married her cousin Henry in 1797, she wrote at once to Hastings, seeking his approbation of the union. After Eliza’s death, Henry visited Hastings. Reporting on the visit, Jane Austen wrote, somewhat mysteriously, that he had ‘never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree’.14 She was clearly astonished that Hastings had said nothing about the last days of the child he had so adored. It may well be inferred that the relationship was so close, his pain so great, that he could not bear to speak of her.
In the summer of 1765, the Hancock family arrived back in England, accompanied by Warren Hastings and their maid Clarinda. It was reported that the first news he heard on his arrival was word from the Austens of the death of his son. He was deeply affected, his love for his god-daughter Eliza only intensified. In London, Hastings and the Hancocks rented houses close to one another. Eliza and her mother stayed on in England when Hancock returned to Bengal. He sent them wonderful supplies: spices for cooking, curry leaves, pickled mangoes and limes, chillies, balychong spice and cassoondy sauce. Perfumes, such as attar of roses from Patna, arrived too. Diamonds were sent worth thousands of pounds, and gold mohurs (coins). He also shipped over fine linen and silks for bed linen and for dresses for both mother and daughter. They received seersucker, sannow, doreas, muslin, dimity, Malda silks, chintz and flowered shawls. In return, Phila sent books, gin and newspapers. Hancock requested that his wife share her treasures with members of her family, including of course George Austen and his family, which by this time was growing rapidly. Little wonder that Jane Austen’s juvenile writing contains references to consumer goods such as Indian muslins, not to mention curry sauces.15
Hancock wrote vivid letters to his wife, telling terrifying tales of servants killed by tigers in the Sunderbunds and reporting that her two maids, Diana and Silima, had become prostitutes. Phila shared this Indian news with Jane Austen’s parents. She often visited Hampshire to help Mrs Austen in her confinements. She was definitely present at Cassandra’s birth and probably at Jane’s in 1775.
Warren Hastings met George Austen in London in July 1765. Austen was extremely impressed with Hastings, who had been a brilliant classicist at Westminster School and had always been disappointed that instead of proceeding to university he had been sent out to the East India Company as a young man. Hastings loved Latin poetry and had a taste for writing verse based on the Horatian model. George Austen urged his own children to emulate the great man’s learning.
Eliza’s parents wanted her to be educated in England or France. She was given the best London masters for drawing and dancing lessons, and for music. She played the guitar and the harpsichord. She was taught to ride, to play-act and to speak French. This was a typical education in female accomplishments with the express purpose of attracting a man of means. But Hancock also insisted that she had arithmetic and writing lessons: ‘her other Accomplishments will be Ornaments to her, but these are absolutely necessary’.16 He took advice on her education from Hastings, who urged ‘an early practice in Economy’, but also hinted that he would provide for Eliza: ‘but if I live and meet with the success which I have the Right to hope for, she shall not be under the Necessity of marrying a Tradesman, or any Man for her Support’.17 Hancock fretted about his daughter. He worried about her moral health, fearing that she might ‘pick up the Levity or Follies of the French’, and also about her physical health – when she got threadworms 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.
***
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
