Mary and his father in the film (1999 MP); he is also right for Mr Knightley

One of Henry’s most remarkable and revealing (about him) texts is his life of his sister. Yes it’s hagiographic, absurdly so. She never had a hard thought in her life, never uttered a cruel statement. (See her overflow of self in her letters). But to see it or his sermons as pompous is to ignore the context and what fueled the French revolution and English riots from 1780 past the Napoleonic era.

The voice of the biographical sketch is a man with a chip on his shoulder a mile high, he is all carapace, his defensiveness of his gifted sister is of himself: those who could not get what they deserved as the system did not allow it. To get her works of genius published, she saved hard out of her tiny allowance. She never once curried favor. As he warms to his topic, he thinks of her as contra mondi in the way he wished he could be, and when his banking system collapsed. Hi tone in that piece is more than hagiographic, it’s the deeply resentful one of the person who has been shut out, excluded, endured the ancien regime patronage system as a fringe person, almost an outsider. If he’s super-formal (called pompous), he’s guarding himself. And he’s guarding his sister.

Diane Birchall writes well about this:

That’s … taking who and what Henry was into account, which, you are right, is not usually done in quoting his “biography” of Jane. On some level he must have been resentful about being shut out, despite the spirit with which he bounced back and always threw himself “once more into the breach.” A chameleon, a self-inventer, a bit of an adventurer. As people getting a short hand in the lottery of life, coming from hard places, sometimes are.

Much of the family denigration is in bitter (albeit denied) retrospective: he went bankrupt, and both Edward and Francis backed him as far as they had dared. Uncle Leigh-Perrot chipped in handsomely too. How could he have ever smiled afterward? How dare he. They call him unstable in public.

But the miracle is not at all that he lost all when the boom fueled by war (familiar no) was pricked when Napoleon was finally defeated, but that he built any banking empire at all — and based partly on taking on debt from powerful ruthless men (as the 1% then was). Eternally the average person will not look at someone’s situation but blame the person.

Henry’s originality of self may be seen in each part of the distortion. If we are asked to see him as shallow (wrongly), as an inadequate business failure (wrongly), so it’s implied he had this (rather dissed nonetheless) lifelong adoration of the (shallow) French woman who didn’t deserve it. It is true that he loved and wanted Eliza from the time he saw her as an adolescent boy. It is true that after they married, he seems to have been unable to be the stay-at-home dad to her mom (to a mentally defective elliptic son — it seems to have been in the genes), her gravity underlying her gaiety was if congenial, in need of some leavening. So we see him (like Jane, though much better appreciated than she) off to Kent, Godmersham when he can. If she was hurt, we have no letters about this; his sister, Jane wrote, she came, Eliza and Henry helped publish the books, and she kept up her French emigre world and ties to her father through people like the Bullens and in Cheltenham.

******************************

Joe Wright in his 2005 P&P ever looking for some action, makes much of the coming of the local militia into Meryton (Lydia is spotting handsome Wickham, Rupert Friend): the outfit is one Henry would’ve worn

Henry’s working life falls into four phases which may be traveled over externally step-by-step in the citied Persuasions articles, especially the 3 by Caplan. I’ve made a chronology of these based on these articles and my other cited sources. 1) The young collegiate turns himself into 2) a successful local militia captain (1793-1801) who almost but not quite turns a blind eye to the injustices before him and then sees this is getting him nowhere when he wants to marry; the disillusioned military man turns himself in; 3) a banker who stays afloat high and extends himself to do so — surely just the sort of modern financial speculator we are supposed to admire. (If we are conservative — but CEOs will tell you they are mythified when they succeed and despised when luck runs against them). War and no war collapses him and everyone else. Depression, dislocation, riots too .So 4) He falls back 9smiling on the surface) on the career most of the men in his family have access to the intellectual, clergyman, religion. He then reminding me of J.L Carr (in The Last Englishmen), as he fought for church improvements and even had a small success of some money. His letter there ironically acknowledges this feat.

