Jane Austen was never confined – at least, not in the sense of experiencing pregnancy, childbirth, and “lying-in.” She had plenty of opportunity to see other women undergoing confinements, at close quarters, as several of her sisters-in-law had large families. Both Edward Austen Knight’s wife Elizabeth and Frank Austen’s wife Mary died after having eleven children each, and Jane Austen had reason to be thoroughly well acquainted with the process, and its outcomes both happy and tragic. In a letter of 1798, when she was twenty-three, she wrote to her sister Cassandra about the latest pair of family lyings-in. Their oldest brother James’s wife Mary was giving birth to their first son James-Edward, and Jane, living at Steventon Parsonage only a mile or two from James’s family at Deane Parsonage, made observations, comparing Mary’s lying-in with that of Elizabeth. Jane and Cassandra had recently visited their wealthy brother Edward at his estate, Godmersham in Kent, no doubt summoned there to help Elizabeth with her children. Maiden aunts were very useful to a household on such occasions.
Jane is quite matter-of-fact about the details, noting, “Mary is quite well he says, & uncommonly large” (she was eight months pregnant). Sentiment was no part of the process for her, and it is in this same letter that she offhandedly makes the caustic comment that a “Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright. – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”
The Fashionable Mamma by James Gilray
More news of Mary in her next letter. “I went to Deane with my father two days ago to see Mary, who is still plagued with the rheumatism, which she would be very glad to get rid of, and still more glad to get rid of her child, of whom she is heartily tired. Her nurse is come, and has no particular charm either of person or manner; but as all the Hurstbourne world [Mary’s own family] pronounce her to be the best nurse that ever was, Mary expects her attachment to increase.” Yet despite her caustic comments, Jane shows tact and sensitivity too, saying, “I believe I never told you that Mrs Coulthard and Anne, late of Manydown, are both dead, and both died in childbed. We have not regaled Mary with this news.” Later she adds, “I have just received a note from James to say that Mary was brought to bed last night, at eleven o’clock, of a fine little boy, and that everything is going on very well. My mother had desired to know nothing of it before it should be all over, and we were clever enough to prevent her having any suspicion of it.”
A few days later she writes, “Mary continues quite well, and my mother tolerably so. I saw the former on Friday, and though I had seen her comparatively hearty the Tuesday before, I was really amazed at the improvement which three days had made in her. She looked well, her spirits were perfectly good, and she spoke much more vigorously than Elizabeth did when we left Godmersham. I had only a glimpse of the child, who was asleep; but Miss Debary told me that his eyes were large, dark, and handsome.” The following week she reports, “I was at Deane yesterday morning. Mary was very well, but does not gain bodily strength very fast. When I saw her so stout on the third and sixth days, I expected to have seen her as well as ever by the end of a fortnight.”
Tellingly, she comments, “Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one. Elizabeth was really a pretty object with her nice clean cap put on so tidily and her dress so uniformly white and orderly.” Possibly the contrast was partly because Elizabeth was the wife of the rich brother Edward while James was comparatively poor.
Lying-in at this date was a risky, precarious time. The mother took to her chamber before the birth, and afterward was kept in bed for weeks in a warm, often darkened room, conditions that tended to promote infection. The risks of childbirth itself, and the common infections such as puerperal fever, meant a 20% mortality rate for the mother, and a huge number of children died in their first year. As a young woman, it is clear that Jane Austen was considering what it would be like to be in a “breeding” situation herself, and it is little wonder if it did not appear to her a very enviable or safe prospect. Future generations may be glad that she seems to have looked on her books as her children, as evidenced by her calling Pride and Prejudice her “darling child,” and remarking on the publication of Sense and Sensibility, “I can no more forget it than a mother can forget her sucking child.” It is not difficult to conclude that she was likely reasonably pleased with her choice.
Yet confinement of another sort was a daily factor in Jane Austen’s life, or of any woman living in her era. As she has Anne Elliot say in Persuasion, “We live at home quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.” Perhaps we have done something similar ourselves, during this last year. In going back to an almost Austenian confinement at home, we may now understand the eighteenth century woman’s condition as never before.
Charlotte Bronte somewhat surprisingly wrote about the element of confinement in Jane Austen’s works. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses,” she observed. Yet Bronte’s own life may seem to our eyes to be no less “confined” than Austen’s, and her characters, though they may range over moors and travel as far as Brussels, still operated under a social system where women were subject to as much confinement as they were in Austen’s day, thirty years earlier.
But Jane Austen knew about still another type of confinement at first hand. Did you know that she actually visited a prison, quite an unusual thing for a lady to do in her time? It was in November 1813, and she was aged thirty-eight, when she accompanied her brother Edward on a trip to Canterbury, writing to Cassandra: “Edward & I had a delightful morning for our Drive there, I enjoyed it thoroughly, but the Day turned off before we were ready, & we came home in some rain & the apprehension of a great deal. It has not done us any harm however. – He went to inspect the Gaol, as a visiting Magistrate, & took me with him. – I was gratified – & went through all the feelings which People must go through I think in visiting such a Building.”
