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

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СКАЧАТЬ brother James, contains marginal annotations in her hand. The volumes of Goldsmith are still in the family’s possession and Jane Austen’s annotations have recently been published in full for the first time.18 Her first known scribbling had been a defacement of a book: her French textbook, from when she was eight, has her signature ‘Jane Austen., 5th Decr. 1783’ and then ‘Mothers angry fathers gone out’ and ‘I wish I had done.’19 Once she had a pen in her hand she couldn’t stop herself from writing. Reading Goldsmith’s biased opinions on English history, she displays the almost uncontainable urge to scribble that is the mark of the born writer.

      The annotations on Goldsmith clearly reveal her own passionately royalist feelings. In Jane Austen’s eyes, Oliver Cromwell was a ‘Detestable Monster!’20 Goldsmith informs us that he ‘inherited a very small paternal fortune’, to which Austen adds: ‘And that was more than he deserved.’ She praises Lady Fairfax (‘Charming Woman!’) for making loyalist remarks from the public gallery when the King was put on trial. The King’s execution drew her most forceful denunciations. ‘Such was the fortitude of the Stuarts when oppressed and accused!’ she wrote of King Charles I. She finished and dated her parodic ‘History of England’ 26 November 1791, her hatred of the English revolution heightened by the French.21

      In an account of the death of the Parliamentarian John Hampden, Goldsmith wrote of his character: ‘affability in conversation, temper, art, eloquence in debate, and penetration in counsel’. Austen responded in the margin: ‘what a pity that such virtues sh[oul]d be clouded by Republicanism’. Of other anti-royalists she wrote, ‘Shame to such members’ and ‘Impudent Fellows’. She often substituted the word ‘guilt’ for ‘innocence’ in relation to anti-royalists. ‘Fiddlededia’, she writes – meaning nonsense or fiddledeedee.

      Jane Austen adored the Stuarts. A touching speech attributed to Bonnie Prince Charlie is annotated ‘Who but a Stuart could have so spoken?’ Her loyalty was inspired by her Leigh ancestry. Of the Stuarts the young Jane Austen noted in her pencil marks: ‘A family, who were always ill-used, BETRAYED or NEGLECTED, Whose virtues are seldom allowed, while their Errors are never forgotten’. These were strong opinions for a young girl. Her Jacobite sympathies meant that she shared Goldsmith’s hostility to the Whigs, who dominated politics in the Georgian era. He claimed that ‘the Whigs governed the Senate and the court … bound the lower orders of people with severe laws, and kept them at a distance by vile distinctions; and then taught them to call this – Liberty’, and she agreed: ‘Yes, This is always the Liberty of Whigs and Republicans.’ To his comment that ‘all the severe and most restrictive laws were enacted by that party that are continually stunning mankind with a cry of freedom’, she writes, ‘My dear Dr G. – I have lived long enough in this World to know that it is always so.’ She felt that the Whigs represented new money, selfishness and self-aggrandizement. Her sympathies were with the poor and oppressed. Beside an account of an impoverished couple who were forced to the last resort of cutting their child’s throat and hanging themselves, she wrote, ‘How much are the Poor to be pitied and the Rich to be blamed.’ She shared with her father and all her family a paternalistic Christian Toryism.

      In another of her Steventon books, Vicesimus Knox’s anthology of Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose Selected for the Improvement of Scholars, she disagreed with every slight on the character of her heroine, Mary Queen of Scots: ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘A lie’, ‘Another lie’, ‘she was not attached to him’. Correspondingly, she vehemently opposed any praise for Queen Elizabeth I: ‘a lie’, ‘a Lie – an entire lie from beginning to end’.22

      Having defaced Goldsmith’s History she eventually decided that she would write a sustained parody, showing up his inadequacies as a historian. She gave her work the title ‘The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian’, dedicated it to Cassandra and added a nota bene: ‘There will be very few dates in this History.’ Austen parodies the tone and style of Goldsmith with unerring accuracy, pinpointing his incongruities and omissions.

      Jane Austen made her dislike of Elizabeth I very clear, though she did cast some of the blame on to her male advisers: ‘It was the peculiar Misfortune of this Woman to have bad Ministers – Since wicked as she herself was, she could not have committed such extensive Mischief, had not these vile and abandoned Men connived at, and encouraged her in her Crimes.’ All her sympathies were with Mary Queen of Scots: ‘firm in her Mind; Constant in her Religion; and prepared herself to meet the cruel fate to which she was doomed, with a magnanimity that could alone proceed from conscious Innocence’. Mary, she says, was friendless apart from the Duke of Norfolk and her only friends now ‘are Mr Whitaker, Mrs Lefroy, Mrs Knight, and myself’. Whitaker was the author of a book called Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated, just published in 1787. Mrs Knight was, of course, the wife of Thomas Knight, who had adopted young Edward Austen and who would play an important part in Jane’s future literary career. Mrs Lefroy was a friend and mentor, who lived in a nearby parsonage.

      Jane Austen also makes a series of knowing jokes about the homosexual preferences of King James I and his circle. The ‘attentions’ of his courtier Sir Henry Percy ‘were entirely confined to Lord Mounteagle’, while ‘His Majesty was of that amiable disposition that inclines to Friendships and in such points was possessed of a keener penetration in Discovering Merit than many other people’. The nature of these ‘Friendships’ might be hinted at in the phrase ‘keener penetration’,23 but it is made explicit in the charade that Austen then slips into her ‘History’: ‘My first is what my second was to King James the 1st, and you tread on my whole.’ The answer is of course, car-pet, an allusion to Sir Robert Carr, the most notorious of King James’s homosexual lovers.24 Those who believe that Jane Austen could never have made a joke about sodomy in the navy (‘Rears, and Vices’) may want to reconsider their opinion in the light of her King James joke, made as a teenager. And read aloud to family and friends. The Georgians, as is clear from the thriving trade in caricatures riddled with double entendres, were a far cry from the prudish Victorians.

      Like all big families, the Austens had their own private language, their in-jokes. Many of the allusions are no doubt lost on us, but certain ones can be deduced. Jane was known to have red cheeks, so there are several jokes about young women who have too much red in their cheeks. Again, Jane drew on the names of family members in stories such as ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’ and ‘Henry and Eliza’. It is hardly a coincidence that a story dedicated to Frank includes a pious young man who is torn between entering the Church and joining the navy, and thus becomes a chaplain on board a man of war. Another story describes a boy who, like Charles and Frank, is ‘placed at the Royal Academy for Seamen at Portsmouth when about thirteen years old’. On graduating he is ‘discharged on board one of the vessels of a small fleet destined for Newfoundland … from whence he regularly sent home a large Newfoundland Dog every Month to his family’.25 And one suspects some sort of family joke in a story dedicated to Austen’s mother, in which Jane writes, ‘I saw you thro’ a telescope, and was so struck by your Charms that from that time to this I have not tasted human food.’26

      The little ‘History of England’ in Volume the Second is a genuine family production: it is peppered with caricature illustrations of the kings and queens of England, drawn by Jane’s sister Cassandra. They are jokily responsive to Jane’s narrative. Cassandra’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth presents her as shrewish and ugly with a long witch-like nose, while Mary Queen of Scots is full of face, pink-cheeked and beautiful with dark, curly hair. Edward IV, whom Jane notes is ‘famous for his beauty’, is drawn СКАЧАТЬ