In Training for a Heroine begins with the story of Jane Austen as a young, ambitious writer at the very start of her career. The exhibition takes its title from a passage in Northanger Abbey (7), in which Austen describes the protagonist, Catherine Morland. The focus for the exhibition was Jane Austen’s writing slope, on loan from the British Library. It was the only item exhibited, and it was placed in the center of the gallery; information panels were mounted on the surrounding walls. In the adjacent long gallery was No Notion of Loving by Halves, an installation by the artist Jocelyn McGregor in response to In Training for a Heroine.
In Training for a Heroine: An Exhibition of Jane Austen’s Travelling Writing Desk
The exhibition space at God’s House Tower, featuring Jane Austen’s traveling writing slope.
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Jane Austen’s traveling writing desk belonged to the author from 1794 until her death in 1817. The portable mahogany desk was designed to fold into a case for ease of traveling and was given to Austen around the time of her nineteenth birthday by her father, George Austen. It would have been an important and encouraging gesture for his daughter, signifying his belief in her abilities and talent as well as his support of her ambitions to be a writer (Byrne 268). The desk also provided Jane Austen with a small amount of privacy in her busy and crowded family home in Steventon, Hampshire, which she shared with her parents, her siblings, the family’s servants, and the pupils who attended her father’s boarding school. For a young woman of nineteen, it would have been the only lockable space for her to store her most treasured possessions—her letters and manuscripts.
Austen’s writing slope is shaped like a box and folded at an angle, so that when it opens the user can write more comfortably on its slanted, embossed leather surface. There is a handle on the side and a hidden compartment for valuable items. The desk could be placed on a lap while traveling or on a table at home. Many writing boxes during this time were made from pine; however, Austen’s was made from mahogany, an expensive colonial import that became more available in Britain after the acquisition of the colony known as British Honduras (now Belize).
Jane Austen’s writing slope. Loaned by the British Library.
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Writing at the desk
Jane Austen’s traveling writing desk has been described as “the Georgian forerunner of the laptop” (Byrne 268). Writing at the desk, however, would have been much more challenging than typing at a computer.
Jane Austen would have written all her letters and novels with a quill pen made from a goose, turkey, or swan feather. Writing with a quill was a difficult and time-consuming process. It could be frustrating: “I must get a softer pen,” she wrote to Cassandra. “This is harder.—I am in agonies.—. . . I am going to write nothing but short Sentences. There shall be two full stops in every Line” (15–16 September 1813). Writing with a quill pen required both skill and specialist equipment, such as a penknife for sharpening the tip and pounce paper to dry the ink and stop it from smudging. Austen would have stored these items in her desk alongside rulers, sealing wax, ink, paper, and, of course, her letters and manuscripts. When the desk was given to the British Library by Joan Austen-Leigh in 1999, it was also found to contain three pairs of spectacles that the Austen family claim to be the author’s own.1
Image 4. Spectacles and Image 5. Desk with Inkpot
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Jane Austen’s spectacles. Loaned by the British Library. |
Jane Austen’s writing slope with inkwell. Loaned by the British Library. |
During this period, ink was often made at home. A recipe can be found in a handwritten household book owned by Martha Lloyd, a family friend of the Austens who lived with them in both Southampton and Chawton.
Take 4 oz: of blue gauls, 2 oz: of green Copperas 1 oz & half of gum Arrabic, break the galls, the gum & Copperas must be beaten in a Mortar & put into a pint of strong stale Beer; with a pint of small Beer, put in a little double refin’d Sugar, it must stand in a chimney Corner fourteen days & shaken two or three times a day. (Gehrer 133–34)
Note the use of sugar as part of the recipe: in Austen’s time, next to God’s House Tower was the Sugar House, where sugar from Jamaican plantations was refined.
“All my worldly wealth”
In addition to manuscripts and letters, Austen stored money in her desk. While traveling to Dartford in 1798, she nearly lost the seven pounds concealed in its secret drawer. The box was accidentally placed in the wrong horse-drawn chaise, which was on its way to Dover, not Dartford. In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, Austen wrote:
I should have begun my letter soon after our arrival but for a little adventure which prevented me. After we had been here a quarter of an hour it was discovered that my writing and dressing boxes had been by accident put into a chaise which was just packing off as we came in, and were driven away towards Gravesend in their way to the West Indies. No part of my property could have been such a prize before, for in my writing-box was all my worldly wealth. . . . Mr. Nottley immediately despatched a man and horse after the chaise, and in half an hour’s time I had the pleasure of being as rich as ever; they were got about two or three miles off. (24 October 1798)
Panel from the exhibition.
