A neglected Jane Austen text! — Catherine, or The Bower

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland reading a gothic romance (2007 Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies) — the closest image to Austen’s conception of Catherine Percival (named Kitty Peterson by Jane Austen, the more dignified romance name is given her in the ms by JEAL) …

Dear friends and readers,

What more appropriate to start the new year with than a neglected Jane Austen text? But can this really be? a text by Austen not close read exhaustively, elaborated upon recklessly, post-texted, edited with devotional minuteness? yes. One of the four admittedly unfinished novels: Catherine, or the Bower, probably because it has been dated with the juvenilia, published with them, and not paid sufficient attention to? Why until recently has no one has why Austen didn’t continue with this one? I suggest it’s the early date — the other three come from her mid-career or Bath (The Watsons, begun 1801), post Bath (Lady Susan, 1806-09), and just before death (Sanditon, 1817). It’s seen as juvenile.

I think it was left off for at least one of the same reasons as The Watsons was abandoned after such thorough work and Lady Susan hastily finished: not socially acceptable to her family because the themes too frank about the family, too radical about women’s position. I have been reading a book whose title and author I am not at liberty to disclose which has the idea that faithful sequels meant to fulfill the original, done very well, can shed light on where the text was going. This is not an original or new idea. It was this thought that led Chris Brindle to produce his play of Sanditon: he read Anna Lefroy’s continuation in Mary Gaither Marshall’s edition; long ago Catherine Hubbard finished The Watsons as The Youngest Sister out of the offered endings Austen told Cassandra (as reported by James Edward Austen-Leigh).

I’ve also noted in other studies of sequels and post-texts and extrapolations from the finished novels, that movement of types or characters from one to another of her novels shows us (as Q.D. Leavis showed so long ago in Scrutiny) how Austen repeats her patterns and types. So by looking at the other probably finished books and their continuations, we can understand better what lies there but as yet not fully developed in Catherine, or the Bower.

But first, there is something beyond the poverty of the George Austen family in the father’s youngest years and after the father died and a sexually transgressive mother standing in the way of discussion: the refusal of the Austen family and its conservative pro-family stalwarts, among which Deirdre LeFaye was an adamantine presence: the reality that Eliza Hancock was the biological daughter of Warren Hastings by Philadelphia Austen who just like the eldest Miss Cecilia Wynne (become Mrs Lascelles) at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower, was shipped out to India and married to a man much older than she, not congenial, and found solace and a modus vivendi through her relationship with Hastings. They were also not eager to have it known that like the younger Miss Mary Wynne, George and Philadelphia’s youngest sister, Leonora, farmed out “as a companion” to a Mrs Hinton, had (like the second son of George and Cassandra) apparently been dismissed to the lower status hardship of a servant’s life and simply never mentioned again. Austen is clearly making up for this because she provides a specific fate for the younger Miss Wynne too: taken by the Dowager Lady Halifax as a companion to her Daughters,” and had accompanied her family into Scotland” (Doody & Murray, Catherine and Other Writings, Oxford, 1993, pp 187-189). (For full details of these two young women, see Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen’s Family Through Five Generations, 33-34, 42-43)

These two fates — not atypical for women of this era — are emphatically at the opening of Catherine, or the Bower. It is the Wynne sisters’ companionship in which Catherine takes delight. It is against the Wynne sisters Catherine compares Camilla Stanley, for, unlike Catherine Morland, but very like Charlotte Heywood (from Sanditon), Catherine sees through Camilla’s lies sufficiently not to like and to distrust her. This earlier Catherine was not to be a naif in a Gothic parody, but a real girl suffering from a repressive aunt’s sexual paranoia. She also recognizes the flaws in the overbearing too self-confident hero, Edward Stanley (as her aunt fails to appreciate). We are fooled because it seems that the Wynnes are dropped in the text we have. We are also fooled because the portrait of the male Stanley is not a caricature in the manner of John Thorpe or obviously subtly manipulative in the way of Willoughby or Henry Crawford. If you read with attention, you find at the end there is hope for Catherine to escape her aunt in the country and come to London. We are told Catherine has received a letter from “Mrs Lascelles, announcing the speedy return of herself and husband to England” (p 229). We are also told that the Stanleys are intimate with the Halifaxes; clearly Catherine, though dubious and hesitant about Camilla, and while recognizing that Edward Stanley leaves a lot to be desire morally is not going to give either of these connections up.

