Part 1 -Jane Austen & Harris Bigg-Wither: the untold love story
Jane's version...
********* Playfully written in first person - as if it was Jane Austen talking - by assembling some of her own words (letters + novels or old biographies on her) plus my own words and interpretation on how things may have truly gone that mysterious November night. Although some of the main facts of Jane’s and Harris’s life have been gathered from a variety of original sources (see part 2 for the full list), the incidents, places, dates and names here mentioned are used fictitiously. ***********
Chawton, Autumn 1816
Miss Impudence,
How impertinent you are to ask me who my “Mr. Darcy” was. For shame. For shame!
What is become of all the shyness in the world?
However, to avoid the imputation of obstinacy or ill-nature, I will gratify your curiosity.
But what must I tell you? Truth or falsehood? I will exert myself and try the former.
In your last letter to me, you were saying that one of my nephew James will one day write a memoir about me. It is very shocking indeed. Why, I shall have a charming account to carry to my sister Cassandra tonight. If it is true, I hope you shall all take his memories with a pinch of salt. I certainly would not expect much useful information about your love life from your nephew!
And so my insolent, tell-tale descendants have spoken to you of my having more than one beaux, is that so?
Tom Lefroy, the blue-eyed Irish gentleman I danced with when I was twenty.
Harris Bigg-Wither from Manydown, who proposed to me in 1802
A third mysterious charming man whom purportedly I have met during a holiday by the sea with my parents in Sidmouth, or Lyme, in 1799 or 1801, or 1802, a man I saw for a few hours, or a few days, at best a fortnight, and who died suddenly shortly after having met me, poor soul. Did you ever hear anything so pathetic?You are given no name, no profession, no scrap of a letter, my relatives are not in agreement about him, nobody has seen him or knows his brother, but you are sure he was a piece of perfection. Well, to be honest with you, this story sounds like something Cassandra, who is the finest comic writer of the present age, could easily make up to protect everyone’s privacy and divert you from the man I truly loved. I am surprised so many fell for it! I will have to congratulate her when she comes home.
But pray, tell me, who do you think I have truly loved of the three, dear future reader? Shall I tell you or let you guess? I know. Your mind is in fluctuation, each of them at times being held the most probable. Well, if it is to be guesswork, guess for yourself. To be guided by second-hand conjecture is pitiful.
But you will soon know everything. I will have no reserves from you. Disguise of every sort is my abhorrence, nor am I ashamed of the feelings I will relate. They will not be repressed anymore. In vain I have struggled. It will not do.
The truth is that I have been forced into prudence in my youth, and learned romance as I grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning…
Harris Bigg-Wither: a very pleasant man
In order to tell you my version of the story, I shall have to take you back to December 2nd, 1802, the evening when Harris proposed to me. Do not imagine me in danger of forgetting that date…
I was living in Bath at the time, missing my friends exceedingly. During a visit to my brother James at the parsonage, in Steventon, my dear friends Miss Catherine and Alathea Bigg invited Cassandra and I to stay at Manydown for a few weeks. A very welcome invitation, to be sure. Their brother Harris had recently left Oxford University and their married sister Mrs. Heathcote, was living there too, with her child William, after having lost her husband a few months earlier.
Cassandra and I of course accepted the invitation with pleasure.
Harris was only one and twenty at the time, while I was about to turn seven and twenty and felt my approach to the years of danger. In my time, a woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, I used to think. However, it sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at that age than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety.
I do not know all the scandalous falsehoods you have heard on his account, but I can assure you that Harris is a sensible, pleasant man, and he is certainly a good brother. At first sight, his address is not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived.
I believe he is too diffident to do justice to himself, his manners require intimacy to make them pleasing, but when his shyness is overcome, his behaviour gives every indication of an open, affectionate heart. He is quite tall and big and he has in him the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness. True, his father showed great anxiety about Harris’s future education, as he suffers from a defect of speech - as you already know - and so he had for some time been at a private tutor, Mr. Wallington, before being sent to Worcester College, in Oxford. This speech impediment makes him so foolishly shy, that he often seems negligent, when he is only kept back by his natural awkwardness.
