Jane Austen—The Lefroys

By MARGARET USBORNE

Y family can boast two female forbears who had poems written to them by the great;• one, our great-great- V 1. grandmother, by Robert Burns, the other, a generation back but fifteen years later, by Jane Austen. The first claim is neither unique nor particullrly creditable. Euphemia Murray, the "Flower of Strathmore," is said—rare among women—to have discouraged the ploughboy who dared to sing of her that she was blythe, blythe and merry," though he was a guest in her cousin's house at the time. This lack of literary discernment was amply made up for by our great-great-great- grandmother, Mrs. Lefroy, of whom it is recorded that she "much encouraged" the young Jane Austen.

The Lefroy family was closely connected with the Austens, as can be seen from the index of any book about Jane. Mrs. Lefroy, born Anne Brydges, was the wife of the Rector of Ashes,, in Hampshire. The Austens, at Steventon Rectory, were about two miles away by road and a mile-and-a-half across the fields. There was much coming and going between_ the two rectories. The Rev. George Lefroy was very much like any of the pleasant but not specially spiritual country gentlemen who took to the Church in Jane's novels. Like most of them, he was a younger son—of Anthony Lefroy, who left his family home in Kent to trade in Leghorn. His elder son went to live in Ireland, and his son Tom was the distinguished M.P., K.C. and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, whose greatest distinction, in the eyes of Janeites, -was that he was Jane Austen's first and best-known beau.

Tom Lefroy came to stay at Ashe in 1796, while he was read- ing for the Bar in London. Presumably he was there at Christmas and took part in the seasonal dancing and charades. When Jane wrote to Cassandra, on January 9th, she and Tom were obviously "getting themselves talked about." The flippant references to him in her letters are very familiar. Their behaviour was "everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." He is "so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon." He has but one fault—" that his morn- ing coat is a great deal too light." She expects him to propose to her at a ball. "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat." She makes over all her other admirers to a friend, "even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't care sixpence."

Nearly three years later Jane is not so flippant. She and her father met Mrs. Lefroy, who, she writes, " did not once mention the name (of her nephew) to me and I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father's afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he was gone back to London on his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise." Jane's niece, Caroline, wrote much later : "It was a disappoint- ment but Mrs. Lefroy sent the gentleman off at the end of a very few weeks, that no more mischief might be done ... There was no engagement and never had been." This surely refers, not to Tom's first visit in 1796, when Jane knew and told Cassandra that he was leaving the country in a few days, but to another occasion, probably in 1798, during which a certain amount of " mischief " must have been done.

My impression is that in the first, ironical letters the lady was protesting a shade too much. The flippancy is reminiscent of the scene in Pride and Prejudice, when Jane is trying to find out what Elizabeth really feels about Darcy. First Elizabeth is frivolous, saying that she fears Jane will be angry, for she loves Darcy more than Bingley, and that she dates her-attach- ment from her "first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley . . . Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the desired effect, and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances of attachment." I believe that, between 1796 and 1798, an entreaty to Jane Austen to be serious would have produced assurances of some attachment to Tom Lefroy. At any rate, his aunt was worried. And thanks to Mrs. Lefroy's "sending the gentleman off," we can only speculate on what would have been the loss or gain to literature if Jane had gone to Ireland, to be another Mrs. Lefroy, wife to a successful barrister and politician. Tom Lefroy, when he was a very old man, admitted that he had been in love with the great Jane Austen, but added that it was a boy's love.

If Mrs Lefroy spoilt Jane's romance, she was certainly forgiven for it. Although she was 25 years older, the Rector's wife was one of Jane's best-loved friends. It was her brother, Sir Egerton Brydges, who, before his well-known description of Jane as "fair and handsome, slight and elegant but with cheeks a little too full," wrote that "she was very intimate with Mrs. Lefroy and much encouraged by her." Our great-great- great-grandmother was, by all accounts, an unusually good, attractive-, intelligent woman. Jane's nephew describes her as " a remarkable person . . . whose, enthusiastic eagerness of disposition rendered her especially attractive to a clever and lively girl."

