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

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      Cassandra’s drawing of Mary Queen of Scots in Jane Austen’s ‘History of England’

      Anybody reading through the vellum notebooks will notice a seemingly endless succession of heroines weeping and fainting. At the end of ‘Edgar and Emma’, the heroine retires to her room and continues in tears for ‘the remainder of her Life’. In ‘A beautiful description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds’, Melissa drapes herself in her bed – somewhat diaphanously wrapped in ‘a book muslin bedgown, a chambray gauze shift, and a french net nightcap’ – so that the devoted Sir William can minister to her in her distressed fit of extreme sensibility. A doctor asks whether she is thinking of dying, to which the reply is that ‘She has not strength to think at all.’ ‘Nay then,’ replies the witty doctor, ‘she cannot think to have Strength.’30

      It is tricky for modern readers fully to understand the genius of the vellum notebooks without placing them in the context of ‘sentimentalism’ and the late eighteenth-century ‘novel of sensibility’. Sentimentalism is a slippery concept, not least because what was first an approbatory term increasingly became pejorative. The cult of sensibility or sentimentalism was acted out in a code of conduct which placed emphasis on the feelings rather than on reason. A heightened sensitivity to emotional experience and an acute responsiveness to nature were perceived as the marks of the person of sensibility. Medical writers of the era connected sensibility to madness, over-taxed nerves and hysteria. In a sense, it was the eighteenth century’s term for what we now call manic depression. In the literature of the time, suicide was sometimes seen as the ultimate manifestation of extreme sensibility.

      Sensibility had its orgins in philosophy, but it became a literary movement, particularly in the newly emerging genre of the novel. Characters in sentimental novels are often fragile individuals, prone to sensibility, which manifests itself in tears, fainting fits and nervous excitability. Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling were exemplars of the genre which emphasized ‘feeling’ and aimed to elicit an emotional or sentimental response from the reader, usually by relating scenes of distress or tenderness. The most notorious of all sentimental novels was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which depicted a highly sensitive hero who kills himself because of unrequited love. It was said that every teenager in the land identified with the hero and shed tears when reading the novel, some even going so far as to commit copycat suicide.

      The flip-side of this popular sentimental craze was the contention that such extreme behaviour was mere narcissism and self-indulgent histrionics. Furthermore, anti-sentimental thinkers associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the violence of the French Revolution. After all, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse was one of the bibles of sensibility and it was that same Rousseau whose Social Contract and theory of the ‘general will’ underpinned the ideology of the Jacobins. The young, passionately anti-revolutionary Jane Austen belonged firmly to the camp of anti-sensibility – though twenty years later her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, would reveal a more nuanced and complex response to the phenomenon.

      During the exact period when Jane Austen was preparing the vellum notebooks, her brothers were also engaged in a literary project that centred on the critique of sensibility. James Austen, sophisticated, creative and ambitious, went at the age of fourteen to his father’s alma mater, St John’s College, Oxford. He was already showing some talent as a poet. In 1786 he went on a Grand Tour on the continent, including a visit to cousin Eliza de Feuillide’s estate in Guienne, France. After his return home he took holy orders and was ordained deacon in December 1787. While serving as a curate in Hampshire, but still spending most of his time in Oxford, he launched, with the assistance of his brother Henry, who was himself a St John’s undergraduate by this time, a weekly literary periodical called the Loiterer. It was initially aimed at an Oxford student audience, but James eventually managed to get wider distribution for it, engaging a London publisher called Thomas Egerton and also advertising in the Reading Mercury, the local paper that served Steventon and the rest of East Hampshire. The periodical ran for a little over a year from 1789 to 1790. It eventually closed because, as James put it, the publisher’s bills were too long and the readers’ subscription list too short. James gave up on his ambition to be a published author, though he continued writing poetry for his own pleasure (when he wasn’t riding to hounds) throughout his career in the Church.