desultory epistolary style. Yet Jane Austen knew that most of the business of keeping separated families together depended on women sending letters, written whether or not there were any exciting incidents to report. In Northanger Abbey Henry Tilney pretends gallantly to support female superiority in letter-writing, while, more sincerely, Mr Parker is grateful to his sister Diana for writing often, when his brother Sidney does not.
Despite roundly mocking her, Jane Austen shares ailments with her character. Diana Parker’s ‘old grievance, spasmodic bile’, is close to her creator’s: just before beginning Sanditon, Jane wrote, ‘I am more & more convinced that Bile is at the bottom of all I have suffered, which makes it easy to know how to treat myself.’ To her list of supposed medical jargon in Sanditon, ‘anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-septic, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic’, the term ‘anti-bilious’ was added later. Diana moaned that she could ‘hardly crawl from her bed to the sofa’: Jane Austen admitted she was now ‘chiefly on the sofa’.
Perhaps the vigour with which the hypochondriacal Diana Parker conquers her bilious disorder is a wish fulfilment of the truly sick Jane Austen (equally wish-fulfilling might be her comfortable situation, for Diana is well-provided for where her author is not). Also, mocking bodily infirmity, even if chiefly imaginary, might have helped Jane herself ward off any tendency to self-pity and petulance: ‘generally speaking it is [human nature’s] weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber,’ she noted in Persuasion.
Outside fiction, Jane Austen found the hypochondriac more irritating than comic. She described a distant relative as ‘the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well – & who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else’. Nearer home, she may have found another example of hypochondria: reading between the lines, we might hear occasional exasperation with her mother and her ‘complication of disorders’, about which she was rarely silent. Mrs Austen survived her daughter by a decade.
Jane Austen’s robust attitude to her own health or sickness, her tendency to believe in the remedies of brisk walking and rhubarb, made her sometimes unsympathetic to other sufferers. Her friend Anne Sharp experienced dreadful migraines and eye problems; unlike Jane, she sought extreme and new-fangled medical cures, including a painful suture in the nape of her neck, electrodes to her head and the cutting off of all her hair. Possibly she persisted because she knew that continued ill health would ruin her modest job prospects – doubting her friend’s fantasy that she might marry a relative of her rich employer. Herself ailing by 1816, Jane Austen was irritated into sarcasm by Anne’s frequent complaints of ill health and naïve optimism about people and cures: ‘she has been again obliged to exert herself more than ever – in a more distressing, more harrassed state – & has met with another excellent old Physician & his Wife, with every virtue under Heaven who takes to her & cures her from pure Love & Benevolence …’ Sympathy returned, and Jane wrote her last letter from Chawton to her ‘dearest Anne’, saying farewell and describing with ‘all the Egotism of an Invalid’ her own appalling symptoms.
Beyond ill health, Diana Parker echoes her creator by being a house-hunter. Following her father’s death, Jane, Cassandra and their mother began a nomadic life, primarily dependent on the brothers for income, moving from lodgings to ever cheaper lodgings in Bath – then for a while staying with brother Frank and his family in Southampton, a port and spa (in Jane’s childhood writings notable for its ‘Stinking fish’). Until they came to live in Chawton in 1809 with Edward’s help, they had no settled home. A search for a home is one of the perennial themes of all the novels and it is an irony of her subsequent reputation that in later years Jane Austen was regarded as pre-eminently the novelist of stability and home. But not even Edward was secure and, when Jane was writing Sanditon, he was suffering a lawsuit which threw doubt on his claim to his huge estates, one of which included the Chawton cottage.
Diana Parker is not homeless, but she is consumed by finding lodgings for what turn out to be mythical visitors, and her manic house-hunting may draw something from Jane Austen’s experiences of trudging round Bath looking at ‘putrifying Houses’ in the hope of finding a place they could afford. All the novels are obsessed with houses, but none mentions so many kinds as Sanditon, which becomes a veritable estate agency of a book with its terraces, tourist cottages, hotels and puffed lodging-houses – all in imagination filled with rich tenants.
Underpinning anxiety about homelessness is of course money. Here the author’s life presses most fiercely on Sanditon. Jane Austen was not only disturbed by Edward’s threatening lawsuit but by something more definite. It happened just after she finished the last sentence of Sanditon, but it likely contributed to her inability to take up her pen again, so leaving her fragment ‘upon the Shelve’ along with Northanger Abbey.
Mrs Austen’s rich brother James Leigh-Perrot and his wife Jane were childless, and it was always understood that his estate in due course would come to his sister’s children but that, if his death preceded his wife’s, there would be immediate legacies for the needy Austens. Eleven days after Jane Austen stopped writing Sanditon, Thomas Leigh-Perrot died. To the great disappointment of the Austens, he left everything to his wife for her lifetime – and this despite their standing by her during the murky incident when she was accused of shoplifting and faced transportation for the crime. ‘I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle’s Will brought on a relapse,’ Jane wrote. ‘I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves.’
If she were indeed suffering from Addison’s disease, as many suppose, this added stress would have been hugely detrimental; she herself was aware that ‘agitation’ could be as harmful as fatigue. Possibly in the portrait of Lady Denham and her treatment of her poorer relatives, there was something of the whimsical and mean selfishness Jane Austen saw in aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot. (A modern critic, straying into gothic mode, finds Lady Denham an early example of the childless ‘rich lesbian vampire’, who collects husbands and property and preys on sick or poor young women.)
One of the reasons for Thomas’s decision – unmentioned by Jane Austen – may well have been the Leigh-Perrots’ anger at losing a large sum of money through the bankruptcy of Jane’s speculating banker brother, Henry Austen.
Henry and Jane
Henry benefited mightily from the long Napoleonic Wars. At first intended for the Church like his eldest brother James, he had instead joined the local militia, soon becoming paymaster and agent. He resigned his commission in 1801 and set up business as a banker in London, partnering local banks in Kent and Hampshire, one in the market town of Alton, very close to Chawton. He was also connected to small country banks in a couple of speculative inland spas: Buxton in Derbyshire and Horwood Well Spa in Somerset. The wartime economy helped all his projects with its huge defence spending as well as import restrictions which kept agricultural prices high – advancing the interests of his main customers, the landowners, though not of the urban or rural poor.
Jane was pleased at the prosperity enjoyed by her charming, witty and sanguine brother. She admired, loved and indulged him, rejoicing at his successes and sympathising in his setbacks. She stayed often with him in London, where one of his lodgings was above his bank in Henrietta Street. There she met his lively friends and colleagues and witnessed his financial activities. She attended the theatre with him and even came to the notice of the Prince Regent – whom she heartily despised. Hearing that Henry had been invited to the season’s most desirable social event in 1814, the ball at White’s Club celebrating the (temporary) allied triumph over Napoleon, she exclaimed, ‘O what a Henry!’
Yet, for all her supportiveness and admiration, she would have been painfully aware that as a woman she had none of Henry’s opportunities to increase her own modest income. Perhaps in this respect Lady Denham with her own money and speculating choices is wish-fulfilling,