Some salient points: far from moving from career to career like a butterfly, Henry sticks it out, and then each time the world changes after a period of much stress and suffering and hardship over which Henry manages to survive, and metamorphose into a new occupation the new order favors — through what connections he made. Henry’s time as a soldier was a period of severe dislocation, distress, near starvation or starvation for many (outside Ireland too), war, riot, mutiny and savage punishments. Kaplan tells of court martial of men originally pressed. Henry left no remarks but from he wrote in the Loiterer he lived with what he recognized by remaining as detached as his sister did.

In banking in order to get a start and keep going he had to lend those powerful friends he came across with preying contacts what they asked. He knew all along the risks he was taking and attempted to compensate by having banks in several places and diversifying. And he works hard, is ever on the move, ever out there networking. His brothers and uncle lent him money because they were impressed; none of them foresaw the bust with the defeat of Napoleon. Amid all the hard work he found time to enlist a publisher, lend money to his sister through paying the publisher ahead (as one had to), kept the printers at it.

His last retreat back to the clerical world was in the cards from the beginning. He wouldn’t care for the chaplaincy at the British embassy in Berlin. A flunky position (Stanier Clarke endured it we know). After he had to give up the curacy of Chawton, and Rector of Steventon (in favor of a nephew, an older brother’s son), he became curate at Farnham (75£ a year with surprlice fees of 35£ and vicarage house, offices, and garden. He had to reside.

St Andrews Church at Farnham

Perpetual curate at Bentley. He had been warned. Perpetual curates are not given over-respect (see Trollope and Oliphant). Given the intransigence of those he had to deal with (as far as providing money for any improvements or changes for the good) and their indifference to religiosity (shown in how little was expected of him to pass his ordination) his late honorable years do as much credit to him as his early college writing ones. In his beginning was his end.

The key to his character the same loyalty and earnest scepticism we see in Henry Tilney. This is born out by his letters to Frank, but more especially to James Edward Austen-Leigh. The same combination of stern didacticism and kind tone can be seen in later life when there is an incident of subordination at Edward’s son’s school.

************************

Henry is said to have “been the handsomest” of the family (this is the nostalgic Anna remembering years later and her designation of “brilliant” is swallowed up in qualifications remembering his end): Alessandro Nivola as Henry Crawford is wrong because the character is a dark man and we have no reason to think Henry Austen was blonde, but he is handsome; Embeth Davidtz has not had smallpox but as an image she’s not far off from how Eliza might have wanted to be remembered (1999 Miramax MP)

Henry’s private or love life reveals the same earnest constant character. We see him from a young male age drawn to Eliza Austen; 1787 he’s visiting Eliza in London; in 1788 she visits him and James at college. But Henry is too young and she is married; before she is widowed, she returns to captivate him and his older brother, James, putting on plays. He wrests himself from her, and engages himself to Mary Pearson (1795), but upon her visiting him, he realizes she won’t do (as Mary Gibson and Mary Lloyd, neither with any gifts), and he however awkwardly breaks it off. Eliza now independent, comes to live with Austens in 1794, and he and James compete, he the winner. Closer to the worldly knowing (by that time) Eliza. This marriage based on adult understanding of one another’s liberty and needs took place December 13, 1797. As I wrote in my portrait of Eliza, they gave one another needed freedom. I speculate that her plangent character when it came to her son surprised him; she was liked by Jane and perhaps this correspondence it was that led him to encourage Jane to start saving to publish her books. Francis had provided the haven he could between 1809 and 11. When Elizabeth died, Edward came forward with Chawrton.

Eliza sickens fatally and dies 1813, and 7 years later he marries again, like his brothers, a local fringe gentry girl, Eleanor Jackson. Let us hope the letter where Austen skewed her as particularly dim is unfair (“What she meant, poor Woman who shall say?”). Henry remains faithful to Eleanor, lives nearby Cassandra, and not far from Edward, the lucky brother adopted into a very wealthy family — who does share what he has with his siblings (Frank too provided with long-term housing as a perusal of his daughter, Catherine Hubback’s life-writing shows).