Rose Williams as Miss Heywood early on makes friends with with black Miss Lamb (Crystal Clarke) — she is never silly just unexperienced as yet (Sanditon, Season 1)

The novel has only begun. The continuations and sequels to the other unfinished novels can also serve to remind us that more characters would have turned up in Austen’s book. So as with Sanditon as Austen left it, we had only Sidney Parker slightly delineated and none of his hinted-at associates, but have been taught by 3 seasons of a semi-Davies product, that many other characters were in potentia, so in this Catherine, or the Bower, I speculate that either Edward could have had an internal reform such as we see in Darcy and Wentworth, or another worthier suitor come upon the scene. I also suggest that as with the other Austen novels, Catherine, our heroine, would have had to learn to distinguish between different circles of friends to which she can belong. So the Stanleys and Aunt Percival’s relations in London say would have been but two circles; the Wynne sisters would have brought the Lascelles from India, and the Halifaxes from Scotland. One of the more prominent qualities of Edward himself most prominent quality is self-satisfaction, something we see in other heroes, which is got over, but also different ones not exactly villainous but not personality characteristics which bode well for later like (rather like Frank Churchill): Edward Stanley shows a superficial willingness to play on the emotions of others, a kick out of alarming people (p 219)

Within the scenes we have other interesting themes: Charlotte Smith’s novels are admired and perhaps genuinely understood by Catherine; we have not yet seen her discuss them with anyone with a real knowledge of them. There is the question of Catherine’s inheritance (if any) from her aunt, the possibility of Catherine being left propertyless should her aunt die without making adequate provision for her. Catherine herself, rather like Marianne Dashwood (and Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Jane Bennet) likes to have quiet moments in retreat and the question of the nature of social life, the place of imagination (as in a bower — I remember a play by Jane Bowles about what can emerge from summer and a bower, In the Summer House) are adumbrated. There is much here that remains unwritten about because the fragment is not taken seriously.

Which takes me to my last new comment for the new year: I think the juvenilia have been over-rated in the last thirty-five years. There are inspired moments of high brilliance, irresistible comedy, parodic insight, aesthetic deconstruction of the elements of fiction, but many of these fragments are scraps — and I have come across pages of solemn hagiographical talk and speculative elaboration not admitted as such. Cassandra’s drawings once and for all let’s admit are dreadful. This desire to distance Austen from sentimentality and the conservative politics of the Victorian realistic novel also get in the way of acknowledging the first achievement of Austen in Catherine, or the Bower. As Juliet McMaster has said, Catherine is the first of the texts to have psychological depth that is persuasive enough to allow us to enter into it in a reader-like reverie.

Let us hope someone will see their way to a film adaptation of this one — it will have to be someone willing to overcome the immediate objections of the family and conservative fans eager to protect the “respectability” (which Austen makes fun of in Catherine, or the Bower) of the Hancocks, Hastings, and anyone else whose prestige they fear is in danger from anyone anywhere. Let us recall Marianne Dashwood’s response to Elinor’s fear lest they offend Mrs Jennings, as criteria for their conduct and/or thought: “we are all offending every moment of our lives” (S&S, Chapter 13).

A favorite still for me: Sophie Thompson as Miss Bates looking up, enjoying a pleasant moment, just before she is humiliated by Emma at the Box hill picnic (1996 Emma, scripted Douglas McGrath)

We find thus early in her life, early in her writing career (for she carried on writing for the rest of her life and had yet to begin one of her six great novels), a serious criticism of the way her society treats women, looks at relationships among people, an adumbrated examination of what a well and worthily live life could be. I also like that thus early we see that she is prepared to use autobiographical material centrally. What a radical serious and potentially fine novel it could have been.

Ellen