Jane Austen Made Me Do It (37 page)

T
he summer of 1813 opened on Chawton, rainy at first, but soon turning into a very properly sunny July, making the rose-red bricks of the cottage glow, and the laburnum blossom shine gold as Jane Austen looked out the open window into the garden. The white syringa made a handsome display, and the shrubbery was filled with Sweet William, pinks, and columbine. But Jane's glance was unseeing, her thoughts turned inward. She was writing.

Her mother and sister were at the Great House for the afternoon, where her brother Edward, having successfully overseen the getting in of the hay, was now planning to lay out a new garden, to be enclosed by a brick wall. She could imagine, without having to hear it, the ongoing discussion with her brother James and her nephews, as to the relative merits of the garden being placed at the top of the lawn behind the House, or remaining near the Rectory. So she was in hopes of some continued quiet, a precious and rare commodity in this summer, for her brother Charles and his children
had just left after a month's visit, while Edward and his long string of children were in residence at the Great House at Chawton, and James and his family were spending some weeks at the small one. Often the house was boiling with people, and Jane appreciated the silence as she deliberately brought the final threads of
Mansfield Park
toward their completion.

Both Cassandra and Henry had implored her to end the story differently, with Fanny marrying Henry Crawford and Edmund marrying Mary, but she wrote with calm and certain decision, making Mary's views on her brother's misconduct with Maria Bertram far too outrageous for her ever to become an acceptable wife to Edmund.

A scuffling of feet was heard outside the door, and a little girl precipitated herself into the room, holding a large, squirming tortoise-shell tabby cat in her arms. This was Caroline, her brother James's younger daughter of eight years old, and a favorite, though not particularly welcome at the moment. Caroline's older half-sister Anna, a lovely girl just turned twenty, with hazel eyes and a clear complexion, followed.

“Caroline! You must not disturb Aunt Jane when she is writing. I am so sorry, dear Aunt,” she said.

Jane smiled, turned her paper over, put up her pen, and adjusted the white cap she wore over her dark hair, which had slipped a little while she was absorbedly composing at the small round table in the dining-parlour. “You are not disturbing me, my dears. I am come to a good stopping place. Tom will not die. But oh,” she said, regarding the cat.

“Oh, Caroline, the cat. You know Aunt Jane can't bear cats …”

“Why do you not like cats, Aunt Jane? Tyger won't scratch you, he wouldn't.”

“Cats are very well, Caroline, in the garden or in the kitchen;
but when they venture too near, they make my eyes hurt, you know, and then I catch the head-ache.”

“I will take Tyger away then,” said Caroline, disappointed.

“No, do not, my love. Only do not let him get up on the table. As long as I do not touch him, I believe we will do very well.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite. And what have you been doing today, young ladies? Have you gone on with your story, Anna? Have you determined what sort of a novel it is to be?”

“It will be a horrid novel, Aunt Jane,” said Anna enthusiastically. “I am having a murdered ancestress haunt the castle as a spectre!”

Jane removed her spectacles and folded them away inside her writing-desk. “Anna, Anna,” she said in mock sorrow, “I knew how it would be. We will have your ‘Car of Falkenstein' story all over again. I never laughed so much in my life.”

On a previous visit, Jane and Anna had conspired on a ridiculous tale of a neighbor, whose rides in a carriage had given rise to extravagantly imagined, horrid plots.

“A most ghastly vision, the result of reading too many novels from the circulating library. But seriously, Anna, I was half in hopes your next work would deal more in the probable.”

“The horrid and the tragical are so much more striking, Aunt Jane,” Anna protested. “I know you are right, however, and I must improve my taste, if I am to be an author like you.”

“What, like me, and not like our esteemed Mrs. Radcliffe, or Mrs. Hunter, who so delighted us last summer with
Lady Maclairn, the Victim of Villainy
? Nearly drowning in her own tears!”

“Yes, how we did laugh at her! But I do know what you mean, Aunt Jane. It is harder to make characters who are truly lifelike, than skeletons and ghouls.”

