Jane Austen (9 page)

Speaking in her own defence, Mrs Leigh-Perrot argued that she was too rich to steal. She had inherited an estate in Barbados. (In old age she boasted to her great-nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh that she dined with thirty families and employed a housekeeper, a cook, a housemaid, a footman, coachman, gardener, and a gardener’s boy who also waited at table.) She claimed that the parcel’s being still in her hand an hour after leaving the shop was in her favour. She called witnesses in her defence. One was John Crouch, a pawnbroker, who said he had had dealings with Filby. A Miss Blagrave said that on 19 September she had bought a veil at the shop but found two in her parcel when she got home. Five Berkshire neighbours and three Bath tradesmen testified to Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s honesty.

The trial took six and a half hours but the jury stayed out for only fifteen minutes before bringing in a verdict of ‘Not guilty’. There were emotional scenes in court and the case was reported in the
Bath Chronicle
. A pamphlet telling the story of the trial was published at eighteen pence.

The expense of bringing in character witnesses had amounted to £2,000. Mrs Leigh-Perrot said she shuddered to think that innocent people without resources had probably been hanged. The shop was in financial trouble. Mr Smith, the owner, had left his wife and gone bankrupt. Miss Gregory was his sister-in-law. The shop assistant Charles Filby was her lover and they possibly hatched a blackmail plot together.

Vindicated, the Leigh-Perrots went back to their house in Bath, though Mountague Cholmeley growled that ‘infernal Bath’ was a den of villains and a harbour of all sorts of swindlers’. Mrs Leigh-Perrot wanted her accusers put in the pillory, but her solicitor told her this was impracticable.

Despite the falsity of the accusations, a faint shadow hung about her. She was later suspected of stealing garden plants. A college friend of James-Edward Austen-Leigh, Alexander Dyce, wrote later in his copy of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
that the family were ‘dreadfully shocked at the disgrace which she brought upon them’ and that the lady had ‘an invincible propensity to stealing’. If so, she was not the only rich woman to show this weakness. She was notoriously stingy. Six years later she exasperated Jane by failing to hand over a trifling sum she owed her, making only vague offers of payment in kind. Might it not be possible that Gregory and Filby, having seen her steal previously, planted the lace on this occasion in an attempt to get justice as they saw it?

Mrs Leigh-Perrot was disappointed when James-Edward, son, grandson and great-grandson of clergymen, followed them into the Church. She felt his good looks and charm could do better, and threatened financial sanctions if he persisted. She became capricious, sometimes saying she would leave her house, Scarlets, to him, sometimes promising to buy him a living, at other times denying him. However, she relented and made him her heir on condition he added the name Leigh to Austen. Thus he founded the family of Austen-Leighs. He always felt, however, that his great-aunt could and should have helped him earlier.

When Jane Austen was asked which of her characters she liked best, unhesitatingly she replied, ‘Edmund Bertram and Mr Knightley’, adding that she knew real English gentlemen were often very different. The conscientious clergyman, the brave sailor and the responsible landowner were her ideals: but she was clear-eyed enough to recognize how often the reality fell short.

W
HEN JANE WAS
twenty-one, tragedy struck her sister. Cassandra had become engaged in 1795 to the Revd Thomas Fowle, a young man eight years older than she was. He had been one of her father’s pupils from 1779-83, living in the house from the time Cassandra was six until she was ten. He was a friend of her brother James, and his father had been a college friend of Mr Austen. Like his tutor and doubtless on his recommendation Thomas went to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1783. By 1788 he was holder of two curacies and in 1793 his cousin Lord Craven presented him with a living, the rectory of Allington, Wiltshire. He was also appointed Lord Craven’s domestic chaplain. Tom may have proposed to Cassandra when he officiated at the wedding of her cousin and one-time schoolfellow, Jane Cooper, to Captain Thomas Williams in 1792 when Cassandra was nineteen. The engagement was eminently suitable. Thomas’s father was Vicar of Kintbury. Thomas’s brother Fulwar, also one of George’s pupils, succeeded his father and lived at Kintbury till he died in 1840. Fulwar was married to his cousin Eliza Lloyd (pronounced Floyd), whose sisters, Martha and Mary, were friends of Jane. The name was pronounced in this way as the family were originally Welsh.

Mr and Mrs Austen must have been highly pleased with their daughter’s prospects of happiness and Mr and Mrs Fowle were certainly pleased at the idea of having Cassandra as their daughter-in-law. But Tom’s income was small and the young couple agreed to wait to marry until one of the livings Lord Craven held in Shropshire fell vacant. The engagement was never officially announced.

Lord Craven took his chaplain with him when he went as Colonel of the Buffs (3rd Foot) to help put down a slave revolt in the West Indies in 1795. Thomas, hesitating to offend his patron, did not mention the engagement to him and hastily made his will. The Buffs sailed in November but Lord Craven followed later in his private yacht accompanied by Torn, who wrote to Cassandra on 8 January 1796 that if the winds allowed they would sail from Falmouth the following Sunday. When people set off on long sea voyages they were incommunicado for months. Letters could be sent only when ships put into port or met at sea. People left at home could only wait patiently for the return of their loved ones. The return of travellers was necessarily unscheduled and news arrived slowly.

