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.
By January 1791 Eliza’s husband Jean-François, now no doubt regretting his title of ‘Comte’, had fled to Turin with the King’s brother and other royalist émigrés. Eliza wrote from London to the Austen family at Steventon telling them the news and also giving bulletins of her mother’s declining health. She comforted herself with gossip about her Steventon cousins, especially Jane and Cassandra: ‘I hear they are perfect beauties and of course gain hearts by dozens.’26
After a long battle with breast cancer, Phila Hancock died in 1792. Eliza’s husband managed, via a circuitous route, to join her in England to provide some comfort in her bereavement. They went to Bath for a period of recuperation and she became pregnant. The Count decided, however, to return to France for fear of having his land confiscated. As Eliza reported,
M. de F proposed remaining here some time, but he soon received Accounts from France which informed him that having already exceeded his Leave of Absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such Advices were not to be neglected and M. de F was obliged to depart for Paris.27
Within days of his departure, Eliza’s nerves, already frayed, were shattered when she was caught up in serious riots in London. On 4 June 1792, the King’s birthday, a group of forty servants had been invited to a dance and dinner at a pub, the Pitts Head. There was no disturbance until the High Constable of Westminster along with his watchmen entered the pub, made trouble and arrested all the servants, taking them to the Watchhouse in Mount Street. The next morning a mob arrived at the Watchhouse and soldiers were called to read the Riot Act. Eliza’s coach was attacked and her driver was injured, terrifying her out of her wits and causing her to miscarry the baby she had conceived on her husband’s visit to England. She wrote a graphic account of the events:
The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my Coachman, the firing at one end of the street which was already begun, altogether in short alarmed me so much, that I really have never been well since. The Confusion continued all that day and Night and the following Day, and for these eight and forty Hours, I have seen nothing but large parties of Soldiers parading up and down in this Street, to which Mount Street is very near, there being only Grosvenor Square between. My apprehensions have been that they would have set fire to the houses they were so bent on demolishing, and think if that was to be the case how soon in such a City as this a Fire very trifling in the beginning might be productive of the most serious Consequences.28
Parallels were instantly drawn with recent history in France. A caricature of the Mount Street riots, published two days later, showed a French manservant arguing with a violent watchman and saying ‘Ah, Sacre Dieu! I did tink it vas all Dance in de land of Liberté!’ On the back wall is a print of the Storming of the Bastille, with cannons and decapitated heads on pikes. The implication is clear: like Paris, London was in danger of being swept into revolution.29
Eliza immediately made plans to escape to Steventon. But as a result of her miscarriage and then a severe case of chickenpox, she didn’t get there until August. So it was that she arrived at the Austen rectory with her head full of English riots and anxieties about her husband back in Paris. Weakened by miscarriage and illness, she cried when she saw the uncle whose features so resembled those of the beloved mother whom she had recently lost.
She noted how tall her cousin Jane had grown and assured Phylly Walter, who disliked Jane, that she ‘was greatly improved in manners as in person’. Eliza also expressed her own sense of loyalty to the younger sister: ‘My Heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me, indeed requires a return of the same nature.’30
She may have felt safe in rural Hampshire, sharing stories and books with her cousins, but news from France reached her in private letters from Jean-François and also via the English press: ‘My private Letters confirm the Intelligence afforded by the public Prints,’ she wrote to Phylly Walter, ‘and assure me that nothing
