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

Author:Paula Byrne [Byrne, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 978-0062199065
Publisher: HarperCollins Publisher
Published: 2013-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

Do not be in a hurry; depend upon it, the right Man will come at last; you will in the course of the next two or three years, meet with somebody more generally unexceptionable than anyone you have yet known, who will love you as warmly as ever He [John Plumptre, with whom Fanny was in love] did, and who will so completely attach you, that you will feel you never really loved before. – And then, by not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure, and countenance, while Mrs Wm. Hammond is growing old by confinements and nursing.46

Few of Jane Austen’s suitors had made a lasting impression on her. As she herself noted, she had high standards. It is gratifying to have in her own words her description of the ideal husband: ‘There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand … where Grace and Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart and Understanding.’ But she was realist enough to know ‘such a person may not come in your way’.47

The details of the seaside romance that were revealed many years after her death tell us far more about Cassandra than they do about Jane. The story came to light in the first place only because Cassandra was struck by another young man (a Mr Henry Eldridge of the Engineers) who reminded her of Jane’s seaside lover: a good-looking, clever man who died young. This was Cassandra projecting her own tragedy on to her sister. Maybe it was her own story of loving and losing Tom Fowle and her own romantic nature, her belief in the irreplaceable ‘one great love’, that deep down she was really remembering. For the nieces who had known Jane Austen well, the seaside romance left no lasting legacy: she ‘never had any attachment that overclouded her happiness, for long. This had not gone far enough, to leave misery behind.’48

People sometimes wonder how Jane Austen could write so compellingly about love when she never married or had a grand passion of her own. We are fortunate to have a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, in which she has been solicited for, and gives, advice on what Fanny Burney had once called ‘the minute and complex intricacies of the human heart’.49 It gives exceptional insight into her own view of such matters: ‘I read yours through the very evening I received it, getting away by myself. I could not bear to leave off when I had once begun. I was full of curiosity and concern,’ she begins. She finds Fanny’s dilemma of the utmost interest: ‘I really am impatient myself to be writing something on so very interesting a subject, though I have no hope of writing anything to the purpose … I could lament in one sentence and laugh in the next.’

Then, turning agony aunt, she tells Fanny that it is her own belief that no one dies from disappointment in love.

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