Jane Austen and Cornwall

Cassandra’s depiction of Jane Austen, said to be at the seaside, 1804

Kynance Cove, modern photo

Janeite friends.

As I hope to get onto a plane and fly to Cornwall tomorrow evening in order to spend a week there with a Road Scholar group headed by Peter Maxted (naturalist, environmentalist, author of among other good books, The Natural Beauty of Cornwall), I’ve been looking to see if there is any mention or connection by Austen of herself with Cornwall. I found one specific concrete mention, to which a friend has added another in the comments:

In a letter to Cassandra, from Castle Square, Southampton, dated Saturday Oct 1st 1808, Austen writes:

You have used me ill, you have been writing to Martha without telling me of it, & a letter which I sent her on wednesday [sic] to give her information of you, must have been good for nothing, I do not know how to think that something will not still happen to prevent her returning by the 10th — And if it does, I shall not much regard it on my own account, for I am now got into such a way of being alone that I do not wish even for her. — The Marquis [of Lansdowne] has put off being cured for another year; — after waiting some weeks for the return of the Vessel he had agreed for himself by a famous Man in that Country [Cornwall], in which he means to go abroad twelvemonth hence (LeFaye, 4th edition, pp 147-148).

A contemporary print of the high street in Southampton: the Austens rented a house in Castle Square

I feel for Jane: she has been used ill: anyone who does not tell of information or acts they have been getting or about, but leaves their friend to act as if they were not in possession of information vital to both, betrays that friend, makes a fool out of her. Cassandra has done wrong, not a big betrayal, but she has gone behind Jane’s back to do something she hoped Jane would not find out about. I am moved by Austen’s statement that she has “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes even for Martha Lloyd, whom Jane loved. I have just had such an experience of a “friend” not telling me of information she has had and so in effect misrepresented a situation. But I will no longer be misled.

Of course I also feel for her as a woman “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes for a beloved presence.

LeFaye’s typically insinuating note tells of John-Henry Petty (1765-1809) who was “widely travelled but rather solitary” who came to Southampton “to indulge his passion for yachting. He bought the ruined castle within the city walls, and enlarged it “into a gothic fantasy,” selling off the father’s library and art collection at Bowood house to pay for this rebuilding. He became Marquis in 1805, married his mistress, Mary Arabella, daughter of Revd Hinton Maddox and widow of Sir Duke Gifford. LeFaye then recounts nasty gossip about how Lady Gifford was “fat,” and as “strange” as the house Lord Lansdowne created, because she, in supposedly eccentric dress, went walking one day with her three daughters in wind, rain, on stony and mud-filled cobbled streets. LeFaye follows this with the more charitable account by James Edward Austen-Leigh, who turns a carriage this woman went round in into a “fairy equipage” (pp 542-43).

But we have had to take several turns to get there.

For the second I am indebted to Diana Birchall and her use of google, a reference in Mansfield Park, the mention is direct, including the word Cornwall.

“To be so near happiness, so near fame, so near the long paragraph in praise of the private theatricals at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, which would of course have immortalised the whole party for at least a twelvemonth!”

The upper classes in Cornwall behaved the way they did in Northampton: put on private theatricals and then wrote in absurd praise of themselves.

The Mansfield Park players hard “at work” (from the 2007 Mansfield Park, scripted by Maggie Wadey)

Another more speculative literary connection could be Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall; an Elizabethan antiquarian, he wrote the first intelligent thorough vivid description of Cornwall and its people; it was valued and reprinted in 1769 and 1811; Davies Gilbert provided an index. It has been reprinted in our era by Halliday.

Austen never mentions it, but it is the kind of book we find her reading: histories, travel books, culture, memoirs, and in good 20th and 21st century accounts of Cornwall’s history and culture and geography Carew is still quoted as an authoritative source. The mid-18th century sees the beginning of archeaological digs and accounts of them in books. I would like to assume she read it, for if she did, she could have known as much about Cornwall and more as most general readers would today.

For a fourth and speculative type, Austen could have read some of the sources Winston Graham used, like reformist exposés of prison conditions. See The History of Bodmin Jail, 1779, compiled by Bill Johnson (2006). We know she visited another prison with her brother and was too appalled to describe what she saw.

She would have known of the Wesleys and clearly knew of the spread of methodism (in its evangelical reactionary phases in Hannah More and elsewhere); but again we are up against mostly silence or no specific evidence.

On religious radical religious movements, emigration and myths and legends associated with or rooted in Cornwall gaining new ground in her period (Arthurian, Druidic), like some sceptical or careful Enlightenment types of her era, she might have shown little interest; like others newly interested in the history of poetry, e.g., Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry, she would come across Arthur in Chaucer and Spenser. We know she read the poets of the later 18th century.

We can find some specific authors and books from the peripheries (so to speak) where we know for sure she read well-grounded observations, in this case mostly about Scotland: Johnson and Boswell’s twin tours and Anne MacVicar Grant)’s memoirs. Here is one of my favorite of Grant’s poems, from her Poems on Various Subjects, a “familiar epistle” to Anne’s good friend of many years, Beatrice, remembering when they were young and aspired to be poets:

When to part us, loud storms and deep gullies conspir’d,
And sublime meditation to garrats [sic] retir’d;
To the workings of fancy to give a relief,
We sat ourselves down to imagine some grief,
Till we conjur’d up phantoms so solemn and sad,
As, if they had lasted, would make us half mad;
Then in strains so affecting we pour’d the soft ditty,
As mov’d both the rocks and their echoes to pity [but]
The cottage so humble, or sanctified dome,
For the revels of fancy afforded no room;
And the lyre and the garland, were forc’d to give place
To duties domestic … (reprinted in Breen, Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832, pp 88-93)

In Austen’s active life, she traveled all around the coast of southern and once to western England — once as far as Wales, about which (again) we have some sketch-y knowledge: see Diana Birchall’s Jane Austen at the Seaside.

So we can sort of connect our 18th century Austen with Cornwall: “philosophical” studies, and history; poetry and memoirs of travel-writers and others telling of life in the peripheries at the time, the newly burgeoning genres of survey and archeaological analysis, and her own summer travels.

And we can place her against a backdrop of 17th through 18th century history in Cornwall from our own modern perspective: here we have a cornucopia, and from a virtual library of books I recommend F. E. Halliday, The History of Cornwall, Philip Payton’s Cornwall, Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground; Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and The Groves of Eagles, and DuMaurier’s several novels set in Cornwall, especially Jamaica Inn and The King’s General, grounded in the real doings of the civil war, its aftermath and the Grenville and Rashleigh families, and 17th into 18th century history of Menabilly in Cornwall. I’ll bet Stevenson’s reading of DuMaurier’s novel is absorbing and enjoyable.

And we can go there ourselves.

Ellen