In The Gentleman's Magazine for 1804, the year in which she was killed by a- fall from her horse, there is a long and very admiring obituary, describing Mrs. Lefroy's talents and virtues,' as a writer, in society and in her husband's parish where, among other good 'works, she "communicated the important benefits of vaccine innoculations to upwards of 800 with her own hand." According to her-brother, she wrote "elegant and flowing verse with great ease." In the Lefroy family book her grandson notes that these versci were collected and printed and "judged by the standard of tile present day, do not entitle their author to any high place among female poets." This judgement can be applied also to the poem which Jane Austen wrote in 1808, four years after her friend's death, which took place on Jane's birthday, December 16th, 1804.

There is no mention in her letters of her feelings on this occasion. Indeed, we have no letters written at the time. Perhaps any there were, were destroyed by Cassandra as too revealing. But four years later Jane could still write: • "The day, commemorative of my birth, Bestowing life and light and hope on me, Brings back the hour that was thy last on earth.

0 ! bitter pang of torturing memory !

"Angelic woman ! past my power to praise. .

Eleven stanzas of this verse are quoted in Jane's nephew's Memoir. In the Lefroy Book there are two more, between the third and fourth.

"At Johnson's death by Hamilton t'was said _ Seek we a substitute—Ah! vain the plan; No second best remains to Johnson dead— None can remind us, even of the man.'

"So we of thee, unequalled in thy race, Unequalled thou, as he the first of men. Vainly we search around thy vacant place. We ne'er may look upon thy like again."

So Jane compares her friend to her "dear Dr. Johnson," and from her there can be no higher praise. The reference is to a tribute paid to Johnson by his friend the Right Hon. Williams Gerrard Hamilton. Boswell records it anonymously as "the words of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an abrupt felicity, superior to all studied compositions." "He has made a chasm which not only nothing can fill up but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."

The Austen and Lefroy families were connected not only by propinquity and friendship but later by marriage, three times in all. Anna, Jane's niece, married Ben Lefroy, her friend's second son, in 1814. In 1846 Anna and Ben's daughter, Anna Jemirna, married Thomas, nephew of Jane's "Irish friend," Tom Lefroy. Jane was not alive to see her family and that of her beau at last allied by marriage, but Tom still had years to live and must at that time have given at least a thought to his "boy's love." The third Lefroy-Austen marriage was of Florence Emma Lefroy, a granddaughter of Ben and Anna, to Augustus Austen-Leigh, a distant cousin.

It is strange that in such a family-minded family and such a genealogy-conscious age, no one seems to have noticed that Jane Austen and Mrs. Lefroy were themselves very distantly related. Jane's mother's grandmother was the daughter of James, 8th Lord Chandos. Edward Brydges, elder brother of Sir Egerton and of Mrs. Lefroy, claimed and, according to the decision given in the House of Lords on June 13th, 1803, proved his descent from Anthony, youngest son of the 1st Lord Chandos and younger brother of Charles, the great-grandfather of the 8th Lord, Mrs. Austen's great-great-grandfather.

I started by boasting, and must• now admit that the Lefroy family did not keep up for long the literary eminence given to it by its connections with Jane Austen. In fact a great-grand- father, Charles Edward, grandson of Mrs. Lefroy, wrote to a friend in 1860: "You and I ought not to read—nothing takes more out of a man. . . It is a general error nowadays to seek further excitements, reading books being one of these . . . Do you suppose the Duke of Wellington ever read a book, except it was to get some information which he practically wanted ? ' But Jane must, like us, have appreciated the compliment paid jointly, to her family and ours when Ben Lefroy was ordained in 1816 (the year before she died). The Bishop asked him only two questions. "Are you the son of Mrs. Lefroy of Ashe ? "and "Did you marry a Miss Austen ? " That was enough. He qualified.