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

he noted that ‘they cannot be watched with too much Caution, as they may be greatly detrimental to her Constitution’.18

      After Hancock’s death, alone in India in 1775, still trying and failing to make money, Eliza and her mother stayed in London another year. Then they began their travels in Europe, first going to Germany and Belgium, before reaching Paris in 1779. By 1780 Eliza had seen the French royal family at close quarters in Versailles, taken up the harp and sat for her ivory miniature. It was a present for her beloved uncle George Austen, dispatched to his rectory. She is wearing a pretty low-cut dress, adorned with blue ribbons, and her hair is heavily powdered, as was the fashion in Paris (‘Heads in general look as if they had been dipped in a meal tub,’ she wrote in a letter).19

      Jane Austen was five when the miniature reached Steventon. A year later Eliza became engaged to a captain in Marie-Antoinette’s regiment of dragoons, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide. Ten years older than Eliza, he was the son of a provincial lawyer – though he called himself the Comte de Feuillide, on somewhat dubious grounds. George Austen thoroughly disapproved of the match, fearing that the self-styled Count was a fortune-hunter and complaining that Eliza and her mother were giving up their friends, their country and even their religion.20

      In December 1773, Hancock had drawn up letters of attorney enabling George Austen to act on his sister’s behalf in the confidential handling of receipts from India. Invoices for assignments of diamonds were made out in George Austen’s name. Hastings and Hancock were also involved in trading opium, among other commodities. It is startling to suppose that Jane Austen’s education and the books in her father’s library, which did so much to inspire her to become a writer, may well have been funded, at least indirectly, by the opium trade. So much for the notion of her family being wholly sequestered from the world in a cosy Hampshire village.

      Hancock’s death, back in Calcutta in 1775, was the occasion for Warren Hastings’s doubling of his gift to his god-daughter Eliza. George Austen was one of the trustees named in the legal documents. It was just two months after Hancock’s death that Jane Austen was born.

      Cecilia Wynne in the early novella ‘Catharine’ is the only young woman in Austen’s fiction to join the fishing fleet to seek marriage in India. But her family connections with Bengal periodically pop up in the mature novels. Lady Bertram’s request for an East Indian shawl is one example. And in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Willoughby make fun of Brandon’s experience there: ‘“he has told you that in the East Indies the climate is hot, and the mosquitoes are troublesome” … “Perhaps,” said Willoughby, “his observations may have extended to the existence of nabobs, gold mohrs and palanquins.”’21 Jane Austen never based her stories directly on her own family’s experiences, but in a life dominated by conversation, the exchange of family news, storytelling and letter-writing, it seems more than a little coincidental that the reason Brandon asks his regiment for a transfer to Bengal is his desire to escape from the heartbreak of losing his great love, who is called Eliza. She is forced to marry his brother, against her will, and later becomes a prostitute; her daughter, also called Eliza, is seduced by Willoughby when only sixteen, has his child and is abandoned. For Jane Austen, it would seem, the name of Eliza was inextricably connected with both the East Indies and sexual scandal.

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      Eliza

      Eliza Hancock, now the Comtesse de Feuillide and bringing with her a baby boy, burst into the life of the Steventon parsonage just in time for the Christmas festivities of 1786. Slight of build and extremely elegant, she had high cheekbones, elfin features, large expressive eyes and masses of curly hair. Marriage had not tamed the vivacious Eliza. She had plenty of admirers at Steventon, male and female. Jane Austen, at the impressionable age of eleven, was simply enchanted by the cousin who brought tales of India and Europe to rural Hampshire.

      For the young Jane Austen, Eliza Hancock was the living incarnation of her favourite character in one of her favourite novels: Charlotte Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Reading Eliza’s real letters is like reading Charlotte’s fictional ones. Temperamentally, Eliza was unsuited to marriage, which she saw as giving up ‘dear Liberty and yet dearer flirtation’. ‘Flirtation’s a charming thing,’ she wrote: ‘it makes the blood circulate!’ Of her first husband, the Count, she remarked, ‘it is too little to say he loves, since he literally adores me’. Of weddings she quipped, ‘I was never but at one wedding in my life and that appeared a very stupid idea to me.’ Of herself she wrote, ‘independence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual … I am more and more convinced that She is not at all calculated for sober Matrimony.’22

      Her liveliness mesmerized the Austens. She played piano for them every day, and arranged impromptu dances in the parlour. She told stories of Paris and of Marie Antoinette. She complained of French theatre that ‘it is still the fashion to translate or rather murder, Shakespear’.23 She gave Jane for her birthday a twelve-volume set of Arnaud de Berquin’s stories L’Ami des enfants.

      Jane and Cassandra, who had been at boarding school for the previous eighteen months, were now home for good. In Steventon rectory Eliza also encountered Henry Austen, no longer a child but a tall handsome man about to go up to Oxford. He soon made a point of visiting her when she went back to London, and arranging for her to visit him at college. At St John’s in Oxford, Eliza ‘longed to be a Fellow that I might walk [in the garden] every day’. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I was delighted with the Black Gown and thought the Square Cap mighty becoming.’24

      Eliza had confessed to Philadelphia (‘Phylly’) Walter, cousin to the Austens, that she was no longer in love with her husband. While he was in France she led, according to this cousin, a ‘very dissipated life’ in London.25 To judge from Eliza’s surviving letters, her life was full of socializing and adventure. She narrowly misses being robbed and attacked by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath. She takes her little boy Hastings to Hastings and other seaside resorts for the benefit of sea-bathing. She attends balls and the opera and moves back and forth between England and France.

      Following the success of her visit to Steventon in 1786 she was keen to go down to Hampshire again, though her uncle had told her that he was able to entertain only at midsummer and Christmas. She made plans to return to Steventon for the following Christmas and she encouraged her cousins in their plans to put on private theatricals. As will be seen, Eliza led the way in choosing the plays and it is no surprise that those she chose featured spirited heroines who refuse to be cowed by men.

      Both James and Henry Austen were ‘fascinated’ by the flirtatious Eliza, according to James’s son, who wrote the first memoir of Jane. One of Jane Austen’s comic stories written before the end of the 1780s was called ‘Henry and Eliza’. Eliza is a beautiful little foundling girl discovered in a ‘Haycock’, rather as Austen’s cousin was a beautiful little girl of uncertain origin called Eliza Hancock. The action turns on an elopement by the titular characters, who run off to France leaving only a curt note: ‘Madam, we are married and gone.’ With the real Eliza anything could happen and the young Jane Austen seems to have found it both exciting and amusing to imagine her eloping with Henry. Little did she know how the story of the real Eliza and Henry would end.

      Eliza returned to Steventon in the summer of 1792, in much darker circumstances. She brought with her a fund of true tales as shocking as anything in the Gothic novels that young women were devouring at the time. Eliza, her mother and little Hastings had fled from France as trouble brewed in the months leading up to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. They were in London when news of the revolution broke. From then on, they were forced to stay in England.

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