In Janeites, in reaction to a recent review of Emma Clery's biography of Jane Austen's brother, Henry, Ellen Moody just posted links to two 2012 blog posts of hers about Henry Austen. I replied as follows:
Ellen,
Ellen,
Thank
you for reopening the topic of the mystery of the personality of Henry Austen. I
happen to be in general agreement with you that Henry’s reputation has in some
ways gotten a raw deal, but I strongly disagree with you as to how and why this
came about.
I will
show how, via my disagreement with two assertions in your second blog post:
THE LEIGH-PERROT
INHERITANCE & JANE AUSTEN’S DECLINING HEALTH
First,
you wrote: “Henry’s letters, as his nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh bravely
avers to his vengeful resentful aunt (whose legacy he desperately needed), show
a man of “feeling” (“he does feel” says JEAL, risking all).”
I’m
pretty sure you are mistakenly attributing a defense of Henry to JEAL instead
of to the actual averrer, JEAL’s father, James. I base my argument on the following
letter (in the Austen Papers) from Aunt Leigh Perrot to James Austen dated Jan.
31, 1819 (i.e., not long before James passed away):
“My
dear Nephew,
Your
letter to-day the less surprised me as I had heard from Mr. Fonnereau that the
sale of the Hawkhurst Farm was postponed…I
am grieved you should have so much vexation, nor would I have Henry’s feelings
(if he does feel) for more than he has occasioned us to lose by his imprudence-
pray do not let this business hang on your mind! Better think of everything as
quite lost, & feel no more about it…
Thank
you, my dear Nephew, for your anxiety on my account—I should certainly have
wished everything had turned out differently on both your account & my
own….I am thankful it is no worse. Where would my pretty Scarlets have gone
then? I wish you thought as fondly of this place as I must ever do…”
It is clear
that in James’s letter to which she replies, he must have complained about his own
financial “vexation” in the aftermath of Henry’s bank fiasco four years earlier.
I read between the lines, and I infer that James’s defense of Henry (in which he
expressed sympathy for Henry’s feelings, as well as his own) damned Henry, so
to speak, with faint sympathy --- precisely so as to elicit from his
mean-spirited aunt the desired condemnation of Henry (and he succeeds, because
she replies “if he does feel”).
Now, the
reason why James would stab his own brother in the back in this way is clear.
It’s because this was a desperate zero-sum game, and Henry’s loss would be
James’s (or JEAL’s) gain.
We know
full well that both James and James Edward harbored no illusions about that
game; they knew exactly what sort of ogre they were dealing with in Aunt
Leigh-Perrot. This is not a matter of mere inference – read the opening of JEAL’s
letter to his father written sometime in 1818 (i.e., about a year before that
1819 letter):
“My
dear Father…
I am
very sorry and certainly surprised at this last motion of Mrs. L. Perrot, but I
have long thought too meanly of her, to be much astonished at any fresh instance
of want of feeling or of hypocrisy. So much for your reduction of income: now
for the effects it is to have…”
So both
James and James Edward understood that Aunt Leigh-Perrot took sadistic delight
in dangling largesse in front of her financially desperate nephews (James, Frank,
and Henry), the better to make them bow and scrape for her favor. And that
shows what a consummate, patient suck-up and family politician JEAL was,
because in the end, in 1833, it was he who took home the grand prize, beating
out both Henry and Frank: Scarlets and the accompanying personal property and
wealth left by Aunt Leigh-Perrot.
So, no –
nothing I’ve seen suggests that JEAL was ever “brave” in dealing with his Aunt,
to defend Henry or otherwise. All I’ve seen shows he was only cynically
self-interested, in knowing exactly how to deal with her (just as Lucy Steele
knows how to deal with Mrs. Ferrars), and the proof is in the financial pudding,
so to speak. If you read all his letters (also in the Austen Papers) to her in
the years leading up to her (long-awaited) demise, you almost have to admire the
cynical master suck-up he is. He plays her like a violin.
And,
apropos JEAL’s attitude toward Henry, and the idea that he would have defended
Henry, it is particularly offbase from another motivation besides greed. I’ve
argued repeatedly in the past few years that JEAL’s Memoir actually contains a deliberate
rewriting of Austen family history in regard to the Leigh Perrot inheritance.