But as for saying that Harris is ‘uncouth’, indeed, you are doing a very unkind thing in spreading the report. He may be a bit ‘unpolished’, true, but pray, what is refinement to me? My own niece Fanny, at Godmersham, I am sure finds me and Cassandra quite unrefined, but what does it signify ?
Of Harris’s sense and his goodness no one can, I think, be in doubt, who has seen him often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation. The excellence of his understanding and his principles can be concealed only by that shyness which too often keeps him silent. I hope you now know enough of him to do justice to his solid worth. I am sure his future life will prove his character to you.
Harris is not the firstborn, but his mother Margaret died when he was only three, and his older brother died too when he was only thirteen, leaving him next in line to inherit Manydown Park. Is that why you believed I accepted his proposal? For money? What's your game, dear reader? Speculation, I believe. Well, I have had some pleasant hours at Speculation in my time, so I cannot judge you, but perhaps, you may in time be convinced that there is no truth in any such report.
But I will be more collected, more concise…
My sister and I began our visit to Manydown on November 25th and spent our first week there most pleasantly. The evening of the second of December, after dinner, the best room was lighted up and the company assembled. It was but a mixture of those who had never met before, and those who met too often. A commonplace business, too numerous for intimacy, too small for variety. Cassandra and I, Kitty and Alathea, Harris and his father, and then their sister Elizabeth with his son and also a few friends of the family, and I bestowed my company, in turns, to all.
You seem utterly convinced that Harris’s proposal took me by surprise that night and that my decision to marry him was taken hastily, but dear reader, do you really believe that a writer who spends her life observing people and describing their feelings in such minute details, would not have noticed the many changes in his behaviour? You must allow that I was not so absolutely unprepared to have the question asked as you fancy. I had some thoughts on the subject, some surmises as to what might be. I saw that he was trying to please me by every attention in his power and was devoted to me, during that week spent under the same roof.
And do you really think me incapable of reading my own heart? That is quite strange, considering how you all seem to regard me as a literary genius, the likes of Shakespeare and Walter Scott! Yet apparently you do not give me the same credit when it comes to observing my own feelings. You think me unsteady: easily swayed by the whim of the moment, easily tempted.
“But how did he propose?”, you asked.
December 2nd 1802: the night of the proposal
Well, you all seem very sure that Harris proposed to me in person, face to face, and that my ‘yes’ was given on the impulse of the moment, but has it ever occurred to you that Harris might have never said a word to me? Remember what he is like, how painfully shy, how much younger than me and most of all, remember that he stutters!
Has it ever occurred to you that Harris may have, in fact, written his proposal to me? Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter. Considering everything, a letter is decidedly the best method of explanation in those cases. The gentleman is able to write much that he could not say, and shall be giving the Lady time for reflection before she resolves on her answer, and one is less afraid of the result of reflection than of an immediate hasty impulse.
And now picture the scene in that drawing room. Picture to yourself Harris folding up a letter in great haste. Having sealed it, picture his hurried, agitated air, which showed impatience to be gone. He passed out of the room without a look and I had only time to move closer to the table where he had been writing, when footsteps were heard returning; the door opened, it was himself. He begged our pardon, but he had forgotten his gloves, and instantly crossing the room to the writing table, he drew out the letter, placed it before me with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on me for a time, and hastily collecting his gloves, was again out of the room: the work of an instant! His sister did not even notice.
The letter, with a direction hardly legible, to "Miss J. A." was evidently the one which he had been folding so hastily. While supposed to be writing only to a friend, he had been addressing me! Sinking into the chair which he had occupied, my eyes devoured his words:
"I cannot make speeches, Jane. As you well know, I am no orator, so I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. I have loved none but you. I offer myself to you with a heart even more your own than when you first amiably danced with me, as I was but a child. For you alone, too good, too excellent a creature, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? I had not waited even these seven days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. Can you fail to have understood my wishes? Believe my attachment to be most fervent, most undeviating. But I can hardly write. I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I will ask your family permission to marry you this evening or never.”
