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

that ‘the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’.15 Seeing the absurdity of the perpetual diet of virtue and piety in the orthodox literature in the family library, they relished the unshockable young Jane’s array of loose women, drunkards, thieves and murderers.

      ‘Lesley Castle’, dedicated to Henry, begins with a married woman called Louisa leaving her child and her reputation behind her as she runs off with a certain Rakehelly Dishonor Esq. (a name straight out of Restoration comedy). But within a few pages the husband ‘writes in a most chearfull Manner, says that the air of France has greatly recovered both his Health and his Spirits; that he has now entirely ceased to think of Louisa with any degree either of Pity or Affection, that he even feels himself obliged to her for her Elopement, as he thinks it very good fun to be single again’.16 After Jane’s death, Henry, by that time in holy orders, would write a brief memoir emphasizing his sister’s piety. By then, he had long forgotten, or made a point of forgetting, the youthful story dedicated to him in which the consequence of a woman’s adultery is a new life of ‘very good fun’ for the jilted husband.

      ‘Very good fun’ is indeed the watchword for the vellum notebooks. Brought up in a house full of boys, sharing jokes with the male lodgers and wanting to cheer up young Frank as he endured the rigorous conditions of a midshipman, she laid on the slapstick and revelled in the sheer joy of words. Every page of the vellum notebooks sparkles with Jane Austen’s love of language. The story called ‘A Collection of Letters’, towards the end of Volume the Second, is a tour de force even in its dedication: ‘To Miss Cooper – Cousin: Conscious of the Charming Character which in every Country, and every Clime in Christendom is Cried, Concerning you, With Caution and Care I Commend to your Charitable Criticism this Clever Collection of Curious Comments, which have been Carefully Culled, Collected and Classed by your Comical Cousin – The Author’.17

      Two of Cassandra’s watercolours in her sister’s ‘History of England’: Henry V (left) perhaps resembles Henry Austen and Edward IV (right) cousin Edward Cooper

      ***

      By the time she reached Volume the Second, she was writing fuller, more sophisticated parodies. This time Oliver Goldsmith was the target of her satire, and even Cassandra got in on the joke. Jane Austen’s ‘History of England’ with illustrations by Cassandra is a pro-Stuart, pro-Catholic skit which makes fun of the standard school history books of the time. It mocks the very textbook that her father used in his own schoolroom. She clearly loved teasing her father. Oliver Goldsmith’s popular four-volume History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (1771) was itself a heavily biased abridgement of David Hume’s History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (six volumes, 1754–62). Jane Austen had her own copy of Hume’s work, which is greatly superior to Goldsmith. Goldsmith later published a one-volume abridgement of his History. Thus part of her joke was to abridge the already abridged history.

      The Steventon copy of Goldsmith’s History, inscribed with the name of her eldest brother James, contains marginal annotations in her hand. The volumes of Goldsmith are still in the family’s possession and Jane Austen’s annotations have recently been published in full for the first time.18 Her first known scribbling had been a defacement of a book: her French textbook, from when she was eight, has her signature ‘Jane Austen., 5th Decr. 1783’ and then ‘Mothers angry fathers gone out’ and ‘I wish I had done.’19 Once she had a pen in her hand she couldn’t stop herself from writing. Reading Goldsmith’s biased opinions on English history, she displays the almost uncontainable urge to scribble that is the mark of the born writer.

      The annotations on Goldsmith clearly reveal her own passionately royalist feelings. In Jane Austen’s eyes, Oliver Cromwell was a ‘Detestable Monster!’20 Goldsmith informs us that he ‘inherited a very small paternal fortune’, to which Austen adds: ‘And that was more than he deserved.’ She praises Lady Fairfax (‘Charming Woman!’) for making loyalist remarks from the public gallery when the King was put on trial. The King’s execution drew her most forceful denunciations. ‘Such was the fortitude of the Stuarts when oppressed and accused!’ she wrote of King Charles I. She finished and dated her parodic ‘History of England’ 26 November 1791, her hatred of the English revolution heightened by the French.21

      In an account of the death of the Parliamentarian John Hampden, Goldsmith wrote of his character: ‘affability in conversation, temper, art, eloquence in debate, and penetration in counsel’. Austen responded in the margin: ‘what a pity that such virtues sh[oul]d be clouded by Republicanism’. Of other anti-royalists she wrote, ‘Shame to such members’ and ‘Impudent Fellows’. She often substituted the word ‘guilt’ for ‘innocence’ in relation to anti-royalists. ‘Fiddlededia’, she writes – meaning nonsense or fiddledeedee.

      Jane Austen adored the Stuarts. A touching speech attributed to Bonnie Prince Charlie is annotated ‘Who but a Stuart could have so spoken?’ Her loyalty was inspired by her Leigh ancestry. Of the Stuarts the young Jane Austen noted in her pencil marks: ‘A family, who were always ill-used, BETRAYED or NEGLECTED, Whose virtues are seldom allowed, while their Errors are never forgotten’. These were strong opinions for a young girl. Her Jacobite sympathies meant that she shared Goldsmith’s hostility to the Whigs, who dominated politics in the Georgian era. He claimed that ‘the Whigs governed the Senate and the court … bound the lower orders of people with severe laws, and kept them at a distance by vile distinctions; and then taught them to call this – Liberty’, and she agreed: ‘Yes, This is always the Liberty of Whigs and Republicans.’ To his comment that ‘all the severe and most restrictive laws were enacted by that party that are continually stunning mankind with a cry of freedom’, she writes, ‘My dear Dr G. – I have lived long enough in this World to know that it is always so.’ She felt that the Whigs represented new money, selfishness and self-aggrandizement. Her sympathies were with the poor and oppressed. Beside an account of an impoverished couple who were forced to the last resort of cutting their child’s throat and hanging themselves, she wrote, ‘How much are the Poor to be pitied and the Rich to be blamed.’ She shared with her father and all her family a paternalistic Christian Toryism.

      In another of her Steventon books, Vicesimus Knox’s anthology of Elegant Extracts: or Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose Selected for the Improvement of Scholars, she disagreed with every slight on the character of her heroine, Mary Queen of Scots: ‘No’, ‘No’, ‘A lie’, ‘Another lie’, ‘she was not attached to him’. Correspondingly, she vehemently opposed any praise for Queen Elizabeth I: ‘a lie’, ‘a Lie – an entire lie from beginning to end’.22

      Having defaced Goldsmith’s History she eventually decided that she would write a sustained parody, showing up his inadequacies as a historian. She gave her work the title ‘The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian’, dedicated it to Cassandra and added a nota bene: ‘There will be very few dates in this History.’ Austen parodies the tone and style of Goldsmith with unerring accuracy, pinpointing his incongruities and omissions.

      Jane Austen made her dislike of Elizabeth I very clear, though she did cast some of the blame on to her male advisers: ‘It was the peculiar Misfortune of this Woman to have bad Ministers – Since wicked as she herself was, she could not have committed such extensive Mischief, had not these vile and abandoned Men connived at, and encouraged her in her Crimes.’ All her sympathies were with Mary Queen of Scots: ‘firm in her Mind; Constant in her Religion; and prepared herself to meet the cruel fate to which she was doomed, with a magnanimity that could alone proceed from conscious Innocence’. Mary, she says, was friendless apart from the Duke of Norfolk and