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 might expect of a parson’s daughter. But then Steventon rectory was not the typical parson’s household. The family were all broad-minded and clearly loved black humour. Like Shakespeare, whose works they read aloud together, they knew 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
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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
