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

the early stories are lampoons, burlesques or parodies. The point of such writing is that it copies or caricatures the style or spirit of serious works so as to excite laughter, often by ludicrous exaggeration. The great exemplar of the form in the eighteenth century was Henry Fielding, whose works Austen knew well. His Tragedy of Tragedies, or the History of Tom Thumb the Great was the classic burlesque of stage tragedy. The ‘great’ Tom Thumb is a heroic warrior who happens to be a midget. He is offered in marriage to the Princess Huncamunca, which makes Queen Dollalolla passionately jealous. Tom dies as a result of being swallowed by a cow, but his ghost returns. The ghost is put to death in turn and nearly all the rest of the cast kill each other in duels or take their own lives in grief. The young Jane Austen loved this sort of thing, and when she uses such names as Crankhumdunberry and Pammydiddle she is paying homage to Fielding.

      Fielding’s great rival Samuel Richardson had pioneered the heroine-centred courtship novel when he published the smash hit Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Pamela is a lowly maidservant who refuses the sexual advances of her master, Mr B, and tames him by her virtue and religious principles into making her an offer of marriage. Fielding loathed the hypocrisy of the idea that the reward for virtue should be so patently material: marriage to a wealthy man with a large house. He responded with his lampoon Shamela, in which the heroine, far from being an innocent and virtuous victim, is a scheming unscrupulous hussy who entraps her master into marriage. Reading Shamela is like reading the original novel through a distorted mirror. In the original novel, Pamela is distressed by her master’s sexual advances, but in Fielding she is playing a long and sly game of sexual conquest:

      He took me by the Hand, and I pretended to be shy: Laud, says I, Sir, I hope you don’t intend to be rude; no, says he, my Dear, and then he kissed me, ’till he took away my Breath – and I pretended to be Angry, and to get away, and then he kissed me again, and breathed very short, and looked very silly; and by Ill-Luck Mrs Jervis came in, and had like to have spoiled Sport. – How troublesome is such Interruption!6

      Jane Austen loved to make her family laugh out loud when reading out her lampoons, but like Fielding she also approved of burlesque as a literary medium for exposing moral and social hypocrisy. And also like Fielding, she had a sharp eye for the absurdities and limitations of much of the fiction of her age.

      The first story that she copied into her precious notebook was ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, a very funny parody of the sentimental novels of the day. For those who begin reading Jane Austen with Pride and Prejudice and come to the vellum notebooks only after the six mature novels, it is a disorienting experience to read ‘Frederic and Elfrida: a novel’. Early in the story comes the news that a new family has taken a house near by. Frederic, Elfrida and her friend Charlotte go to pay their respects. The arrivals in the neighbourhood are Mrs Fitzroy and her two daughters. The conversation initially turns on the relative merits of Indian and English muslins. So far, so Pride and Prejudice. But one of the sisters is beautiful and foolish, the other ugly and clever. In this topsy-turvy world it is the ugly and hump-backed Rebecca who garners the compliments: ‘Lovely and too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses and your swelling Back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor.’7

      As in Fielding, the lampoon depends upon the pitch-perfect rendering of the stylistic clichés of the sentimental novel. In a serious novel of the day you would read such sentences as ‘From this period, the families of Etherington and Cleves lived in the enjoyment of uninterrupted harmony and repose, till Eugenia … had attained her fifteenth year.’ In ‘Frederic and Elfrida’ Jane Austen writes ‘From this period, the intimacy between the Families … grew to such a pitch, that they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window on the slightest provocation.’8

      ‘During this happy period of Harmony,’ Austen continues, ‘the eldest Miss Fitzroy ran off with the Coachman and the amiable Rebecca was asked in marriage by Captain Roger of Buckinghamshire.’ The world of the vellum notebooks is so knowing and so uninhibited that one cannot be entirely confident that the young Austen was blissfully unaware of the Georgian slang meaning of the verb ‘to roger’.9 Mrs Fitzroy disapproves of the match ‘on account of the tender years of the young couple’: Rebecca is only thirty-six and Captain Roger sixty-three. Charlotte then becomes engaged to two men simultaneously. Realizing her breach of social decorum, she commits suicide by jumping into a stream, while Elfrida, who has a most delicate constitution, is reduced to ‘a succession of fainting fits’ in which ‘she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another’.10

      The second story, ‘Jack and Alice: a novel’, is dedicated by Austen to her older brother Frank, ‘Midshipman on board his Majesty’s Ship the Perseverance’. Jane presumably sent a copy with a letter. We need to imagine Frank receiving it several months later, somewhere in the East Indies, and smiling at the deadpan humour of his clever sister. She has perfected the satirist’s art of bathos or ‘sinking’, the abrupt transition from an elevated style to a ludicrous conclusion. An elegant evening party is described, until at the end of the chapter the whole party ‘were carried home, Dead Drunk’.11 And a character called Lady Williams waxes lyrical about her governess:

      ‘Miss Dickins was an excellent Governess. She instructed me in the Paths of Virtue; under her tuition I daily became more amiable, and might perhaps by this time have nearly attained perfection, had not my worthy Preceptoress been torn from my arms e’er I had attained my seventeenth year. I never shall forget her last words. “My dear Kitty” she said “Good night t’ye.” I never saw her afterwards’ continued Lady Williams wiping her eyes, ‘She eloped with the Butler the same night.’12

      So many of Austen’s greatest gifts are here in embryo: not only the comic timing and the revealing gestures (that sentimental teardrop), but also the sense of mischief and the sheer delight in human foibles – the incongruity of the ‘worthy Preceptoress’ in the ‘Paths of Virtue’ eloping with the butler. Already Austen has absolute control of her tone, and elsewhere in ‘Jack and Alice’ there are hints of the more deadly because more understated irony that is to come in the mature novels: ‘Every wish of Caroline was centered in a titled Husband.’13

      ‘Henry and Eliza: a novel’ might be described as Fielding’s Tom Jones meets Austen’s Emma – in parody. Eliza, like Tom, is a foundling. She is taken into the household of the goodly Sir George and Lady Harcourt, who are first seen superintending the labours of their haymakers, rewarding the industrious with smiles of approbation and punishing the idle with a good cudgelling. They bring up Eliza in ‘a Love of Virtue and a Hatred of Vice’. She grows up to be a delight to all who know her. Then the next sentence begins like an anticipation of Emma but ends with a twist: ‘Beloved by Lady Harcourt, adored by Sir George and admired by all the World, she lived in a continued course of uninterrupted Happiness, till she had attained her eighteenth year, when happening one day to be detected in stealing a banknote of 50£, she was turned out of doors by her inhuman Benefactors.’14 From being a somebody, an Emma, she turns into a nobody, a Jane Fairfax, who has to seek a position ‘in the capacity of Humble Companion’. She gains one in the household of a duchess, where Henry Cecil, the wealthy fiancé of the only daughter, falls in love with her. The Chaplain, who has also fallen in love with her, marries them privately (and illegally) and they run off to the continent.

      A family of alcoholics and gamblers, a young woman whose leg is fractured by a steel mantrap set for poachers in the grounds of the gentleman she is pursuing, a child who bites off her mother’s fingers, a jealous heroine who poisons her sisters, numerous elopements: the vellum notebooks do not contain the subject matter one