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1817: Jane Austen’s death
The death of one of Britain’s greatest ever novelists went all but unnoticed by everyone except Jane Austen’s immediate family.
The waspish maiden aunt, who died on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41, had been suffering for a year from nausea, diarrhoea, muscle weakness and fatigue. She had only in recent years been in a position to concentrate exclusively on writing and had gained modest success.
Jane Austen was born 16 December 1775 in Steventon Rectory in Hampshire where her father, George, was vicar of the parish church. She was the younger of two girls, of eight children. Their father came from an old and respected family, but now he had the ‘ living’ of the parish: a small sum on which to bring up a gentleman’s family.
The Austens lived in a three-storey house with a kitchen garden where Mrs Austen grew vegetables, and a field where she kept cows. Mrs Austen, Jane and her sister Cassandra sewed dresses for themselves and shirts for the men. Family entertainments included board and card games, puzzles, and charades. The family gathered round and read aloud from novels and other light literature. As the children grew up, they would write plays which were produced in the rectory barn by brother James.
Jane and Cassandra were sent to the Abbey School House in Reading where they would have been taught French, Italian, needlework, spelling, dancing, music and drama. There was access to a lending library with its novels of romance and adventure and publications such as the Lady's Magazine which carried
fiction. They had to leave the school at the end of December 1786 because the family could not afford the fees.
George Austen supplemented his income by tutoring three boys who also boarded in the parsonage. Jane probably had access to the same books the boys were taught from, and she had full use of the parsonage library. Her father must have encouraged or at least tolerated her writing, for even paper and ink were an expense that had to be noted in the family budget.
Jane was very shy in early adolescence and would tend to be silent – and never developed into a composed individual. She has been described as unpredictable in public and awkward in society.
Writing career
Her first stories were made up to entertain family members, from these she progressed to writing short novels. At 15, she wrote Love
and Friendship, which was a satire of contemporary romances. Her first adult novel was Elinor and Marianne, an early version of
Sense and Sensibility which was written in epistolary form (as a series of letters). The next was Pride and Prejudice which was started when Jane was 20, the same age as her heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Her father offered this novel to a publisher who rejected it and it was not published for another 16 years.
She told tales of middle-class provincial life where the constant preoccupation is courtship and the only ambition is marriage. Family relationships and above all the relationships between sisters are central to her work. This was very much the world of your ancestors in the ‘middling classes of society’ without the intrusion of any of the big events of the day. There are no politics or even reference to the precarious state of the monarchy. There is no mention of the Napoleonic Wars which were taking place for almost all of Jane Austen’s adult life, though the action could be propelled by the arrival of a regiment in the heroine’s locality with its garrison of eligible officers. This was a true reflection of life for women, for whom politics and wars were part of the male sphere and did not intrude into the home space.
For all the churchgoing of her characters, and despite her father’s profession, there is no religious debate in Jane Austen’s work. Christianity was a given, and the Anglican faith was the only proper form in which it could be expressed. Church attendance was a part of respectability, not evidence of deep conviction.
Bath and Sevenoaks were the extent of Jane Austen’s travels, so her experience of life outside the home was limited, but consequently her understanding of domestic behaviour was more acute. She is an excellent guide to the way your female ancestors would have behaved at home, though no guide at all to the way men behaved out of the drawing room; there are no scenes in Jane’s work where two men talk to each other in the absence of women.
Sadly for an understanding of her life, Jane’s reputation grew at a time when society was becoming more refined and respectable and her acerbic wit and acid tongue were not admired. Almost all her letters were destroyed and biographies of her made her appear unrealistically mild, though in surviving letters she expresses disgust for marriage and childrearing in comments like: “Poor woman! How can she be honestly breeding again?” She makes fun of unappealing newlyweds, and complains of irritating children.
She and Cassandra both stayed unmarried and, on the death of their father, their brothers pitched in to pay for their upkeep and that of their mother. In 1809 they moved to the Hampshire village of Chawton, near the manor house that one of their brothers owned. Jane’s career as a writer could really begin. She was determined to make money and was unpretentious about her work. Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811 in the usual three volume format.
POLITICS AND WARS WERE PART OF THE MALE SPHERE AND DID NOT INTRUDE INTO THE HOME SPACE
It was anonymous, saying on the title-page “By a lady”. The first edition sold out and brought Jane £140. Other novels now followed, giving her a reasonable income.
Between 1811 and 1815 she had four novels published. One, Emma, was positively reviewed by Sir Walter Scott and was dedicated to another of her readers, the Prince Regent (who was deficient as a royal but was a fine judge of art).
After only seven years of revising, published, planning new novels and dealing with publishers she fell ill. Modern analysis suggests that the darker pigmentation of her skin meant she had Addison’s disease or adrenal insufficiency but this condition had not even been identified when Jane Austen died.
She was taken to Winchester to be treated at the county hospital. Her funeral was held in Winchester Cathedral, it was attended by her brothers and unremarked by the world. Two novels were published posthumously,
Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, with a note identifying her as the author of these and the previous four. All her novels were available in relatively cheap editions from the early 1830s and your ancestors would certainly have been familiar with them.
Royal tragedy
Another death noted this year was that of Princess Charlotte, only child of the Prince Regent and heir to the throne. Charlotte’s death in childbirth at 21 was a testament to the poor standard of obstetric treatment available to your ancestors.
Her baby was estimated to be large, so Charlotte was starved in an attempt to reduce it. She was also subjected to bleeding, which further weakened her.
She was in labour for 50 hours from 3 to 5 November. An obstetrician with advanced views, John Sims, was sent for, but was not allowed to see Charlotte and forceps were not used. She finally gave birth to a stillborn boy and the exhausted woman took some food and went to sleep. Soon after midnight she began vomiting violently and suffered haemorrhaging. She was dead before morning. “Two generations gone in a moment,” said a courtier. The hope of a stable royal family after the mad King George III and the debauched Prince Regent was destroyed. Charlotte’s long labour gave the country days to hope for her and her baby’s survival, at a time when every family know the dangers of childbirth. Grief was widespread and a commentator wrote “it really was as though every household throughout Great Britain had lost a favourite child”. Shops closed along with the courts and docks – even the poor wore black armbands. Even at a time of unpopularity for the monarchy, a death in such awful circumstances concentrated your ancestors’ own feelings of woe.