JEAL took great pains to conceal that Jane Austen (in her own words!) became
sicker because of being disinherited by Uncle Leigh-Perrot, not due to Henry’s earlier
bankruptcy. For example, read this:
“Reviving
the 1817 news that made Jane Austen sicker, that nephew JEAL tried to submerge”
http://tinyurl.com/nsmdcfx
Embedded
within my above-linked 2015 post is an earlier post I wrote in 2014, in which I
present the details of JEAL’s deliberate and self-serving editorial deceit,
that essentially and falsely places the blame for Jane Austen’s getting sicker
in 1816 on Henry’s 1815 bankruptcy:
JEAL
made sure that history would (mistakenly) record that (after his father’s death)
his ultimate inheritance of Scarlets was a wonderful thing which was in no way
connected to the premature death of Jane
Austen, instead of the outrageous, injurious property grab that it actually was.
BIOGRAPHY/HAGIOGRAPHY
OF JANE AUSTEN
Which
brings me to the second thing you wrote with which I disagree:
“One of
Henry’s most remarkable and revealing (about him) texts is his life of his
sister. Yes it’s hagiographic, absurdly so. She never had a hard thought in her
life, never uttered a cruel statement….”
You
must not have read the two posts I wrote a few months ago after reading
Juliette Wells’s Persuasions article,
in which she for the first time in Austen scholarly history raised excellent questions
about the true authorship of the 1818 Biographical Notice.
In
essence, I went beyond Wells’s modest suggestion that Cassandra contributed to
the writing of that 1818 Notice, and instead I made the more radical argument
that it was JEAL, not Henry, who wrote that entire 1818 hagiography. It was
only in 1833, I suggest, that Henry Austen got involved, and made that Biographical
Notice much less hagiographic in his revision thereof for the Bentley edition.
But then, in the 1870 Memoir, JEAL, once again, as with the Austen family inheritance
story, had the final word:
But calling
it “hagiography” puts a far rosier tint on it than it deserves. This was not
about JEAL having an unrealistically positive memory of Aunt Jane. One of JEAL’s
absurd claims was the one about JA never uttering a cruel statement about
anyone else, and he thereby got the sweetest revenge of all for his late parents.
How so?
Because
he knew that Aunt Jane had, in her very first published words, in 1811,
thoroughly skewered his parents James and Mary Austen in Chapter 2 of S&S. JA
had made it clear to all who knew the actual Austen family history and had any “ingenuity”
at all, that the vile John and Fanny Dashwood were thinly veiled portraits of James
and Mary, and their avaricious grab of the lion’s share of the Steventon assets
in 1801. It is only a century and a half after JEAL’s Memoir that I and a few other
Austen scholars (like Emily Auerbach) have finally been able to scrape off his “veneer”
and revealed those ugly portraits once again!
But
there’s even more personal nastiness behind JEAL’s seeming “hagiography”. While
he was at it, JEAL also made sure that history would (mistakenly) record that
his Aunt Jane was the conservative, pious, unambitious, conformist milquetoast depicted
in his Bowdlerized image of her for the 1870 Memoir -- instead of the fiercely
nonconformist, non-heterosexual feminist Cassandra actually sketched in 1810,
and whom his mother Mary Lloyd Austen fiercely hated. Sweet revenge, indeed!
If you have
any disagreement with any of my claims, I welcome your pointing it out to me.
[MY FIRST POST IN FOLLOWUP TO THE ABOVE AFTER NANCY MAYER REPLIED:
Nancy:
"I still see no proof that JEAL wrote the biographical note in
1818"
And if
you read Juliette Wells's recent article here...
http://www.jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/vol38no1/wells/
...you
know that (to quote Wells) "The first
hint [that Henry Austen wrote the 1818 version] appeared in 1892, when Reginald
Brimley Johnson, editor of a ten-volume edition of Austen’s novels, stated that
the “Biographical Notice” was “probably written by Miss Austen’s brother, the
Rev. Henry Austen”.
As Wells goes on to say, it was only AFTER that passing,
unsubstantiated comment by Reginald Brimley Johnson (who, I will also point
out, was born in 1867, and therefore couldn't have spoken to any Austen family
member who was old enough to have personal knowledge of who wrote the 1818 Bio
Notice) that subsequent 20th & 21st century Austen scholars treated Henry
Austen as definitely having written the 1818 version. That's not proof, that's
not even close to proof--- it's sloppy scholarship being repeated over and over
again till people assume it is true.