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The art of letter writing
Letter writing was part of Jane Austen’s typical morning routine, often undertaken before breakfast. Keeping track of letters sent and received was considered an important social obligation, much like hosting and entertaining. Before telegraphs or telephones, email or texts, letter writing was the only way to keep in touch with family and friends. Not only were letters a necessary and vital form of communication, but they also provided entertainment at home, as they were often read aloud to family and guests after dinner.
Letter from Jane Austen to Francis Austen (3 July 1813). Loaned by the British Library.
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Writing letters was also costly, as paper was very expensive; fifty sheets of paper would have cost a housemaid a whole week’s wages. To save paper, writing was often added in available margin space, and letters were often “crossed”—in other words, once a page was filled it was turned ninety degrees, and the writing would continue over the first layer. A conscientious sender might use red ink for the crossed portion of the letter to make it easier to read.2
To save on postage, people did not use envelopes, so the sheet of letter paper was folded, addressed, and sealed with wax. The letter was then taken to a receiving house—such as that operated by Thomas Baker, the printer and stationer on the High Street in Southampton—where it was picked up by the letter carrier.
The practices of crossing and folding letters continued until the postal reform in 1840. Before 1840, postage was paid by the person receiving the letter and was expensive and variable, depending on weight and distance traveled. In 1840 a cheaper and simpler system of prepaid postage stamps was introduced, and the volume of UK mail doubled within a year.
Jane Austen’s writing slope, with glasses. Loaned by the British Library.
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Jane Austen was sensitive about the costs of postage that would be paid by her correspondents. To Cassandra she wrote, “I will endeavour to make this letter more worthy your acceptance than my last, which was so shabby a one that I think Mr Marshall could never charge you with the postage” (21–23 January 1799).
Austen’s letters
Jane Austen spent many hours at her desk writing letters. At school, she would have had lessons in letter-writing etiquette. Her handwriting was small, straight, and exceptionally neat. Most of the surviving letters written by Jane Austen were addressed to her sister, Cassandra, Austen’s closest friend and confidante. Cassandra burned a number of her sister’s letters, as well as her own written replies. Though burning letters was a common practice at the time, it is hard to say what Cassandra’s motives were. The letters that were destroyed might have contained secrets and private conversations that Cassandra didn’t want to share, or she might have been trying to protect her sister’s reputation. In any case, much of what we know about Jane Austen is based on the letters that Cassandra decided to preserve.
I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter. (3–5 January 1801)
Jane Austen’s letters provide a unique and direct insight into her life and her work. They are full of witty observations, humorous anecdotes, and scandalous gossip. Those she received from Cassandra must also have been characterized by these qualities:
Your Letter gave pleasure to all of us, we had all the reading of it of course, I three times—as I undertook to the great releif of Lizzy, to read it to Sackree, & afterwards to Louisa.—Sackree does not at all approve of Mary Doe & her nuts—on the score of propriety rather than health. (11–12 October 1813)
The Southampton letters
Jane Austen knew Southampton well. She first visited the city in 1783, aged eight. Her stay didn’t end well, however, as she contracted typhus and became very seriously ill. Her second visit, in 1793, was a happier affair as she celebrated her eighteenth birthday at the Dolphin Inn.
In 1806, following the death of her father, Jane Austen moved from Bath to Southampton with her mother, sister, brother Frank and his wife, and friend Martha Lloyd. Their home, 2 Castle Square, was in an atmospheric part of the town, overshadowed by the mock-gothic castle residence of their landlord, the Marquis of Lansdowne. The large and abundant garden ran down to the medieval walls. Austen writes about her new home in a letter to Cassandra in 1807: “We hear that we are envied our House by many people, & that the Garden is the best in the Town” (20–22 February 1807).
The High Street, Southampton, engraved by William Day, after R. Scruton (1827).
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In the three years that she lived in Southampton, Jane Austen supported her sister-in-law during the birth of her niece; visited a music shop to rent a piano; danced at the Dolphin Inn; watched her brother Frank skate on the frozen marshes opposite God’s House Tower; and witnessed a fire at a local bakery near her home. She also visited Netley Abbey, a gothic ruin that has inspired many artists, poets, and novelists over the centuries and that still stands today.