“I am glad you are so wise as to know it; but I confess a secret
desire to see you work up something amusing about the excesses of your murderess. Only it might be too terrible for the public.”

Caroline looked up from playing with the cat.

“What have you been writing, Aunt Jane? Is it about Jane and Elizabeth again? That is what you were writing when we were here last summer.”

“No, Caroline, you know
Pride and Prejudice
has been printed,” Anna told her. “Only remember, it is rather a great secret that Aunt Jane wrote it, so we are not to talk about it.”

“That is very good of you, Anna. Your father has been so kind in not mentioning it everywhere; unlike your Uncle Henry. I believe he has told his entire acquaintance that the author is his sister. I do not doubt that he is now telling every one he meets in Scotland.”

“Won't he be here next week? You can scold him well, then,” said Anna.

Jane shook her head. “No. I would not wish to give him even a moment's pain, so soon after his loss of poor Eliza.” Henry's wife had died only in April, and he had gone to Scotland for a change of scene. “And if it gives him pleasure to tell people about it, I must try to harden myself, though I dislike it being spoken of by every person one meets.”

“I am sure, if I should ever be so happy as to publish a novel, I would go to London and meet all the famous!” exclaimed Anna.

“Ah, your nature is more sociable than mine, Anna. To be lionized would make me feel wild indeed. No, no, I am much better off here, where I belong.”

“Well, Caroline, I must say your cat is behaving very well. He quite deserves the honour of the poem your papa wrote on him, at Christmas.”

Caroline beamed. “It does not show him off as a very good cat, however. Stealing the mutton steak meant for Papa's supper.”

“Can you say the poem for Aunt Jane?” Anna urged.

“No, it is too long, but you know he said that if Tyger ever did such a thing again he would have him shot through the head and hung up with the stoats and weasels as a lesson to the tabby race. But poor Tyger, I won't let that happen.” She hugged the cat, which wriggled violently.

“James was always a fine versifier,” said Jane, “and it is natural that the talent has descended to his son.”

For James-Edward, Caroline's older brother, a schoolboy of fifteen, had lately written a humorous verse to his Aunt Jane expressing his surprise at discovering she was the authoress of two famous volumes.

“Oh, I thought his verses were so inelegant,” said Anna disparagingly, “saying he was as surprised as a pig the butcher had stuck though with a knife!”

“And to have a relation whose works were dispersed through the whole of the nation. No; they are fresh, and artless, and I appreciate his sentiment—that I do.”

“But you write poems that are almost as good,” said Caroline critically. “The one you wrote about Anna was so fine, I wish you would write one about me.”

Jane laughed. “I would call it a deliberately bad poem, Caroline, when I rhymed ‘Anna' with ‘savannah,' and said her wit descended like Niagara Falls. Dear me! How silly we are.”

“ ‘Caroline' would be easier to rhyme with than ‘Anna,' ” persisted the little girl.

“My poems are not my pride, though they are a family failing. A cat cannot steal meat without an Austen writing an ode on it. However, I will try.”

She bent over her table, dipped her quill, wrote a few lines, and then handed the paper to Anna. Anna read, and laughed.

“It is very nice,” said Caroline critically, “I like it being about me, but you do tell stories and write novels much better than poems.”

“Who are the characters you are writing about now, Aunt Jane?” asked Anna.

“I am writing about Fanny.”

“Oh, please tell about her. What does she do?”

“Fanny is a very singular girl, for she refuses to act. She thinks acting quite wicked. I am afraid she is not my most amusing heroine; but I wanted a complete change, after my last. I do not wish it to be thought that wit should be more prized than goodness.”

“But acting isn't wicked—Papa says that you used to have plays, in Steventon barn,” said Anna. “I wish I could have seen them.”

“Did you act too, Aunt Jane? Or did you refuse, like Fanny?”

“I am sure you were the very best of the actresses! You do read so beautifully.”