***
Rapt in the contemplation of my own unutterable happiness, I scarcely opened my lips. Such a proposal was not to be soon recovered from. The revolution which one instant had made in me… It is almost beyond expression. It was overpowering happiness. And who can be in doubt of what followed? Suffice for you to imagine that when he came back into the room, a little while later, my bright eyes and bashful smile made it impossible for him to misunderstand my ‘yes’. Still a little nearer, and a hand taken and pressed; and 'Jane, my own dear Jane!' bursting forth in all the fullness of exquisite feeling - and all suspense and indecision were over. It would be difficult to say which had been the happiest: I, in receiving his declarations and proposal, or he in having them accepted.
Cassandra and his sister Catherine were overjoyed at hearing the news and did everything in their power to leave us alone for a while to have a tête-à-tête. We begged them not to tell anyone else yet, for Harris still had to ask my father’s permission, but we were exquisitely happy, fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and attachment. We could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations of what had directly preceded that present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest.
He told me he had been in love with me ever since I was thirteen at least. It is something for a woman to be assured, in her seven-and-twentieth year, that she has not lost one charm of earlier youth. But there were emotions of tenderness that could not be clothed in words. A short period of exquisite felicity followed, and but a short one. Troubles soon arose…
At the end of that remarkable evening I went to my bedroom and grew steadfast in the thankfulness of my enjoyment. I shared my room with Cassandra, who soon joined me and asked me to tell her without delay how long had I loved him. “Upon my soul, I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation”, I replied. “My love for Harris has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun”, I said.
And then there was a knock at the door…
I accepted him because I loved him
If I understood you correctly, my niece Caroline – who was not even born at the time - told you that the following morning I rejected Harris’s proposal.
Very true my dear. It is but too true.You are well informed on this. However, as I read some of your motives, I was half incensed, half amused. Do you all really believe that I was ready to marry Harris only for his money, or because to be the mistress of Manydown would have been something? Do you really think me worse than a Lucy Steele or a Charlotte Lucas? With such an opinion, no wonder that. Pray, why do you all suppose I did not love Harris? Here was a young man of sense, of character, of temper, of manners and of fortune, exceedingly attached to me and seeking my hand in the most handsome and disinterested way, and I may live eighteen years longer in the world without being addressed by a man of half Mr. Bigg’s estate or a tenth part of his merits!
You do not seem to even contemplate the possibility that I greatly esteem him, that I have the highest opinion in the world of his goodness and sense, that I think him everything that is worthy and amiable. In short, that I ...love him.
But it is not by protestations that I shall endeavour to convince you; it is not by telling you that my affections are steady. My conduct shall speak for me; absence, distance, time and my novels shall speak for my constancy.
“Why did you refuse him then?”, you will rightly wonder. But I am not sure it is in my power to tell you. You seem so keen on trusting my niece, despite the fact that she told you she only “conjectures” that I had no feelings for Harris, even if she herself admitted to having “no proof to offer”. Yet you believe everyone’s supposition that at first I accepted Harris only for the advantages of his position and wealth.
How provoking! Dear reader, how could you imagine me, even for a few hours, an advocate of marriage without love? You should know that it has always been my belief that if a woman can hesitate as to “Yes” she ought to say “No” directly. Marriage is not a state to be safely entered into with doubtful feelings, with half a heart. Some of the excellent scholars you quoted seem convinced that I broke this decent young man’s heart, because I decided on that night to pursue a literary career instead of marrying, as if I had never once contemplated the issue in the first twenty and seven years of my life! And besides, if that had been my only reservation, Harris would have not thought twice about giving me his permission to write, rather than losing me forever!
But you do not believe he loved me...
Dear creature, can you not suppose, even for a second, that he actually did, and that it was someone else, someone I trusted and looked up to, who persuaded me not to marry him?
How I have been persuaded to break the engagement
What if I told you that someone came knocking at my door that evening, and told me that Harris was too young for such an engagement, that he, not I, would have regretted it in the future and that he was only under the delusion of being in love with me, but that his affection was only that of a dear brother? What if I told you that I was persuaded to change my mind that night for his sake?
But perhaps I have said enough. Perhaps you have already guessed who this adviser was, who convinced me to refuse Harris. If not, go back to that night, dear reader.
Although proposing by letter has its merits, the greatest danger is that it exposes its writer to all the evil of consultation. The greatest danger lies in the woman consulting someone who is against the marriage, with the man at a distance unable to help his own cause, and where the mind is anything short of perfect decision, an adviser may, in an unlucky moment, lead it to do what it may afterwards regret.
