The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">43 the heroine, is a clever girl who is interested in politics and is shocked when her feather-brained friend, Camilla, professes, ‘I know nothing of Politics, and cannot bear to hear them mentioned.’

      Catherine finds succour in a garden bower that she has built. When Edward Stanley, recently returned from France, kisses Catherine’s hand in the arbour, her aunt, Mrs Percival, is horrified: ‘Profligate as I knew you to be, I was not prepared for such a sight … I plainly see that every thing is going to sixes and sevens and all order will soon be at an end throughout the Kingdom.’ Catherine is dismayed by her aunt’s rebuke: ‘Not however Ma’am the sooner, I hope, from any conduct of mine … for upon my honour I have done nothing this evening that can contribute to overthrow the establishment of the kingdom.’ ‘You are mistaken Child,’ replies the older woman, ‘the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s individuals, and any one who offends in so gross a manner against decorum and propriety, is certainly hastening it’s ruin.’44

      This is one of Austen’s most explicit references to the French Revolution. There is no mistaking what Mrs Percival means by the overthrow of the establishment of the kingdom. She sees no distinction between radical politics and dangerous sexual impropriety: in her view Edward Stanley has picked up both vices on his French travels. The stability of the state, she suggests, depends on proper behaviour between the sexes. She is horrified that Catherine has been neglecting the improving sermons and catechisms she has foisted upon her.45 French influence, inappropriate reading and sexual licence mean only one thing: revolution. The fact that Jane Austen is clearly mocking Aunt Percival’s political paranoia shows that she has no sympathy for mindless conservatism. But, at the same time, the presence of Eliza and her French news in the household at Steventon alerted the young Austen to the high stakes in the current ‘State of Affairs in the political World’.

      Later in the turbulent 1790s Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the novel that was eventually published after her death under the title Northanger Abbey. It includes a scene not dissimilar to Catherine’s debate with Mrs Percival. The exchange takes place on Beechen Cliff, the hill above the city of Bath. Henry Tilney has been lecturing another Catherine, Miss Morland, on the picturesque, and then moves on to politics and the ‘state of the nation’:

      Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.46

      Strikingly, it is Catherine who puts an end to the silence: ‘I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London.’ Catherine is in fact talking about a new Gothic novel that is about to be published, but she is misunderstood by Henry’s sister, Eleanor, to mean mob riots in London: ‘Good Heaven! – Where could you hear of such a thing?’

      ‘A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday’ [replies Catherine]. ‘It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and every thing of the kind.’

      ‘You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend’s accounts have been exaggerated; – and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by the government to prevent its coming to effect.’

      ‘Government,’ said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, ‘neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much.’ …

      ‘Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; – but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot.’

      ‘Riot! – what riot?’

      The reference to reading about the London horrors in a letter from a friend echoes the real-life detail of Eliza writing to her family about the Mount Street riots. Henry’s reproving speech to his sister blames female imagination for the misunderstanding:

      ‘My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain … You [Catherine] talked of expected horrors in London – and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the hopes of the nation,) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents.’

      Henry’s graphic description recalls a series of violent insurgencies on the streets of London: the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots back in 1780, the Mount Street riots witnessed by Eliza, and also the Bread riots of 1795, when hungry mobs seized flour and bread, damaging mills and bakeries. The threat to the Tower and the image of the streets of London flowing with blood inevitably conjure up the Bastille and the September Massacres.

      ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ ends abruptly with Edward Stanley’s return to France. The events that winter, culminating in the execution of Louis XVI and later Marie Antoinette, perhaps contributed to Jane’s decision to leave it unfinished, though she continued making adjustments to the fragment until at least 1809. Many critics have complained that she ignored the historical events of her times. In 1913, the historian Frederick Harrison described her to his friend Thomas Hardy as ‘a heartless little cynic … penning satirettes about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces, and consigning millions to their graves’.47 This kind of accusation ignores the evidence of ‘Catharine’ and Northanger Abbey, where anxiety about revolution is clearly part of the narrative. And it neglects the fact that, because of her cousin Eliza, Jane Austen was brought exceptionally close to the events of revolutionary France. Why do Austen’s novels not engage more frequently and directly with ‘the Dynasts tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves’? Could it have been not so much because she knew and cared little about it all, but because she knew too much and cared all too deeply? Loving Eliza as she did, it would have been too painful to let her pen dwell on the guilt and misery of revolutionary Paris.

3

       The Vellum Notebooks

      There are three of them. Each is inscribed on the cover in careful handwriting, in imitation of a three-decker novel or a set of complete works: Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third. The first – a collection of little stories, plays, poems and satires – ends with the date 3 June 1793, but it is clear that some of the pieces were written much earlier, at the age of as little as eleven or twelve, and then transcribed in a fair hand when the author was in her eighteenth year. The notebook, purchased ready-made from a stationer, is bound in tanned sheepskin over marbled boards. It is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

      Volume the Second, illustrated here, is another miscellany, including two epistolary novelettes, a parodic ‘History of England’ and various ‘Scraps’, all probably composed when the author was in her mid-teens. It is another stationer’s notebook, this time headed with the acknowledgement, in Latin, ‘a gift from my father’. In small quarto format, it is bound in full parchment – vellum – pasted on to millboard. It is now СКАЧАТЬ