*************************

Andrew Davies’d Henry Tilner (J.J. Feild) telling Catherine she has been right about his “vampiric” father and he means to marry Catherine if she will have him: the film does justice to Eliza’s letter to her father, Warren Hastings, announcing her coming marriage to Henry Austen, admittedly best foot forward (2007 NA):

He has been for some time in Possession of a comfortable Income, and the excellence of his Heart, Temper & Understanding, together with his Steady Attachment to me, his Affection for my little boy and disinterested concurrence in the disposition of my property, have at length induced me … (26 Dec 1797, Manchester Square)

In one of Henry’s Loiterers he confesses he doesn’t like to write. It has taken him ever so long to write this one, to get himself to do it. He is one of those people to be known by what he involved himself with, and (in his case) how he reacted to what was at hand. Very important. Hee left little about himself.

One element of life that comes up in his letters continually is money, not in the sense Jane is ever one about it (she hasn’t any and must watch every farthing she spends), but who makes it, the difficulty he has in paying his debts. It is he who wrote the (to his sister who was at least aware of his sentiments) letter about how comfortable his mother and sisters will be on such a small living, that they will keep no carriage, live so small, not that much is needed. I don’t doubt Mrs Jane Leigh-Perrot didn’t like him (as she seethes against him in her letters — it’s not enough to leave him nothing). It’s hilarious that she accused him of a want of feeling; what she resented was he saw through her greed and incompetence (who shoplifts) and didn’t hide it. I imagine like Tom Bertram he paid her no mind.

Sloane Street, first floor plan where Henry lived with Eliza and Jane came to read proofs

He lived well when he could, from London apartment to London apartment, an eye to what others admire, but by then he had Eliza’s money. He got to know people who mattered as far as lay in his power. It was he who would have taken Jane to where she could meet Germaine de Stael (though again the French connection probably is due to Eliza). it is of the highest irony that Miss Austen Regrets which picks up many of the false nuances and myths the Austens have conveyed try to suggest it was Jane who was the cunning negotiator, Jane who knew better than Henry how to publish a book.

Olivia Williams as Jane smirking at Henry’s inadequate negotiations on her behalf with publishers (2008 MAR)

It was he who knew these publishing people, how to approach them, how to get them to do what he wanted. I can see him exult in getting back his sister’s Northanger Abbey from the grasping narrow publisher and then telling the man the product he’d lost. It was who published posthumously Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and gave them their present catchy titles.

So perhaps it’s best to close this brief portrait on the letter by Henry that Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh opens his Austen Papers with: Henry’s account of the one relative he had who had made his money through what was despised as a trade: Francis Austen, the great uncle who provided Henry’s father with his decent education and so by extension or through time’s connections, Jane Austen with hers. He is writing his nephew in response to one JEAL wrote about a new acquaintance who has said something disturbing. Henry feels that as the one intelligent relative left whom he trusts what JEAL needs to know about the family money and a few individual’s natures so as not to be cheated or manipulated. Family history has been kept secret from him. Henry like Jane knows of this family habit of keeping secrets from one another: minor gentry were a secret lot to protect themselves and enable them to fight back.

Letter of Henry Thomas Austen to James Edward Austen-Leigh (James’s son, Henry’s nephew):