You will certainly know our custom. After a proposal has been accepted, it is the task of the gentleman to visit the fiancè’s father and ask him for permission to marry and to establish all the details of the contract, especially when a man is as wealthy as Harris. But please remember that my father was in Bath that night. To whom, therefore, could Harris ask permission to marry me, after being accepted? What member of my family could have been invited there as a guest, and a family friend, to act as our chaperon in lieu of our father? Who else could have been so protective of Harris’s interests and yet protective of me at the same time?
Have you really never suspected one of my elder brothers?
Come, come. Don’t act so surprised. You have read ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
You will surely remember that Darcy persuades his good friend Mr. Bingley not to marry his beloved … Jane.
Now picture the scene. Use your imagination again.
When Harris went to my brother - let’s say James - to ask him permission to marry me, that December night, without actually withholding his consent, or saying it should never be, this brother gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence.
That kind of consent was enough for Harris, but not for me!
Imagine James coming knocking at my door that evening. I eagerly expected his felicitations but instead he persuaded me to believe that Harris asked me to marry him only because he wanted, almost as a brother, to give me all the advantages and protection that his family, his name and his home could give me. Harris knew I disliked Bath, he knew how poor I was and how close to Cassandra. He could not see me suffer without the desire of giving me relief. It was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged, friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which I cannot contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that I know not which prevails. Imagine Harris all those years, hearing his sisters speak so highly of me and having our mutual friend Mrs. Lefroy tell him how sad I was in Bath, how lonely, how poor.
And how does a knight rescue a damsel in distress? My brother convinced me that Harris was only trying to be chivalrous and to do the honourable thing by proposing to me, since he was in a position to help. I was therefore persuaded that his love was only pity, his tenderness a brotherly affection, but that he did not love me, so nothing could have justified my accepting him.
Was I wrong in believing my brother?
A real Lady Russell…
But Mr. Darcy did not act alone in separating Bingley from Jane, did he? Another woman was against that marriage, for different reasons. And also think of Lady Russell in my novel ‘Persuasion’.
Who could she be in my story? Think! Who was our mutual friend, one who had almost a mother's love in both our estimation, and who knew both our families very well? What sensible, deserving woman could I trust so fully, as I did? Who do you know of strict integrity, a regular guest at Manydown balls, a friend of James’s and someone I must have mentioned often in my letters?
This gentlewoman had a delicate sense of honour; but she was as solicitous for the credit of the Bigg-Wither family, as aristocratic in her ideas of what was due to them, as anybody of sense and honesty could well be. Though with more tempered and pardonable pride than my brother, she too received the connection between me and Harris as a most unfortunate one. To see Harris, with all his claims of birth, and mind, throw himself away at one and twenty; involve himself in an engagement with an older woman like me, who had nothing but herself to recommend her, and no hopes of attaining affluence but in the chance of a most uncertain profession like writing, and no connections... You can imagine that she thought that it would be, indeed, a throwing away. She deprecated the connexion in every light. My brother added that the world in general would join in the scorn.
Perhaps during that week that woman had seen, in common with my elder brother, that Harris preferred me to any other young woman in the country. But it was not till the evening he proposed that she had any apprehension of his feeling a serious attachment. At the previous ball my brother was perhaps first made acquainted that Harris’s attentions to me had given rise to a general expectation of our marriage. Some guests perhaps spoke of it as a certain event, of which the time alone could be undecided. Perhaps this woman’s uneasiness had been equally excited.
Perhaps they talked about it while we were dancing or talking, blissfully unaware. From that moment they observed Harris’s behaviour attentively, and could then perceive that his partiality for me was beyond what they had ever witnessed in him. Myself they must have also watched… My look and manners were open, cheerful, and engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar regard, and perhaps they remained convinced from their scrutiny, that though I received Harris’s attentions with pleasure, I did not invite them by any participation of sentiment.
