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Authors: Valerie Grosvenor Myer
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making jokes on painful subjects. It was her way of coping.
5
Flirtations and Scandals
T HE AUSTENS WARDED off boredom with family jokes, conundrums, home-made verses, and theatricals in the dining room or the barn. James was fond of writing prologues and epilogues. In 1782, when Jane was just seven, he produced
Matilda
, a ranting blank verse tragedy by Thomas Francklin, set in the time of the Norman Conquest. Edward spoke the prologue, Mr Austen’s pupil Tom Fowle the epilogue. Family mourning for their aunt Mrs Edward Cooper prevented festivities the next Christmas, but in July 1784
The Rivals
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan was acted.
At Christmas 1786 Mrs Austen entertained Philadelphia Hancock, her married daughter Eliza de Feuillide and Eliza’s little boy. Eliza had been considered too grave as a child, but now, in her twenties, was quite lively. She played every day on the pianoforte the Austens had borrowed for her. The visitors brought a present for Jane’s eleventh birthday, a set of Arnaud Berquin’s book, L'
Ami des enfans
. Jane had not met this cosmopolitan cousin before, and was enchanted with her and her social grace.
The following Christmas, when Jane was just twelve, her cousin Eliza played the lead in a domestic production of Susannah Centlivre’s comedy
The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret
. Eliza wrote to Phila Walter begging her to take part, but Phila puritanically objected to the idea of appearing in public. In the New Year the Steventon company performed
The Chances
, an old play by John Fletcher, adapted by David Garrick. This was a comedy set in sixteenth-century Naples, dealing with girls in disguise and their jealous lovers. When Jane was fifteen, the family performed Isaac Bickers taffe’s recently published
The Sultan
, with Jane Cooper as Roxalana and Henry as the Sultan. A proto-feminist English girl, the heroine teases the Sultan into giving up his harem and making her his sole Sultana. Jane Austen learned from the dramatic writers to write brilliantly witty dialogue. Aged fifteen, she wrote an absurdist playlet called
The Mystery
, dedicated to her father, and later, she adapted Samuel Richardson’s novel
Sir Charles Grandison
into a five act drama.
Energetic Mrs Austen was in favour of the theatricals, saying she had no room for idle young people, though the plays gave Eliza, a married lady and mother of a baby boy, Hastings de Feuillide, the chance to flirt shamelessly with Jane’s brothers James (then in his early twenties) and Henry (in his late teens), as Henry Crawford does with Maria and Julia Bertram in
Mansfield Park
.
In September the following year the Austens heard of a couple who had fallen in love while they were rehearsing an amateur production and eloped to Scotland. The Honourable Thomas James Twisleton, aged eighteen, ran away with Charlotte Anne Frances Wattell, also under age. The age of majority was then twenty-one. The play was
Julia
by the Irish dramatist Robert Jephson, friend of Dr Johnson and his circle. It may be that the name Julia stayed in Jane’s mind, to reappear in
Mansfield Park
. Another link in the chain of associated ideas was that Thomas Twisleton’s sister Julia had married a distant cousin of Jane’s, James Henry Leigh, of Adlestrop Park. Twisleton’s younger sister, the Honourable Mary-Cassandra, was an ‘Adultress’ Jane was to recognize at a dance in Bath in 1801, having homed in on Mary-Cassandra’s likeness to Julia Leigh. Jane wrote:
I am proud to say I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for though repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the
she
, I fixed on the right one from the first. A resemblance to Mrs Leigh was my guide. She is not so pretty as I expected … she was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else.
The adultress was a year older than Jane herself, and had married at sixteen. Seven years later her husband, Edward Jervis Ricketts, discovered love letters
5
Flirtations and Scandals
T HE AUSTENS WARDED off boredom with family jokes, conundrums, home-made verses, and theatricals in the dining room or the barn. James was fond of writing prologues and epilogues. In 1782, when Jane was just seven, he produced
Matilda
, a ranting blank verse tragedy by Thomas Francklin, set in the time of the Norman Conquest. Edward spoke the prologue, Mr Austen’s pupil Tom Fowle the epilogue. Family mourning for their aunt Mrs Edward Cooper prevented festivities the next Christmas, but in July 1784
The Rivals
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan was acted.
At Christmas 1786 Mrs Austen entertained Philadelphia Hancock, her married daughter Eliza de Feuillide and Eliza’s little boy. Eliza had been considered too grave as a child, but now, in her twenties, was quite lively. She played every day on the pianoforte the Austens had borrowed for her. The visitors brought a present for Jane’s eleventh birthday, a set of Arnaud Berquin’s book, L'
Ami des enfans
. Jane had not met this cosmopolitan cousin before, and was enchanted with her and her social grace.
The following Christmas, when Jane was just twelve, her cousin Eliza played the lead in a domestic production of Susannah Centlivre’s comedy
The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret
. Eliza wrote to Phila Walter begging her to take part, but Phila puritanically objected to the idea of appearing in public. In the New Year the Steventon company performed
The Chances
, an old play by John Fletcher, adapted by David Garrick. This was a comedy set in sixteenth-century Naples, dealing with girls in disguise and their jealous lovers. When Jane was fifteen, the family performed Isaac Bickers taffe’s recently published
The Sultan
, with Jane Cooper as Roxalana and Henry as the Sultan. A proto-feminist English girl, the heroine teases the Sultan into giving up his harem and making her his sole Sultana. Jane Austen learned from the dramatic writers to write brilliantly witty dialogue. Aged fifteen, she wrote an absurdist playlet called
The Mystery
, dedicated to her father, and later, she adapted Samuel Richardson’s novel
Sir Charles Grandison
into a five act drama.
Energetic Mrs Austen was in favour of the theatricals, saying she had no room for idle young people, though the plays gave Eliza, a married lady and mother of a baby boy, Hastings de Feuillide, the chance to flirt shamelessly with Jane’s brothers James (then in his early twenties) and Henry (in his late teens), as Henry Crawford does with Maria and Julia Bertram in
Mansfield Park
.
In September the following year the Austens heard of a couple who had fallen in love while they were rehearsing an amateur production and eloped to Scotland. The Honourable Thomas James Twisleton, aged eighteen, ran away with Charlotte Anne Frances Wattell, also under age. The age of majority was then twenty-one. The play was
Julia
by the Irish dramatist Robert Jephson, friend of Dr Johnson and his circle. It may be that the name Julia stayed in Jane’s mind, to reappear in
Mansfield Park
. Another link in the chain of associated ideas was that Thomas Twisleton’s sister Julia had married a distant cousin of Jane’s, James Henry Leigh, of Adlestrop Park. Twisleton’s younger sister, the Honourable Mary-Cassandra, was an ‘Adultress’ Jane was to recognize at a dance in Bath in 1801, having homed in on Mary-Cassandra’s likeness to Julia Leigh. Jane wrote:
I am proud to say I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for though repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the
she
, I fixed on the right one from the first. A resemblance to Mrs Leigh was my guide. She is not so pretty as I expected … she was highly rouged, and looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else.
The adultress was a year older than Jane herself, and had married at sixteen. Seven years later her husband, Edward Jervis Ricketts, discovered love letters
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