There (at Stevenoaks) my Father’s Uncle, old Francis Austen set out in life with £800 and a bundle of pens, as Attorney, & contrived to amass a very large fortune, living most hospitably, and yet buying up all the valuable land round the Town — marrying two wealthy wives & persuading the Godmother of his eldest son, Motley Austen, to leave to her said Godson a small legacy of £lOO,OOO [Henry’s irony] — He was a kind uncle too, for he bought the presentations of Ashe & Deane, that your Grandfather might have which ever fell vacant first — it chanced to be Deane. He left your Grandfather a legacy of £500, though at that time he had 3 sons married & at least a dozen grandchildren. All that I remember of him is, that he wore a wig like Bishop, & a suit of light gray’ ditto, coat, vest & hose. In his picture over the chimney the coat & vest had a narrow gold lace edging, about half an inch broad, but in my day he had laid aside the gold edging, though he retained a perfect identity of colour, texture make to his life’s end — I think he was born in Anne’s reign, and was of course a smart man of George the First’s. It is a sort of privilege to have seen and conversed with such a model of a hundred years. Of his 8 sons one died childless, another has left a son who distinguished himself at St. John’s Cambridge, and is settled in the valuable living of Aldworth near Pangbourne & has children.

My great Uncle’s eldest son, Motley, completed his Father’s various purchases of land about Sevenoaks by buying Kippington House & demesnes a short mile from the Town — and so forming an extensive Park. Motley has been dead many years, & is represented by a second though eldest surviving son; Thomas usually called Colonel Austen.

The large Kippington property must go the Colonel’s next Brother, the Rev. John Austen who has male heirs, & in addition to the family living of Chevening has succeeded to the old family estate of the Austens called Horsmonden, in the Weald; some 14 miles off this place (? Tonbridge).

It was left to him by a son-less John Austen the representative of the family, & who was of course first cousin to my Father — to the Rev. H. Austen of Tonbridge, & to Motley Austen. It is better to be lucky than wise; it is no scandal to say that my aforesaid relations of West Kent never raised any alarming fears of their setting even the Medway on fire; and certainly the Rev. John Austen will bring no such disgrace on his family.

You know that the Rev. Mr. Austen of Aldworth is the first cousin of Colonel Austen of Kippington; but you do not know by what line he obtains the very desirable & pleasant Rectory of West Wickham situated in a very fertile & cheerful part of West Kent, about miles from Croydon.

Wickham estate & advowson was the property of a Mr. Lennard some ninety years ago. He left it to his widow for life, & afterwards to his & her only child, a Lennard. The widow was legally attacked by the nearest male relations of the defunct — she flung her cause into the hands of my Great Uncle, old Frank Austen: he won the cause & the wealthy widow’s heart and hand. A very pleasing amiable woman she was; I remember her about 1780, & thought her a great deal handsomer than her Daughter who always lived with her & my Uncle till her death. She (the widow) was the 2nd wife, and Mother of two sons, John & Sackville — John would be a soldier, & so he was one-rose to rank of Major, & married — left the army, was a widower, died, leaving two sons — both very talented — One died early at Clifton — the other is your new acquaintance. Sackville was destined for the Church –t he living of Wickham becoming vacant before he was old enough to take it, it was given ad interim to the Rev. Henry Austen first Cousin to my Father; the latter would have had it if his Aunt the real patroness had been alive (for he was a great favorite with her & had the promise for it) but she being dead his uncle Frank, acting for his step-daughter a minor (Miss Lennard), chose to give it pro tempore to his other nephew Henry; not that he preferred him. but because he was the son of an older Brother than my Father. Primogeniture, with all its ramifications, was more in those days than since the Reform Bill. So Henry Austen held the said living very, satisfactorily, holding Socinian principles, if any, & never residing an hour — till Sackville was old enough to relieve him from the onus of receiving tithes. Sackville lived but a few years, & left no child.

The onus of receiving tithes. Henry would not have laughed at the Rev. Stanier Clarke for hating this system. He had had to watch his own father sluice over needed tiny bits of money from desperate peasants when a boy and since. i wonder if like Jane he hoped the novels would sell big.

Henry ceases suddenly. He’s tired of this and has said enough to aid his decent nephew who has helped Henry when Henry needs it financially without requiring that Henry fawn at all. Henry’s letter to this nephew reveals him without the usual guards.

He did not say we hide behind our jobs (J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country) but he would have understood the utterance.