Frank’s skating
It is one of the pleasantest frosts I ever knew, so very quiet. I hope it will last some time longer for Frank’s sake, who is quite anxious to get some skating; he tried yesterday, but it would not do. (7–8 January 1807)
The fire
On Tuesday Eveng Southampton was in a good deal of alarm for about an hour; a fire broke out soon after nine at Webbes, the Pastrycook, & burnt for some time with great fury. I cannot learn exactly how it originated, at the time it was said to be their Bakehouse, but now I hear it was in the back of their Dwelling house, & that one room was consumed.—The Flames were considerable, they seemed about as near to us as those at Lyme, & to reach higher. One could not but feel uncomfortable, & I began to think of what I should do, if it came to the worst;—happily however the night was perfectly still, the Engines were immediately in use, & before ten the fire was nearly extinguished—tho’ it was twelve before everything was considered safe, & a Guard was kept the whole night. (7–9 October 1808)
The ball at the Dolphin
Our Ball was rather more amusing than I expected, Martha liked it very much, & I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour.—. . . The room was tolerably full, & there were perhaps thirty couple of Dancers;—the melancholy part was to see so many dozen young Women standing by without partners, & each of them with two ugly naked shoulders!—It was the same room in which we danced 15 years ago!—I thought it all over—& inspite of the shame of being so much older, felt with Thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then. (9 December 1808)
The keenest relish for wit
Jane Austen’s letters record little of her views on Southampton itself, but some of the residents did not escape her judgment or her cutting sense of humor. Of Mrs. Lance of Chessel House, she wrote:
We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. . . . They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance. (7–8 January 1807)
Of a Mrs. Dickens and a Mrs. Bertie:
Soon after I had closed my last letter to you, we were visited by Mrs Dickens & her Sisterinlaw Mrs Bertie, the wife of a lately made Admiral;—Mrs [Frank Austen] I believe was their first object—but they put up with us very kindly, & Mrs D—finding in Miss Lloyd a friend of Mrs Dundas had another motive for the acquaintance. She seems a really agreable Woman—that is, her manners are gentle & she knows a great many of our Connections in West Kent.—Mrs Bertie lives in the Polygon, & was out when we returned her visit—which are her two virtues. (9 December 1808)
The Polygon, engraved by William Walker, after Conrad Martin Metz (1783).
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And of the Marchioness of Lansdowne and Mr. Husket, the painter employed by the Marquis, she wrote:
Our Dressing-Table is constructing on the spot, out of a large Kitchen Table belonging to the House, for doing which we have the permission of Mr Husket Lord Lansdown’s Painter—domestic Painter, I shd call him, for he lives in the Castle. Domestic Chaplains have given way to this more necessary office, & I suppose whenever the Walls want no touching up, he is employed about my Lady’s face. (8–9 February 1807)
The novel
At the time Jane Austen was writing, the novel was a relatively new invention. The rise of the novel coincided with the growth of the middle class, cheap printing technology, and improving literacy rates. More people than ever were reading books. To keep up with demand and make reading more accessible and affordable, circulating libraries grew up across Britain. For a regular subscription fee, readers could borrow a certain number of volumes at a time. Surviving catalogues and advertisements suggest that a very large proportion of the publications held by these libraries were novels. By the end of the eighteenth century, circulating libraries were commonplace; even small provincial towns had them.
Above Bar Street, Southampton (Skelton—printer, stationer, and circulating library—far right), by G. L. Lee, lithograph by Thomas H. Skelton (1828).
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Jane Austen wrote in her letters about using circulating libraries. She was an avid reader and was inspired by many novelists, including Samuel Richardson, who wrote what was said to be her favorite novel, Sir Charles Grandison.
Crucially, the novel offered a new literary space for women. It evolved out of genres already stereotyped at the time as feminine, such as prose romances, epistolary narratives, and first-person confessional narratives. Women writers were early and important contributors to the medium. Unfortunately, but predictably, the abundance of female success led not to celebration but to a popular devaluation of the novel as a literary form.
In defense of the novel
Jane Austen imbued many of her heroines with a love of reading novels. She was passionate about their worth and decidedly unashamed of her own reading habits. In chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, Austen deploys a literary device known as “authorial intrusion,” switching to first-person address and breaking away from the narrative to defend the novel as a literary form:
Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. . . . “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.—“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;” or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (NA 30–31)
Austen’s novels
Austen began her literary career at the age of twelve. Intended to entertain and amuse her friends and family, her Juvenilia contain many in-jokes and references to people they knew. Some scholars believe that some of Austen’s early works were epistolary in form—told through a series of letters exchanged between the characters. The unpublished novella Lady Susan (1794?) is an extant example. Although Austen abandoned this mode, the letter remained an important plot device, particularly in Pride and Prejudice.
In 1795, shortly after she acquired her writing desk, Austen began work on early versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. In 1797 First Impressions (the early version of Pride and Prejudice) was initially offered to and immediately rejected by the publisher Thomas Cadell. Susan, her first version of Northanger Abbey, was sold to the publisher Richard Crosby in 1803 for £10; it was not released. In 1811 Sense and Sensibility was published by Thomas Egerton, who then purchased Pride and Prejudice for £110. Northanger Abbey wasn’t published until after Austen’s death.
