With all the celebrations surrounding the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride & Prejudice last year, you could be forgiven for thinking that 1813 was the most important year in Jane Austen’s short life.
But 2014 is the bicentenary of the year I believe marks the real zenith in the life of Jane Austen, novelist. For in 1814 she began to properly enjoy the fruits of her labours and some reward for her remarkable talent. Two of her novels – Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice– had already been let loose on the world to some acclaim. A new novel –Mansfield Park –was published in May 1814, and Jane also began writing Emma, the novel many people think her most accomplished of all. Her success inspired her niece Anna to try her hand at writing novels too. ‘You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life – 3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’, was her aunt’s most encouraging – and much-quoted advice.
And well she might have been in a mood to encourage her aspiring novelist niece. During this milestone year of 1814, Jane Austen made several trips from sleepy Hampshire to London to stay with her brother Henry; first in Covent Garden, and then later, at his new house in Chelsea. There were meetings with her publisher, and trips to the theatre, including notable outings to see Edward Kean’s much talked-of performance as Shylock, and former royal mistress Mrs Jordan’s as Nell in The Devil to Pay. There were curricle rides, dinner parties and shopping trips during which Jane eyed up ‘pretty caps in Cranbourn Alley’, and selected ribbons with which to trim her bonnet. Miraculously, Jane Austen’s books were earning her money which she – accustomed to frugality - was learning to spend a little of. ‘Though I like praise as well as anybody, I like what Edward calls Pewter too’, she remarked pointedly, in a letter to another niece Fanny, in November 1814.
And this newly-flush Jane also allowed herself to bask just a little in her literary triumphs. ‘I am very greedy and want to make the most of it’, she wrote to Fanny after the first edition of Mansfield Park sold out by the autumn of 1814.
No wonder she wanted to make the most of it. For how thrilling a year 1814 must have been for this woman: a writer by profession now, not pastime. How satisfying a year for a woman, who from a young child, had loved more than anything else to write; both to entertain her family and to set down the irresistible thoughts of her quicksilver brain, alive with characters and incident. A woman who – by her early twenties - had written skits, plays, poems, prayers and completed the first versions of two novels which would one day be read and adored across the world. A woman who had turned down the prospect of a husband and children because she knew that motherhood and family life would not allow her the freedom to carry on doing the thing she burned to do. A woman who in the words of PD James, a lifelong devotee ‘must have known that however brilliant or successful her brothers, it was she who had genius’.
1814 was the year Jane Austen first let herself be ‘greedy’, this woman who thought of herself as a writer first and foremost, long before anyone in the world much cared.
Caroline Sanderson has done jobs in both bookselling and publishing and now works as a writer, editor and books journalist. She is the author of pocket GIANTS Jane Austen and lives in Gloucestershire.