*******************

Alton where Henry banked (see Going to Alton with Jane):

High Street, Alton, 57 Henry’s bank

I turn now to a typical way of treating this material. It’s instructive to read J. David Grey’s portrait article, as characteristic of the way Henry is portrayed. I would not call it “roseate,” rather in the way these scholars write about her siblings utterly dismissive. He treats Henry’s excellent and saturmine even subversive loiterers as trite moralizing

Most can be taken as homilies, early indicators of his eventual clerical profession: an apologia for a wasted life; criticism of the abuse of heraldry; half-hearted support for the theories of education promulgated by Rousseau and Mme. de Genlis; advice to the victims of husband-seekers; the folly of relying on first impressions; the results of marriage for pecuniary interests.

Of Henry’s real and constant attraction to Eliza we get but one sentence. When she chose him, it was faute de mieux:

His success was probably helped along by two factors: James had only recently become a widower and, much more abhorrent to the liberated Eliza, was a clergyman. The ceremony took place at Marylebone Church in London, 31 December, 1797. The fact that the wedding did not occur at Steventon may indicate that the family viewed the marriage as less than felicitous.

At every step Henry is trivialized; his resentment and real sense of guardedness and hauteur, a carapace that fuels the life (as well as a hagiography) resembles that of Elizabeth Jenkins (a pro-family writer): “a solemn manner of writing.” I get the feeling Grey intuitively hunted up the phrase in other scholarship that would most dismiss Henry at each point. Of course he was a failure, unstable. Oh yes he smiled, the perpetual sunshine of her life (so Anna Austen) and then lost all that money, and the favorite brother (so Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh). Grey’s is a hatchett job which goes unrecognized as it’s the going way of summing the man up.

You see it is necessary to separate Jane off from these other relatives.

The man was no clown nor ideal either. This is a portrait in the Lytton Strachey and Geoffrey Scott sense. I have not quoted the letters or texts much but rather extrapolated and paraphrased, blending together, not followed Henry step-by-step. That’s done more than adequately from what is known in the four Persuasion articles on Henry the worth reading.

*********************

2008 Miss Austen Regrets: Henry (Adrian Edmondsom) the failed banker is even found in a chicken-house before he gets up the courage to say what happened

The stories told by the family are distortions, but not without basis and therefore acceptable. I suggest that they are also inaccurate enough to prevent real understanding of Austen’s fiction. They first of all erase — or ignore — the real hard circumstances of the time. All patronage and this branch of the Austens have nothing to offer. They eke along as precarious fringe gentry. Trim Street the nadir for the women, perpetual curacy for Henry, withdrawal for James. The two sailors were types of physical daring and Frank a literalist. They were successes because of their limitations. We know little of what Jane felt for Charles and there is little in the letters. Edward is alas in John Dashwood to some extent (as is Henry). Elizabeth found partly in Lady Bertram, partly Fanny Dashwood.

Eternally the average person will not look at someone’s situation but blame the person (including sometimes for sickness). So part of the Austen instinctive strategy to hide that Henry was the 4th son of a man without any means and few connections, Hastings the rare one whom he had to be oh so careful before he approached him. Hastings like all others (so common) who has an illegitimate child insists on clinging to official story so as to absolve himself of trouble.

Henry must create alliances and managed this just enough. How few of his letters as recorded in other family members’ letters we have. I suggest that like Jane in these he had a penchant for releasing himself so few survive.

The family wants a gay brother and son, “Oh what a Henry!” may be Austen’s sense that it’s hopeless for Henry to go to White’s. But I see in it condescension and looking askance. First present the happy story. Then blame the person rather than the situation and reveal who and what the family was in the scheme of things at the time. Now join that to his preference for Eliza and the distortions are easy to understand.