“Not quite,” said Jane modestly. “No; our best actress was your Aunt Eliza.”

“Aunt Eliza?” asked Anna thoughtfully. “I can't picture that. I only think of her as so sadly ill, and not able to leave her bed for so long.”

“Yet there was a time when she was young and pretty, and quite the greatest flirt of the modern age.”

Jane was silent for a moment, thinking of her sister-in-law. How the gayest spirit of all the Steventon theatricals had suffered, and been brought down to dust.

“My father once told me he was in love with her,” said Anna, “and she could not decide between him and Uncle Henry. I can hardly believe it.”

“Many men wanted to marry Eliza,” Jane admitted. “Sometimes I thought it was only a game to her. Yet she really had a warm heart. It was her living in France so long, that gave her the airs of the world.”

“It is as well Uncle Henry got her,” said Anna. “He is much more fashionable than our papa.”

“I admired her very much, as a girl. And she has been so much in my thoughts that one of my characters, Mary Crawford, has grown rather like her.”

“Will you read us some of what you have written, Aunt?” begged Anna. “We laughed to die when you were reading about Elizabeth and Mr. Collins!”

“The work I have in hand may disappoint you, then; it is quite different. And I think it may be a little dull for …” She nodded at Caroline.

“Then tell us a story, Aunt Jane. Just made up for me, like your fairy tales,” Caroline implored.

“But fairy tales may not amuse a young lady like Anna. I have the two of you to please equally.”

“Oh, I always loved your fairy tales, Aunt Jane, and I do still. Please tell one—if you are not too tired from your writing.”

“Very well. Only let us have our cold meat, first, it is time,” said Jane, and summoned a maid, who shortly brought in plates of cold pie, salad from the garden, and sweet-cake, and placed
them on the sideboard with the elderberry cordial. Caroline was bid to send Tyger out, and she let go the animal, which made a bee-line for the window, and after surveying the sunny scene without, jumped down into the shrubbery and was away.

When they had eaten, Jane asked Caroline what story she wanted told. “Fairies again? Command me.”

“Oh, make a story about a cat!”

“Your cat? Tyger? Or a constellation of cats?”

“A constellation!”

“But I don't want to hear about cats—I want to hear more about Fanny, and acting and all,” complained Anna.

Jane sipped her cordial thoughtfully, before she spoke.

“Once there lived a terrible old cat named Mrs. Norris.”

“Was she a tortoise-shell cat, like Tyger?”

“Why yes, I rather think she was. A fierce, brindled creature, with jowls and a face like a monkey.”

“My Tyger has a face like a pansy,
I
think.”

“Well, Mrs. Norris was a stout cat, with short legs, and a propensity to direct all the household. She considered herself as the lady in charge, and gave orders very firmly, whether needful or not.”

“Was she as dictatorial as Lady Catherine de Bourgh?” asked Anna.

“Quite different. She had not so much money, or rank. She was a clergyman's widow, but she did like to interfere, quite as much as Lady Catherine, and her prejudice, and her faulty judgment, made her a penance to all around. She was particularly unkind to a poor little kitten—we may call her Fanny, like my heroine.”

“And what sort of kitten was Fanny?” Caroline inquired breathlessly. “Did she have brown hair, like me?”

“She was a little grey kitten, with soft, light eyes. Mrs. Norris
was harsh to her, very. She would not let her play with the other cats, but kept her down, reminding her that she was not a pure bred; she would not let her have anything nice, not even to sit by the fire. Which is very cruel when you think how cold it is in Northamptonshire in winter, and how cats admire a good fire.”

“The story is set in Northamptonshire, then? Not in a castle, I suppose,” asked Anna, regretfully.

“No, but a very grand house, with a park five miles round. I shall call it Mans-cat Park.”

“Oh! Is it like the Great House here at Chawton?”

“Very. And at Mans-cat Park, Mrs. Norris managed to get everything good for herself.”

“What sort of things?”

“Oh, anything that was going. Cheese, and plants, but most of all, green baize.”