One can hardly blame me. I often believed our regard to be mutual, and felt scarcely any doubt of his preference, but I required greater certainty. And besides his inclination, I could not be sure how his father would have taken it if he were to wish to marry a younger woman who had not either a great fortune or great rank. There was, at times, a want of spirits about him which seemed to denote indifference, and even that week at Manydown, there was sometimes no distinction between Cassandra and me in his words. It was the regard of an affectionate brother to both. Sometimes, for a few painful minutes, I believed his regard to be no more than friendship. So you cannot wonder at my wishing to avoid any encouragement of my own partiality.
But perhaps my brother and this woman thought me cold-hearted. Their coincidence of feeling was soon discovered; and, alike sensible that no time was to be lost in detaching me from Harris, they readily engaged in the office of pointing out to me the certain evils of such a union.
But I don’t want to speak evil of the dead. She was a benevolent, charitable, good woman, and capable of strong attachments. She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent; but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them.
Being such friends of such an important family, she may have wished his increase of wealth and consequence; she may have wished him to marry a girl who had all the importance of money. I can see now that they both thought it a very degrading alliance for him. And how quick come the reasons for approving what we like! I do not believe that I am inferior to Harris just because I am poorer and untitled. Harris is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal. The disproportion in our fortune was nothing: it did not give me a moment's regret. It is contrary to my own mother’s doctrine too that difference of fortune should keep any couple asunder who are attracted by resemblance of disposition. They have been mistaken with regard to both of us; they have been unfairly influenced by appearances in each; because Harris’s manners and age had not suited their own ideas, they have been too quick in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity. And the serenity of my countenance and air was such as might have given the most acute observer a conviction that, however amiable my temper, my heart was not likely to be easily touched. That they were desirous of believing me indifferent is certain.
They have been misled of course.
But let me reassure you that, however this remonstrance might have staggered my determination, I do not suppose that it would ultimately have prevented the marriage, had it not been seconded by the assurance of Harris’s indifference. They convinced me that he had deceived himself, that he was too young to know what he wanted, and that he would have regretted his actions in the future. I was the older of the two, my brother said, it was up to me to protect him from making such an insufferable, eternal, unpardonable mistake. Harris cared for me as a sister, that was all. He could not bear to see me in pain and thought of marriage as the solution to all my problems.
He did not truly love me, they said.
To persuade me against accepting his proposal, when that conviction had been given, was scarcely the work of a moment… Such opposition was more than I could combat. It might yet have been possible to withstand a brother’s ill-will, but this woman, whom I had always loved and relied on, could not, with such steadiness of opinion, and such tenderness of manner, be advising me in vain.
The morning after: a bull vs a mule
You can imagine in which condition I went to bed after talking to them. Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours. It was necessary to sit up half the night and lie awake the remainder to comprehend, and weep the greatest part of it. You said that my descendants will say that my yes was a fit of ‘self-delusion’. Well, not the self-delusion you all think. Not the delusion of being in love with Harris, but the delusion that he could truly love me as more than a brother!
I was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it. And I truly believed it and I convinced myself of that falsehood for many years.
But it was not a merely selfish caution, under which I acted, in putting an end to the engagement. Had I not imagined myself consulting his good, even more than my own, I could hardly have given him up. The belief of being prudent, and self-denying, principally for his advantage, was my chief consolation, under the misery of a parting, a final parting. That is why I decided overnight to refuse him, dear reader. And can you blame me? What would you have done in my place?
I awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which I had closed my eyes. I got up with a headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to my sister, and forbidding all attempt at consolation. We asked the servants to prepare the carriage and in the meantime I went to face Harris. I could not write to him. I owed him that much. Needless to say he was desperate and would not take no for an answer. I had to encounter all the additional pain of opinions, on his side, totally unconvinced and unbending, and of his feeling himself ill used by so forced a relinquishment.
Oh, how much we both tried to persuade each other that our reasons were the right ones, but he would not relent. A bull and a mule, a Taurus and a Sagittarius, each firm in their beliefs, could not have been less headstrong. Oh, it was all wretchedness together. A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart! He ought not, at least, but I had deceived his expectations. I had lost his good opinion. Self-willed, obstinate, selfish and ungrateful. He thought me all this.