He did enjoy life — again and again. Not so much with her as he had supposed. She was far sadder than he knew, far more in need, and when her boy died, it hit hard. Much more comfortable at Kent — and he was not disliked as Jane had been by Elizabeth. Marriage was a property arrangement. One hid an illegitimate child because if legitimate you were responsible for their behavior (as in Hastings). You sullied the woman, some of the deals underlying patronage will not bear the light of day (Hastings found his wives and at least one mistress among his colleagues.)

His last years do seem the bleak ones of compromise.

************

1983 BBC MP: Henry Crawford (Robert Burbage) flirting with Maria Bertram (Samantha Bond): said to mirror the real theatrics at Steventon in the 1780s with Crawford enacting Henry and/or James and Maria Eliza

And last why the favorite brother story? instinctively to divert attention from the reality that no one else had or would’ve. Nowadays it’s fashionable to want to turn Jane into a businesswoman, so the myth of “favorite brother” is linked to the marginalization of him. It was Henry who published these books. He who forked out the money which had to be there upfront to start with. Jane contributed but she did not have enough to start with.

Of course it’s not nonsense to suggest favorites. People have favorite children and siblings. It’s obvious to common sense and happens everywhere all the time in families and among friends. But it’s not Henry who was her favorite. He is “Oh what a Henry!” He is the wanderer in the letters (Eliza worries sometimes where he is); he is, like Anna Austen, not to be quite trusted.

There are no three packets of letters to Henry: only Frank. It’s Frank Jane sits and waits for a second letter each day. She favored him strongly and wrote idealizing portraits of him in her novels. It’s Frank she writes poem to and for. One thing I can notice is she favors Fanny over Anna; the conventional people rather than the more unusual ones. Both literalists. They did not want anyone to see Jane’s adoration of her brother, Frank. It made them uncomfortable. And especially no one should see the half-marriage partnership with Martha.

The Cassandra story is a part myth too. She could not help but end up with her and Cassandra rewarded her big: gave her time and peace and space. But there are intense difference when they are young and they are still there when they are older. She is guarded and has a rebarbative writing style to this sister. I read 4 letters by Cassandra in the Austen papers. They reveal among other things that Cassandra insists on telling pretty upbeat stories. She actually says this to Philadelphia: I will persist to say you are happily married, though apparently Philly has now told her the marriage was a compromise. How different from Jane who will not tell lies. I know that makes letters not the best thing to read their relationship from. Cassandra regards a letter as a place where one tells pious lies and is upbeat; nothing is further from Jane’s letters. Jane’s letters therefore don’t please and when they are young Cassandra scolds. Now they are older and Cassandra probably seeing Jane’s gifts and that Jane is this dependent single woman feels for her so stops scolding.

Fanny told Anna: Aunt Jane does not tell Cassandra everything. This remark is not as endlessly repeated as the one which said she did. The letters that show joy and congeniality are to Martha, and while she gets angry at Martha for turning away from her, they remain direct.

She is also very disappointed in James. Early on in the Loiterers I’ve now seen how she admires James (she wrote twice, as Sophia Sentiment and then again as Mary Simple). He married twice, once for rank and connection; the second time more disastrously, a bully who hated what were his fine gifts (Mrs Austen says this and that he has no head for business) and so repressed him and only by obeying could he live in peace with her. it is only recently that James is being done justice to as a poet. Austen does not enter sympathetically into what happened to James either, it was too close, and she seems to think he could have held out against Mary who clearly hated books. She wanted him to take sinecures. The light of James’s existence when he was old was his gifted son, JEAL. I will write another blog on James which challenges prevalent views somewhat less than those I’ve done thus far (the sailor brothers, Stanier Clarke, Anna Lefroy, Eliza Austen). It’ll be about enemies of promise.

Not that she didn’t like Henry. I don’t mean to say she did not love him, only that when she wrote about him outside her books she took on the family’s stance. Inside the fiction, it was different.

Like Johnny Lee Miller, Blake Ritson captures the sensitivity of Henry in his enactment of Edmund (2007 BBC MP): the actor could easily be a clergyman here

Ellen