Not, however, into a great house of the kind that has become familiar in television and film adaptations of Austen’s novels (in which the houses are nearly always bigger than they should be). ‘Near the foot of an old pier of uncertain date’5 on the seafront at Lyme there is a row of cottages. We enter a cramped but welcoming parlour. It is the home of Captain Harville, who has retired in poor health as the result of a severe wound incurred on naval service during the war that lasted for almost the whole of Jane Austen’s adult life. This snug little dwelling-place will be revisited later, but for a first glimpse of Austen’s art of minute observation consider a single detaiclass="underline"
Captain Harville was no reader; but he had contrived excellent accommodations, and fashioned very pretty shelves, for a tolerable collection of well-bound volumes, the property of Captain Benwick. His lameness prevented him from taking much exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him with constant employment within. He drew, he varnished, he carpentered, he glued; he made toys for the children, he fashioned new netting-needles and pins with improvements; and if every thing else was done, sat down with his large fishing-net at one corner of the room.
Anne Elliot will soon engage Captain Benwick in conversation about books, debating the relative merits of the two most fashionable poets of the day, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. She gently suggests that romantic poetry might not be the most healthy reading for a man with a broken heart such as Benwick – though she sees the irony of her admonitions to ‘patience and resignation’ in the light of her own broken heart.
But it is Captain Harville’s carpentry that sticks in the mind: the prettily fashioned shelves, the varnish, the glue, the toys for the children. Jane Austen grew up in a house of books and reading, but she also came from a family that valued handiwork, the craft of making things, whether with needle or wood.
Captain Benwick reading poetry aloud while Captain Harville mends his net is a little image of how she imagined a secure home and a sense of belonging. Her family circle was a place of quick tongues, laughter and moving fingers, with a novel being read aloud and everyone busy at their needlework. Both her world and her novels can be brought alive through the texture of things, the life of objects.
Sketch of a Royal Navy ship by Jane Austen’s nephew, Captain Herbert Austen
In January 1852 Admiral Francis Austen received a letter from the daughter of the President of Harvard University. ‘Since high critical authority has pronounced the delineations of character in the works of Jane Austen second only to those of Shakespeare,’ Miss Quincy began, ‘transatlantic admiration appears superfluous; yet it may not be uninteresting to her family to receive an assurance that the influence of her genius is extensively recognised in the American Republic.’6 She was writing because she wanted an autograph of the great novelist.
The Admiral was more than obliging. He was delighted to hear that the ‘celebrity’ of his late sister’s works had reached across the Atlantic. He sent not merely a signature but a whole Jane Austen letter. And he was happy to provide a character sketch of her. She was cheerful, not easily irritated, a little shy with strangers. Her natural reserve was sometimes misinterpreted as haughtiness. She was kind and funny, never failing to excite ‘the mirth and hilarity of the party’. She loved children and they loved her: ‘Her Nephews and Nieces of whom there were many could not have a greater treat than crouding around and listening to Aunt Jane’s stories.’
Miss Susan Quincy shared the contents of the Jane Austen letter with her sister, who was ‘quite carried off her feet’ with excitement. The conclusion, they agreed, could only be that Admiral Austen was so charming that ‘he must have been like Captain Wentworth when he was young’. Was Jane Austen’s brother really the inspiration for the hero of Persuasion? Miss Quincy communicated her sister’s response to the elderly Admiral. He replied that he was very flattered, but:
I do not know whether in the character of Captain Wentworth the authoress meant in any degree to delineate that of her Brother. Perhaps she might, but I rather think parts of Captain Harville’s were drawn from myself; at least the description of his domestic habits, tastes and occupations bear a considerable resemblance to mine.
Admiral Austen does not deny the possibility that there might be some element of himself – or of Jane’s other naval brother, Charles – in the character of Captain Wentworth. But he positively celebrates the fact that Captain Harville’s handiwork is his own.
When Francis Austen’s baby was born in 1807, he cut out the patterns for the infant’s night-clothes himself. On another occasion, according to his sister Jane, ‘he made a very nice fringe for the drawing room curtains’. Like Harville, he ‘turned silver’ to make needles for fishing nets. When Jane Austen watched her young nephews passing the evenings by making nets in which to catch rabbits, she described them as sitting ‘side by side, as any two Uncle Franks could do’.7 Jane also remembered her brother Frank, as she always called him, making ‘a very nice little butter-churn’.8 He was skilled at turning wood.
There can be no doubt that Captain Harville’s carpentry is both a compliment to Frank and a family joke. By acknowledging the allusion after Jane’s death, Admiral Austen is giving her readers warrant to make connections between the people his sister knew and the characters she created. By implication, he is also licensing us to make links between her novels and the places she went to (and those she heard about), not to mention the historical events through which she lived.
Yet in the ‘official’ family biography of Jane Austen, it is stressed that hers was an enclosed, sequestered world and that the characters in her novels were always generic types, never based on real individuals. The ground for this reading of her was laid by her brother Henry in the brief ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ which prefaces her posthumously published novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.’ Furthermore, ‘Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals.’9
Henry’s denial of eventfulness and of drawing ‘from individuals’ was of a piece with the desire of the clerical Austens to be discreet, decorous and reticent. That was the image of Jane Austen herself that the family wished to establish in the public domain. They reinforced it in the Victorian era by means of a memoir published in December 1869 by James Edward AustenLeigh, son of another of her clergy brothers, James. Jane Austen was one of the wittiest of writers, but there are not many jokes in the official family record. Admiral Francis Austen was known for his lack of a sense of humour, but at least he manages to drop in a joke at the end of his second letter to Miss Quincy: ‘I am not a Vice Admiral, having for the last 3 years attained the higher rank of Admiral. I wish I could believe that in the change of rank I had left every vice behind me.’ Startlingly, here he seems to be remembering his sister’s most questionable joke, concerning ‘Rears, and Vices’ in the British navy. That was not the sort of subject to detain James Edward Austen-Leigh in his pious record of his aunt’s allegedly quiet life.