In 1809, Jane Austen moved with her mother, her sister, and Martha Lloyd from Southampton to Chawton, a small, quiet village in Hampshire, and lived in a cottage owned by her brother Edward Knight. It was there that she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Austen also started a seventh novel, Sanditon, but was unable to finish it before her death in 1817.
After 1818, Austen’s novels remained out of print until the publisher Richard Bentley purchased the rights to all six novels from Henry and Cassandra Austen and from Egerton in 1832. In 1833, Bentley issued the first inexpensive editions as part of his “Standard Novels” series.
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Jane Austen’s writing table. Courtesy of Jane Austen’s House. |
The Bentley edition of Austen’s novels. |
“My own darling Child”
Jane Austen speaks of her novels very fondly in her letters to her sister, Cassandra. Like a proud parent, she seems to love them as if they were her own children. “I am never too busy to think of S&S,” she wrote. “I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child” (25 April 1811). And soon after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to Cassandra: “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London;—on Wednesday I received one Copy, sent down by Falknor” (29 January 1813).
Jane Austen’s writing slope, closed. Loaned by the British Library
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No Notion of Loving by Halves: A Contemporary Art Exhibition by Jocelyn McGregor
Commissioned by “a space” arts, “No Notion of Loving by Halves” was a site-specific, multi-media installation and program of live performances that took a deep dive into Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and the enduring legacy of the “Female Gothic.” The title of the exhibition comes from a scene in Northanger Abbey, in which Isabella Thorpe proclaims, “‘I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong’” (33). For Jocelyn, this declaration epitomizes the female relationships in the novel, which lurch from familial and supportive to conspiratorial, formal, funny, distant, heated, ragingly competitive, and passionate in both love and hate. They are complex, nuanced, and fundamentally gothic.
No Notion of Loving by Halves, by Jocelyn McGregor, at God’s House Tower.
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No Notion of Loving by Halves, by Jocelyn McGregor, at God’s House Tower.
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The main gallery space was divided by hanging drapes of muslin, a fabric mentioned multiple times in Northanger Abbey. The drapes melded the architecture of God’s House Tower and nearby Netley Abbey, two buildings that Jane Austen knew and walked past or visited during her time living in Southampton (1806–09). Curtains and veils are often used in horror movies and gothic novels to signify that everything is about to change, probably for the worse—we watch the curtains billow out in Poltergeist, peer through the wedding veil in The Others, lift the black veil in The Mysteries of Udolpho. These penetrable, permeable skins barely separate inside from outside, imagination from reality; they are concealers, not barriers, ever shifting.
The intervening sculptures depict legs and sheets, referencing the bed as a space for sleeping, dreaming, masturbation, and nightmares—unobserved moments of freedom and self-discovery. Austen’s “regulated hatred” lubricates her female characters as they navigate a restrictive world ruled by etiquette and class divides.3
Detail of performance for No Notion of Loving by Halves, by Jocelyn McGregor, at God’s House Tower.
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At the back of the Main Gallery was shown a film that documented a live performance, written and directed by Jocelyn. A warped reimagining ofNorthanger Abbey, the film and performance were inspired by drawing-room plays that Austen herself wrote in her youth. Plays were also the first adaptations of Austen’s novels, before the numerous films and TV series. Jocelyn’s film and performance explore the multiple interpretations of Austen’s work, especially her dialogue and complex characters. They also draw on possible inspirations behind Northanger Abbey itself, particularly the purportedly True and Affecting Story of the Duchess of C***, the tale of an Italian duchess locked in a dungeon for nine years by her jealous husband that may have inspired Catherine’s fantasy of Mrs. Tilney and General Tilney.4
No Notion of Loving by Halves, by Jocelyn McGregor, at God’s House Tower.
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No Notion of Loving by Halves brought to life the fierce attachments and rivalries that define Austen’s characters and the bonds between gothic women authors. The work reflects the artist’s own connection to these dynamics, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the emotional intricacies of Austen’s world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Janine Barchas, Susan Beckett, Theo Dagadita, Gillian Dow, Lizzie Dunford, Deborah Gearing (the voice of Jane Austen), Harrison Pitts, Sophie Reynolds, Lesley Thomas, Nicola Watson, and Aaron West. Thanks also to the British Library, the Bodleian Library, City Eye, the Morgan Library & Museum, the National Archives, the Tate Gallery, the Maritime & Local History Collection, Southampton Culture & Tourism, and the Archives and Special Collections Cope Collection at the University of Southampton.
NOTES
1For more on the spectacles, see Barchas and Picherit.
2For an example of a letter that has been “crossed,” see the cover of Persuasions from No. 20 (1998) on.
3See D. W. Harding’s seminal essay “Regulated Hatred.”
4For more on the connections between this story by Mme. de Genlis and Northanger Abbey, see Gillian Dow’s essay.
