There was one person, we can be sure, who did have a loving heart—Austen herself. That is the great question that hangs above her life. Not, how a person who never married could have known so much about love. The mysteries of genius are enough to explain that conundrum. But rather, why a person who knew so much about love, and had such a clear capacity for it, never did get married herself.
She might have been about to once, when she was Elizabeth Bennet’s age. The record of Austen’s letters opens like a novel. She is twenty, and writing to her sister in a rush of high spirits about the ball she has gone to the night before:
Mr. H. began with Elizabeth, and afterwards danced with her again; but they do not know how to be particular. I flatter myself, however, that they will profit by the three successive lessons which I have given them. You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago.
“My Irish friend” was Tom Lefroy, nephew of Anne Lefroy, Austen’s beloved older friend and surrogate mother, on a Christmas visit to his cousins at their home at Ashe, a couple of miles from the Austens’ place at Steventon. (Tom’s father had settled in Ireland as a young man.) Their romance evidently flared up very quickly. Three evenings were enough—three evenings of dancing and flirting and talking, of hopes and glances and laughter—to seal their mutual attachment. Six days later, the day before the ball at Ashe, Austen wrote to her sister again:
Tell Mary that I make over Mr. Heartley & all his Estate to her for her sole use and Benefit in future, & not only him, but all my other Admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I do not care sixpence.
The feeling, as always, was hedged by a laugh, but it was no less in earnest for that. The moment of truth, Austen felt sure, was about to arrive. “I look forward with great impatience to it,” she said of the next day’s ball, “as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening.” Yes, an offer—a proposal.
And yet it was not to be. We do not know what happened that night—the record of Austen’s letters breaks off at that point (Cassandra burned everything she deemed too sensitive), and the next one dates from the following summer. But we do know that Tom’s family took stock of the situation and decided to put a stop to it. Tom was the oldest son of a large and by no means wealthy family. He was studying for the bar and still making his way in the world, and he could not afford to engage himself, or so it was thought, to a fortuneless young woman. As his cousins later said, their mother sent him off posthaste so “that no more mischief might be done.”
Would he have proposed, as Austen expected, had he not been interfered with? We cannot know. Did he return her love in equal measure? Of that we can be sure. Decades later, as an old man—he had married (an heiress) three years later, fathered nine children, and risen to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland—“he said in so many words,” according to a nephew, “that he was in love with her, although he qualified his confession by saying it was a boyish love.” A boyish love it may have been, at least from the perspective of old age, but twenty-one years after their brief romance—the only time they ever met—he had traveled back to England (no small journey) to pay his respects after learning of her death. Still later he had bought, at an auction of the publisher’s papers, the rejection letter that Austen had received for the first version of Pride and Prejudice. His feelings, it seemed, had never died.
As for Austen’s, it is harder to say. His only other mention in her letters came almost three years after that fateful Christmas season. Anne Lefroy, his aunt, had just been visiting, and, Austen reported:
I was enough alone to hear all that was interesting, which you will easily credit when I tell you that of her nephew she said nothing at all, and of her friend [another young man] very little. She did not once mention the name of the former to me, and I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was going back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise.
The tone is unmistakable: lingering resentment, continued curiosity, and yet, as well, a sense that she has gotten over it. Tom Lefroy had taught her what it meant to be in love, but Austen was no Anne Elliot, pining away for Wentworth. It was not disappointment that made her a spinster.
For one thing, there were other opportunities. Austen was, by all accounts, an attractive young woman: tall and slender, with bright hazel eyes; long, curly, light brown hair; a clear and glowing complexion; and a light, firm step that spoke of health and animation. Of her charms of conversation, her playfulness and wit, there can be, of course, no doubt. Tom Lefroy was hardly the only young man to be drawn to her. There was “Mr. Heartley & all his Estate,” and Charles Powlett, who wanted to kiss her, and who knows how many other “Admirers.” After Tom there was that friend of Anne Lefroy’s, the one that Austen mentioned in the letter three years later, a young clergyman who had expressed regard and interest. There was a young gentleman in a seaside place—the details are as hazy as the setting, for Cassandra divulged the episode only years after her sister’s death—“whose charm of person, mind, and manners,” according to a nephew, “was such that Cassandra thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her sister’s love,” who took his leave “expressing his intention of soon seeing them again”—but who, a short time later, suddenly died. And then, of course, there was Harris Bigg-Wither.
Could Austen have grown to love her fiancé-for-a-night, as she later advised her niece to do with John Plumptre? Perhaps. She had known him since childhood, she loved his family, and although he was still somewhat shy and awkward, he had come back from Oxford a far more confident young man than he had once been. But love was no longer the only consideration. The young woman who had lost her chance with Tom Lefroy at the age of twenty had still been only a fledgling writer. The one who rejected her friends’ brother seven years later was now the author of three novels, even if none were published yet. She had come to a fork in the road. In one direction lay marriage, family, security, and perhaps love. In the other lay the adventure of art.
She could not have had both. To marry then, for a young woman, was to become a mother to the exclusion of all else—and at the cost, finally, far too often, of life. Austen’s brother Charles’s wife had four children in five years and died. Austen’s brother Frank’s wife had eleven children in sixteen years and died. Austen’s brother Edward’s wife had eleven children in fifteen years and died. Austen’s mother had had eight children. When Austen thought about the fact that her favorite niece would someday find a husband—this was several years after the John Plumptre episode—she feared for what it would mean. “Oh! what a loss it will be, when you are married,” she exclaimed, telling us everything we need to know about why she never got married herself: “I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affections.” Cassandra would later remember the letters her sister wrote, “triumphing over the married women of her acquaintance, and rejoicing in her own freedom”—the freedom to write, the freedom to create, the freedom to ride her incomparable genius wherever it wanted to go.