I could not stay another minute at Manydown that morning. I could not have looked him at those crying eyes another time. His sisters Kitty and Alathea could see that I looked very ill. The absolute necessity of seeming like myself produced an immediate struggle; but after a while I could do no more. I began not to understand a word they said, and was obliged to plead indisposition and in desperation, I said I would go home. His sisters were concerned, and would not stir without me for the world. And so we drove together, in their carriage. How bitterly we all cried. My mind was all disorder. They who suffer little may be proud as they like and may resist mortification, but I cannot. We arrived at the Rectory where my puzzled sister-in-law Mary started quizzing me, but I refused to tell her anything. And then, when James was back from Manydown, I ordered him to drive us straight back to Bath!
I couldn’t stand to be near him, or near Harris, anymore.
So, what do you think of me now?
If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion, remember that when I yielded, I thought it was to duty. It was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety. Would you be turned back from doing a thing that you had determined to do, and that you knew to be right, by the interference of someone you admire, I may ask? No, I have no idea of you being so easily persuaded. When you have made up my mind, you have made it! Yours is the character of decision and firmness. “Let those who would be happy be firm”, I now often say myself. But I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the people who persuaded me. To me, they were in the place of a parent, and a regard for the requester would often make one readily yield to a request without waiting for arguments to reason one into it.
Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that those who persuaded me did not err in their advice. I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. I understand now that it was unfair and weak of me to yield. As my beloved writer Dr. Johnson put it better than I can: “To be driven by external motives from the path which our own heart approves, to give way to any thing but conviction, to suffer the opinion of others to rule our choice, or overpower our resolves, is to submit tamely to the lowest and most ignominious slavery, and to resign the right of directing our own lives.”
Oh, if I had read such wise words back then! But I was right in submitting to their advice then. If I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion. I believe I have done exactly as I ought in refusing Harris, for his sake. I am in earnest. I speak nothing but the truth! Indeed you have no reason to doubt my words.
Yet, I confess that my attachment and regrets have, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth, and an early loss of spirits has been their lasting effect, for years I was not able to write anything, but time has softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him. I have nothing either to hope or fear, and nothing to reproach him with. Thank God! I have not that pain. The minute details of my short-lived engagement, and the persuasion I was forced to yield to, are known to very few among my connections. People outside my immediate family were never admitted, by the pride of some, and the delicacy of others, to the smallest knowledge of it afterwards. Between those who persuaded me and I, the subject was never again alluded to. I pressed for the strictest forbearance and silence and they both had enough delicacy to keep a secret. That woman is now dead and as for my brother, we know not each other's opinion now, either its constancy or its change, for the subject was no longer alluded to between us. And I know my sister will one day burn all my letters. That is why you found nothing on my true motives, despite all your research. That is why my own relatives ‘conjecture’ but cannot know everything. Please say nothing about it yourself, dear reader. Nobody would believe you, anyway. And believe me, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you!
But on this subject I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. It is done, and it was done for the best. If someone has wounded my feelings, it was unknowingly done; and though the motives which governed them may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn them, although I am not entirely acquitting them.
As for everyone else: what do they know of my heart?
Captain Wither
“What happened to Harris after you broke the engagement?”, you wondered.
Very soon after our short engagement ceased, Harris got employ in the Militia. He wanted to be doing something. Anything. There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy. And so, on June 30th 1803, he joined the Hampshire Militia. He soon distinguished himself, and early gained the other step in rank as a Captain, Captain Wither, yes, C.W., like Captain Wentworth.
I was worried for his life, naturally. Talks of an imminent invasion were everywhere in 1803. I wanted to hear of him, when there seemed the least chance of gaining intelligence. I had only the newspapers for my authority. At first some news reached me that he was quartered at the Lewes barracks, in Sussex, and then moved to Brighton in the summer. Brighton, that was the place to get husbands and wives! How jealous I became…
Till I was threatened with his loss, I had never known how much of my happiness depended on being first with Harris, first in interest and affection. Long, very long, I felt I had been first with him. I had enjoyed it without reflection; and only in the dread of being supplanted, found how inexpressibly important it had been. How was it to be endured? What could be increasing my wretchedness but the reflection never far distant from my mind, that it had been all my own work? I became jealous of his esteem, when I could no longer hope to be benefited by it. I was convinced that I could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely we should meet.