“A Visit to Newgate” from “Sketches by Boz.” Photo by Felix O.C. Darley, courtesy of the Victorian Web https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/darley/33.html
We may be surprised that it was considered suitable for a lady to visit a prison, though Elizabeth Fry the prison reformer was active in Austen’s day. However, if we imagine Austen’s experience was due to her being a lady of mature age, and accompanied by her magistrate brother, we should take into account that there was another time that a prison figured in her life, many years earlier. In 1799 Jane Austen’s aunt Mrs. Leigh-Perrot was accused of stealing lace from a shop in Bath, and was sent to gaol to await trial. Mrs. Austen considered joining her sister-in-law, to keep her company, but pleaded illness instead, and suggested that her two daughters take her place as their aunt’s companion – in prison! Mrs. Leigh-Perrot refused the offer, but it is remarkable to think that the two young women (Jane and Cassandra were then 24 and 26), might have spent time in prison, in quite sordid conditions!
Whatever we may make of these glimpses of Jane Austen’s life, we may conclude with certainty that confinement, especially female confinement of all kinds, was something that our author thought about – and wrote about.
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Thank you for sharing.
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Thank you for reading, Denise!
Thank you for the interesting article!
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Xena Anne, you’re very welcome! 🙂
Yes, well, I’m definitely happy that things are so much better these days! Especially as my son’s twins were 10 weeks early and needed intensive care until they were well enough to go home! My daughter also had problems giving birth to her two and I have no doubt she wouldn’t have survived in Jane’s day!
Thank you for this informative post.
Oh my goodness, Glynis, you have special reason to be thankful for modern medicine! Life must have been so hard back then when there was nothing they could do for obstetrical problems but resign themselves. Shudder. Glad you liked the post, and *very* glad for your good family outcomes!
Yes this is true, accurate. Had she wanted or dared (she was a maiden lady and was not by mores allowed to write of topics that showed real knowledge of female sexuality) to she could have written novels where we experience women giving birth.
Not the fine details of giving birth exactly but she did write about two children being born in Sense and Sensibility- Mrs Palmer and Willoughby’s Eliza. She knew about sex obviously but of course, good, non-vulgar, manners dictated that the references were only inferred and oblique.
Good point, JRTT, and I’m thinking she gave herself some leeway to write that way because Mrs. Jennings, though good hearted, was the sort of woman who talked freely about those unseemly topics. Jane Austen satirized her behavior in the same way she satirized Mrs. Allen’s dress obsession in Northanger Abbey. So we get a glimpse!
She was certainly more frank and forthright about such topics in her letters than in her fiction, but as you say it was the mores of the day.
Very thorough, I would add, to round up, the general lack of sanitation practiced by the medical profession, curiously midwives were more fastidious. This is something was aided and abetted by a lack of clean running water. This lack of sanitation continues today and was again highlighted with Covid to “wash your hands!” Imagine having to remind people to do that after using the bathroom and before meals. And if that is the case today, imagine 200 years ago! Covid also reminded the world about how hand washing in the western world was a relatively recent thing with the direct link made to childbearing mortality being by a Hungarian doctor- Semmelweis in the 1840s. Let us assume, given the condescension adopted by the British to the continent that such learnings were not adopted (and possibly claimed) until much later in the UK. It’d be interesting to compare the mortality rates in urban centres such as London vs the country. Many wealthy families in the late Georgian preferred giving birth in ‘town’ for various reasons.
JRTT, it is so interesting, one would like to make a whole study of the subject! I did read in passing that no one survived a Caesarean operation in Paris from the 1820s through 1880s. So many horrifying details, we forget how dangerous life – and birth – were then. But it is well to remember this, in studying Jane Austen.
I love how you examined the idea of confinement in Austen’s era and examined it from several different angles! And it’s always fascinating to read excerpts from Austen’s letters. I sometimes feel I’d be very afraid to be in the same room with her and her wit! Thanks for this thought-provoking post!
Thanks, Christina, I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I do think that when you start quoting Jane Austen’s letters, they have a quality of actually speaking and taking over – everything else pales. There’s nothing better for putting her life into context!
An interesting look at women during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Some things haven’t changed that much and others have considerably improved.
Very true – and sometimes not the things you’d expect! It’s a good subject for discussion, what confinement meant in her day, to different classes of women.
I think we underestimate how much of life in the raw Austen probably observed first hand. (She visited poor cottagers, and remember the little niece she feared might fill her bed with fleas?)
I am old enough to remember home births, and particularly one a next-door-neighbour underwent when I was about nine or ten. She gave birth in the home adjoining ours and her strange, deep, animal cries during birth were perfectly audible through a brick wall. They made a strong impression on me; and though a day later we were brought in to see her sat up in bed happily feeding her baby (which we duly praised and fussed over), I came away reflecting that childbirth was on the whole an experience best avoided.
Yes, that really resonates with me, Rita. First, yes, because I’ve often thought how Austen saw “real life” things, of a physical and sometimes sordid type, that she did not “regale” us with (her word) in her fiction. Then, speaking of writing, my great aunt was Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), the first Asian American fiction writer (1865-1914). She was the oldest of fourteen half-Chinese children growing up in Montreal in the 1880s, and in her memoir she writes: “My mother’s screams of pain when another baby is born almost drive me wild.” She was “little mother” to all the younger children, so it is perhaps no surprise that she never wanted to have children of her own. Her vivid writing about this has left a strong impression on me, though at second hand, though the written word across a century’s time.