Tom caught yellow fever off San Domingo in February 1797, died and was buried at sea. The Austens, expecting to have him back with them at any time, did not hear of his death until a couple of months later. Lord Craven said afterwards that had he known Thomas was engaged to be married, he would never have taken him abroad.

Cassandra remained close friends with Thomas’s parents for as long as they lived and with his brother Fulwar. Jane said her sister behaved with a degree of resolution and propriety which no common mind could evince in such a situation. Broken-hearted, Cassandra faced life with Christian stoicism. She went into full mourning as if she had been Tom’s widow. James later wrote a poem in Tom’s memory saying how much he had looked forward to officiating at the marriage of his sister and his friend.

Sense and Sensibility
was begun at this time and Elinor’s painful, disciplined self-command reflects Cassandra’s. But how Cassandra must have regretted that ‘sensible’ decision to wait, that fruitless two-year engagement and the poverty which was the only reason for delay! Excessive caution led to disaster and a long life of loneliness for Cassandra, especially after the early death of Jane. It is hard not to see parallels between Cassandra’s fate and the wistful unhappiness of Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
. Anne’s misery was remediable in consoling fantasy whereas Cassandra’s life was ruined by her loss. Although Thomas Fowle left her £1,000 she would surely have preferred a husband to a legacy. Towards the end of
Persuasion
comes the famous passage:

Cassandra marked it and added in the margin, ‘Dear dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold.’

Captain Wentworth in the novel had been made commander in consequence of ‘the action off San Domingo’ and had come into Somersetshire in the summer of 1806. Captain Wentworth, like Jane’s brother Frank, was defending England’s colonial territories in the Caribbean.

In her earliest surviving letter, written from Steventon to Cassandra on 9-10 January 1796, when Cassandra was staying with her intended parents-in-law at Kintbury, looking forward to her marriage, Jane writes of her own flirtation with Tom Lefroy, three weeks younger than herself. She mentions his birthday first, as almost coinciding with Cassandra’s.

The ball Jane writes of was at the home of the rough Squire Har-wood. Serious-minded James’s dancing had improved. Cassandra had scolded Jane for behaviour which might give rise to gossip. Jane wrote teasingly:

Next day Tom found the courage to return the call and Jane pretended to find fault with the colour of his morning coat. Dark colours for men were replacing the pastels popular in the earlier eighteenth century and young men were wearing their own hair instead of powdered wigs. Jane attributed Tom’s old-fashioned taste for a light-coloured coat to his admiration for Henry Fielding’s novel
Tom Jones
. Jane herself had spent all her own small allowance on pink figured silk for her ballgown and white gloves to wear with it. She joked, though there may have been an element of seriousness, that she half expected a proposal.
'
I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.’ But the evening ended without any declaration from the young man.

In her next letter (14 January) Jane drags in the mention of his name only to declare she does ‘not care sixpence’ for Tom. In the continuation next day Jane adds: ‘At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.’

The reference to tears may be an exaggeration but there is no doubt Jane was hurt, if only in her pride. Among the music copied out by her own hand there is a heavy concentration of Irish airs, which may suggest some emotional involvement. However, she also had a lot of Scottish music and she knew no Scotsmen.

Nearly three years after Tom’s departure Jane wrote to her sister, then at Godmersham, that Mrs Lefroy, Tom’s aunt, had called:

Mrs Lefroy was the bearer of not one, but two pieces of bad news. Not only had the charming, if bashful, Tom Lefroy been shunted out of Jane’s orbit but the ‘friend’ referred to, another eligible young man, the Revd Samuel Blackall, had made it plain he could not ‘indulge’ any expectations of Jane. It is possible that Jane Austen gave him small encouragement. The letter to Cassandra, though, suggests she had cherished hopes or at least let her fancy play with agreeable possibilities. Mr Blackall was five years older than Jane, and had been a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before becoming Rector of North Cadbury in Somerset. He was married in 1813 to Susanna Lewis, ten years younger than himself.

Jane’s letter to her sister continues:

Mrs Lefroy was the wife of the Rector of Ashe, the Revd Isaac Peter George Lefroy, and dignified with the courtesy title ‘Madam’ Lefroy. The family, of Huguenot origin, were worldly and intellectual. Anne Lefroy was better off than the Austens and did not need to manage her own dairy. She taught the village children to read and write, and to plait straw so that they could earn money by making hats. She vaccinated all her husband’s parishioners herself. Her brother, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, rented Deane parsonage for two years. He said his sister had an exquisite taste for poetry and knew the works of Milton, Pope, Gray and Collins almost by heart, together with ‘the poetical passages of Shakespeare’. Sir Samuel has been confused by some biographers with Sir Brook Bridges, whose daughter Elizabeth married Jane’s brother Edward.

Jane looked on Mrs Lefroy as a dear friend, though whether she acted the part of a true friend in teasing her nephew out of his attraction to a penniless girl may be doubted. Jane’s feelings were clearly piqued, not least her pride. She says she doesn’t care about Mr Blackall or about Tom but we do not believe her. She protests too much. Tom became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and lived to be ninety-three. He remembered Jane as the object of his youthful admiration all his life.