I have to admit that in spite of myself, I admitted a hope, while he remained single, that something would occur to prevent his marrying another; that some resolution of his own, some mediation of friends, would arise to assist the happiness of all. After all, had he wished ever to see me again, he need not have waited; he would have done what I believe that in his place I should have done long ago. He would have proposed a second time. But he never did…
Evidently, after I broke his heart, it was Harris’s object to marry and he fully intended to settle as soon as he could be properly tempted. Once he joined the Militia, he was ready to fall in love with all the speed which a clear head and a quick taste could allow. He had a heart for any pleasing young woman who came in his way, excepting me. A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments, and Captain Wither was a lost man. And that’s how things went…
The fashionable looking young woman who soon became his fiancè was Miss Anne Howe Frith, a wealthy young woman, daughter of a heiress of Brook House, on the Isle of Wight, and whose father was Harris’s Lieutenant in the Militia. I soon received the confirmation of the engagement through some mutual acquaintance and less than a year later, in November 1804, they were married, and all my hopes of a second proposal were gone forever.
A man who has once been refused… How could I ever be foolish enough to expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex, who would not protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman? There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings! And yet, my brother Henry proposed twice to Eliza. Not all men are as proud and resentful as Harris has been. But how can I blame him? I used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, I have shown a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. I have given him up to oblige others. It has been the effect of over-persuasion. It has been weakness and timidity. That he did not return to the charge with unconquerable perseverance, may he not be pardoned? He could think of me only as one who had yielded, who had given him up, who had been influenced by anyone rather than by him. Perhaps he had imagined himself indifferent to me, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to my merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.
By now I am sure Anne is the perfect wife that many wished for him. Mrs. Lefroy and everyone around here was very pleased with her when she first arrived in the neighbourhood, I heard. Indeed, she was their earliest visitor in their settled life, at Quidhampton. Everyone finds them to be a very happy couple, and I have no doubt of their being happy together. In fact, I believe them to be very mutually and very sincerely attached. They already have a few children by now. One is called Jane, but since Jane was the name of Harris’s grandmother, I would suggest you restrain yourself from jumping to any of your romantic conclusions!
As for the letter with his proposal, I think no more of it. The feelings of the person who wrote it, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every circumstance attending it ought to be forgotten.
I am told by his sisters, who are still very good friends of mine, that he lives the life of a country squire, diligent in magisterial work, kind to the poor, and beloved by his family, and that he is very hospitable in his own house, and that he is little at ease among strangers of gentility. He has no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes have always centered in domestic comfort and the quiet of a private life.
We have no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now we are as strangers; nay, worse than strangers! Ours is a perpetual estrangement. I felt the utter impossibility, from my knowledge of his mind, that he could be unvisited by remembrance any more than myself. There must be the same immediate association of thought, though I was very far from conceiving it to be of equal pain.
But I cannot utter another sentence: my heart is too full, my breath too much oppressed. If I loved him less, I would speak more. There is nothing more to be said. Harris may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance, but that is all. I have nothing either to hope or fear and nothing to reproach him with.
You will doubt me, but indeed you have no reason. When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. Perhaps I will write about him in a novel one day and vent my feelings there. And now, my dear reader, this subject is closed between us. From this hour the subject is never to be revived…
P.S. In reading over the last three or four pages, I am aware of my having expressed myself in so doubtful a manner, that I flatter myself that you can have understood very little of what really happened that night, from all this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations, as to give a clear one on any occasion myself! Please, seize upon the scissors as soon as you possibly can on the receipt of this letter or better still, burn it.
Yours affectionately,
J. AUSTEN
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To read Harris’s version of how things went that November night and find the sources I used to depict both stories, you can read the second part here:
This was an excerpt from the book ‘Jane Austen’s letter to a reader’, a work of fiction. Although most sentences of this letter have been truly written by Jane Austen, they have been carefully selected, assembled and rearranged from her novels and letters so as to represent the author’s imaginary reconstruction of some events of this writer’s life.
Although some of the main facts of Jane’s and Harris’s life have been gathered from a variety of original sources, the incidents, places, dates and names here mentioned are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to living or dead people is entirely coincidental.