such as the spirited sister of Sir Charles, Lady G. Fanny Burney was pioneering in her quest to draw ‘characters from nature’, as her preface to Evelina (1778) suggested. Burney was also pioneering in her decision to bring her second novel, Cecilia (1782), to its close with a ‘realistic’ ending: ‘the Hero and Heroine are neither plunged into the depths of misery, nor exalted to unhuman happiness, – is not such a middle state more natural? more according to real life, and less resembling every other Book of Fiction?’18
The final chapter of Cecilia includes a phrase that inspired Jane Austen: ‘“The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE … Remember: if to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.”’19 Pride and Prejudice is indeed a homage to Cecilia. Burney’s heroine, Cecilia Beverley, is beautiful, clever, spirited and rich, but her wealth comes at a price. The condition of her inheritance is that whoever wins her hand must relinquish their surname and take hers. The hero is Mortimer Delville, a nobly born man whose family pride is uppermost. He loves Cecilia but, like Darcy with Elizabeth, says it will ‘degrade’ him to marry her because of her lack of nobility. He will never agree to become Mr Beverley. His mother, Mrs Delville, is a magisterial older woman, who first opposes, then sanctions, the marriage. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a version of this kind of powerful and proud older woman who opposes the young usurper.
Burney wrote that her intention in Cecilia was to depict characters who were neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but true to life: ‘I meant in Mrs Delville to draw a great, but not a perfect character; I meant, on the contrary, to blend upon paper, as I have frequently seen blended in life, noble and rare qualities with striking and incurable defects.’ Of the Delvilles, she wrote, ‘I merely meant to show how differently pride, like every other quality, operates upon different minds.’20 The latter sentence could be a description of Pride and Prejudice.
In many ways, Cecilia is a deeply shocking and unsettling novel. It shows that as a young girl Jane Austen was free to read emotionally and morally challenging material. With its large cast of characters, it is a prototype of the great Victorian novels of George Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray. One of Cecilia’s guardians, Mr Harrel, a gambling addict, who has blackmailed her, shoots himself at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens while she is there. A back-story is the seduction of an innocent young girl who is then forced into prostitution. Cecilia, abandoned by her husband, descends into poverty and madness. Her nervous breakdown at the end of the book is graphically rendered. The hero and heroine are finally united but at great personal cost to Cecilia’s mental health and physical beauty.
Burney had, ever since the success of Evelina, wanted to create an ugly, poor but clever heroine. She called it her ‘ugly scheme’. Her original intention was for Cecilia to be this new kind of plain heroine (called Eugenia), but she was persuaded to abandon her idea. Burney would not give up on Eugenia, however, and she appears in her third novel, Camilla, as the pock-marked crippled sister of the heroine. Eugenia contracts smallpox and is badly disfigured and then falls off a see-saw, injuring her spine in the process. It is ugly, clever, kind Eugenia who is the real heroine of the novel.
Strikingly, Jane Austen’s heroines are rarely described as beautiful and accomplished. Even Emma Woodhouse is ‘handsome’ rather than ‘beautiful’. Physical descriptions of her heroines are rare. Austen shows instead how they grow into loveliness or possess a particular fine feature, such as sparkling eyes. Jane Bennet is the beauty of the family but the heroine is feisty Elizabeth, who ridicules the common tendency of over-idealizing the female species. Burney was the first novelist to create heroines who were plain or even downright ugly. Without her, it would not have been possible for Jane Austen to reject the convention that a heroine must be beautiful.
Jane Austen would have felt particular pleasure and pride when she received her five-volume set of Camilla in 1796. Not only was there the anticipation of a read as good and as lengthy as Cecilia. There was the added frisson of seeing her own name in the list of subscribers, as well as a personal connection: her godfather Samuel Cooke was a close friend of Burney.21 The Reverend Samuel Cooke was married to Mrs Austen’s first cousin, who shared the name Cassandra Leigh. She was the daughter of Theophilus Leigh, Master of Balliol College, Oxford. The Cookes lived in a village in Surrey called Great Bookham. Opposite them in a little house called The Hermitage lived Fanny Burney, now married, as John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey puts it, ‘to an emigrant’, General Alexandre d’Arblay. Burney had first met her future husband at Juniper House, a former coaching inn nestled in a valley at the foot of Box Hill, that had become home to a group of émigrés who had fled from revolutionary Paris.
Fanny Burney
Fanny was a frequent visitor to the Cookes. She didn’t really like their teenage daughter, Mary, whom she found ‘stiff and cold’, but she was very fond of Cassandra Cooke, who was herself a novelist. It may have been Cassandra who asked Jane to be a subscriber to Camilla. Burney lived close to the Cookes from 1793 to 1797, whereupon she moved near by to build Camilla Cottage. Samuel Cooke baptized Burney’s only and beloved son, who was named Alexandre after his father. Jane Austen later joked about marrying him, so it is clear that she and her sister gossiped about the d’Arblay family life.
The Cookes particularly admired Mansfield Park, and Samuel wrote to Jane Austen to tell her so, observing that he would not like Madame d’Arblay’s new novel (The Wanderer, published the same year) so well. We know that Jane Austen visited her godfather in Surrey. The topography of the fictional Highbury in Emma bears some resemblance to that of Great Bookham, and there can be no doubt that Jane Austen knew Box Hill. She would have discussed novels when she spent time with Cassandra Cooke. The publication of Cassandra’s novel Battleridge in 1799 might have helped to persuade Jane Austen that she too could be a published author. She may well have read the novel in manuscript.
Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra in October 1798, ‘Your letter was chaperoned here by one from Mrs Cooke, in which she says that Battleridge is not to come out before January; and she is so little satisfied with Cawthorn’s dilatoriness that she never means to employ him again.’22 Cawthorn, of Cawthorn and Hutt in Cockspur Street, London, was Mrs Cooke’s publisher. Here, Jane Austen shows her interest in her cousin’s publishing problems. Cassandra Cooke’s openness in discussing such matters suggests that the Austens were supportive of her attempts to be a published novelist. Later, as we will see, Jane experienced similar frustrations with her first publisher.
Jane and her Leigh cousins had loyal Cavalier ancestors during the Civil War. In 1642, Sir Thomas Leigh had entertained King Charles I at Stoneleigh for three days when the gates of Coventry were shut against him. The Leighs were heavily fined by Cromwell’s government but held on to their lands and their royalist sympathies.
Cooke’s preface to Battleridge: An Historical Tale claims that the novel was based on a true story set in the interregnum. The chief character is the historical figure Doctor Scott, who was a favourite of Charles I but manages to earn the admiration of Oliver Cromwell (who appears as a character in volume one). Battleridge actually tells two different tales, both allegedly based on ‘facts’. The main story concerns the abduction and imprisonment of a young girl whose family fortunes are restored by the recovery of a lost deed which has been locked into the false bottom of a cedar chest. It has typically Gothic features: madness, old castles, lost documents, cruel fathers and sons, beautiful but crazed maidens, wise divines. In her preface, Cooke acknowledges the novels of Goldsmith, Richardson and Burney as exemplars for not representing their heroines as ‘angels’, and Mrs Radcliffe as the ‘Queen of the tremendous’.