So, NOBODY has anything resembling definitive proof about
the actual author of the 1818 version; and I've previously made my case that it
was JEAL, based not on my "gut feeling", but on demonstrable,
striking similarities between the 1818 version and JEAL's 1870 Memoir,
similarities which are ABSENT in the one version we DO know (from
correspondence written by him to Bentley) that Henry wrote, which is the 1832
revision! As I asked in my Dec. 2017 post, why in the world would Henry delete
significant claims in 1832 that he had made in 1818, only for JEAL to restore
those very same claims in 1870? Common sense and Occam's Razor suggests instead
that JEAL was the author in 1818 and 1870, who did not like that his Uncle had
deleted some of his pet claims, and so restored them when Henry's hand was long
mouldering in the grave.
Based on all that, I'd say that my argument is the stronger
one on the table.
Nancy:
"...or that Austen was a "fiercely non-conformist,
non-heterosexual"."
And we
know you and I are never going to agree on that one, but I claim that my
position is more plausible than yours, and in any event, JEAL's editorial fraud
does not depend on my larger claims also being true.
Nancy:
"The description of Jane in the bio was most likely the true feelings of a
brother. Just because he was an intelligent didn't mean that he was aware
of irony. Though JEAL was chosen to help carry the coffin, I do not think he
would have been chosen to write the biography when a brother was around to do
so."
You're
guessing, just as I am guessing, but I base my argument on a consistent pattern
of distortion on JEAL's part, a pattern that, even when it was previously noted,
no Austen scholar before me (except, to some extent, Emily Auerbach) has called
it for what it is -- even (as I also blogged back in 2010) DW Harding, way back
when, and Kathryn Sutherland, much more recently, stopped short of crossing the
proverbial "t" by calling out fraud as fraud on JEAL's part.
Think
I'm exaggerating? Look at what Sutherland wrote in 2000, in her footnotes to
JEAL's "severely edited" version of JA's last surviving letter to
brother Charles (rather than in Sutherland's Introduction to JEAL's Memoir,
where it would've been much more prominent and likely to be noticed by a
reader):
“"...some
family troubles..."”: apparently a discreet reference to HA’s bankruptcy,
which occurred in March 1816. But the letters from which JEAL goes on to quote
date from April and May 1817 and refer to the disappointment felt in the Austen
family at the will of James Leigh Perrot, Mrs. Austen’s brother, who had died
on 28 March 1817….As chief beneficiary on Mrs Leigh Perrot’s death in 1836,
JEAL would obviously be discreet in recording this disappointment as he was
earlier in his omission from the Memoir of Mrs. Leigh Perrot’s prosecution for
theft. But family tradition, as well as her own correspondence, suggest that
the terms of the will were a considerable shock to JA and even exacerbated her
illness. (Fam. Rec. 221-3).
“...a
letter…to Charles...”: JEAL prints a severely edited extract. JA wrote: “…I am
ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle’s Will brought on a relapse…I am the
only one of the legatees [JEAL alters this to ‘party’] who has been so silly….”
I.e.,
Sutherland tries to explain JEAL's editorial fraud as merely
"discreet", just a case of "a severely edited extract" as
if the reason for the alteration was to save space?; and Sutherland draws an
analogy to JEAL's omission of mention of Mrs. Leigh Perrot's prosecution for
theft. But that is an utterly invalid analogy, because neither JEAL nor either
of his parents, were at all culpable in Aunt Leigh-Perrot's purloining of lace
in Bath --that was all her "bad". Whereas, changing
"legatees" to "party" is, prima facie, a total smoking gun
that reveals JEAL's intent to conceal the true cause of what Sutherland
correctly calls "a considerable shock to JA and even exacerbated her
illness." There is NO other rational explanation, JEAL's personal conflict
of interest is overwhelmingly probative.
But
such is the enduring power of the Myth of Austen which you so persistently seem
to defend, Nancy, and in particular, in this case, the desire of many
present-day descendants of James Austen to keep a lid on such an odorous bit of
dirty family laundry that reflects badly on their ancestor (JEAL, that is).
Even scholars like Harding and Sutherland, who have not shunned controversy
about Jane Austen, were not free to straight-out say that JEAL was a self
interested, untrustworthy liar.
Nancy:
"As for the inheritance of the Perrott Leigh money and property. Who had
the prevailing vote on that? Mr. Leigh Perrott or his wife? Both of them
probably subscribed to the idea that money and property was best handled by a
male who would need it to support a family and aged aunts."
Balderdash!
(I just checked--that colorful term was indeed in use in JA's lifetime, even
though she herself never used it, at least in print). Your suggestion implodes
from within, ignited by the fact that Mr. Leigh Perrot actually left his estate
completely in his wife's control-- and I think we can at least agree on that
point, which is that Aunt Leigh Perrot was indeed a woman! So it was apparently
perfectly okay for that woman to decide who would receive the remainder of his
estate after her death, when he had all those same male family members at his
disposal, whom he could have named as trustees.
No,
what we had in 1817 was nothing less than a dreadfully ironic repetition of
what happens in Chapter 2 of S&S -- once again, a weak minded dying man
puts a predatory female relative in charge of dispensing much-needed largesse
to impecunious relatives. It turns out that JA's 1811 expose of what happened
in 1801 and 1805, turned out to be a prophecy of what happened in 1817 -- and
in all these cases, the finger of guilt is pointed at James & Mary Austen,
and their "knight" and son, James Edward.
Nancy:
"Though Austen and her mother were disappointed about the way the property
and money was left, most of those who heard about the legacy would agree
that giving it to the oldest son of the oldest nephew was proper. The mind
set was different. Though females could and did rail against such thinking, it
was the prevailing attitude of the day."
Again,
balderdash! This was not an all or none scenario. Nothing, absolutely nothing,
prevented Uncle Leigh Perrot from carving out a portion (say, a quarter) of his
estate, and thereby easing the precarious financial status of his impecunious
sister, and several of her impecunious children. Unlike Mr. Dashwood in
S&S, he had full power to divide his estate any way he chose-- but he
didn't.
Nancy:
"I don't believe that Austen would allow herself to be made ill by such a
thing. Unfortunately, her illness worsened at this time and probably
increased her disappointment."
So now,
as your piece de resistance, you now say that JA did not mean what she actually
wrote in her letter to Charles! She is so obviously doing her best to
soft-pedal the shock that she suffered from the disinheritance news, and keep
the tone low-key, that we may safely infer that it was much much worse -- and
factually, we know that JA died only a few months later.
No
wonder JEAL, a half century later, made it a point to distort the written
evidence, so as to get him and his parents off the hook. ]
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
1 comment:
Jane's health setbacks weren't either/or. Henry's collapse wiped out pretty much everyone's savings, which put the Austen women in dire straits indeed, as about half their income came from the brothers, now unable to help them (except Edw). That must have increased Jane's suffering. How could it not? Soon thereafter, the lack of any inheritance from their uncle compounded that disaster. It was a double whammy. Henry's bank failure, which cost the L-Ps at least 10,000 pounds, would have been reason enough for them not to provide anything to the Austens.
As the eldest son, the bulk of the inheritance would have gone to James, unless he blew it, which explains his mincing letters to Aunt P. The inheritance was his to lose. It's doubtful that they would have left Henry anything, so J didn't have to work hard to elbow H out of the way. Since James was in poor health then, too, I'm sure he was hoping to ensure the estate went down to JEAL rather than sideways to one of his other poor siblings. You're right, but that doesn’t make James vicious.
I don't buy at all that JEAL wrote the bio notice. Henry had handled all of Jane's books; there's no evidence that James or his son was ever involved in any way. Jane even remarks in one of her letters that James had been dumbed down by marrying Mary. Hard to see their 19-year-old son swooping in and writing a notice that naturally would have fallen to Henry. Hard to see Henry blithely agreeing: I've known her for 41 years, you've gotten interested in her as a writer in the last two--sure, I'll concede that duty to you. Henry handles all the books before her death, handles the two afterward, handles the copyright sale and the bio update to the bio in 1832, but he lets a kid write the first bio that will describe his sister to posterity? After she had nursed him through a near-fatal illness of his own the previous year?
It's plausible that Cass would have been involved, of course. There are just too many phrases that sound like what a brother and sister would write, not a nephew. Like the paragraph of description of Jane (her "personal attractions"). How would JEAL know to discuss her skills vs. Richardson's? Use a 20-year context for her musical ability; i.e., back to when James had not been born? Or know that J had an "invincible distrust of her own judgment" in the quality of her books? Only someone around her since the 1790s. JEAL could have written the conventional boilerplate, but nothing else.
Naturally, JEAL's comments in 1870 would sound like those of the bio notice in 1817--he's following the earlier text! Just as the portions of the Memoir he took from Caroline's notes (much more interesting than his own comments) sound like Caroline.
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