Stoneleigh Abbey, Pictures in Colour of Warwickshire, c.1905
Book Details
Victoria Huxley
JANE AUSTEN AND ADLESTROP
Her other family
240pp. Windrush. Paperback, £10.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 9575150 2 4
The writer's "other family" – the Leighs – and their English village
CLAIRE HARMAN
"Adlestrop": the name only was enough to conjure an essential Englishness in Edward Thomas's mind, all the more fragile and fugitive because of the threat of war. His poem is now Adlestrop's greatest claim to fame and is inscribed on a plaque underneath the station sign that Thomas saw from his carriage window – a fit emblem of the village's conceptual status, perhaps, since the station itself was pulled down after the axeing of local train services in 1966. "Only the name" remains.
Had Edward Thomas left the train and wandered into Adlestrop village on that summer afternoon in 1914, he might have discovered its links with another epitome of Englishness, Jane Austen, who made three recorded (and probably other) visits there in the 1790s and 1800s to see her mother's cousins Thomas, Mary and Elizabeth Leigh at the rectory and her second cousin James Henry Leigh at the "big house", Adlestrop Park. The village is still centred on these two properties, with the church, manor farm and a string of cottages along the main street making up the rest. Victoria Huxley, a local historian and long-term resident, ingeniously uses the social history of this quiet Gloucestershire backwater and the grand Leigh family estate 60 miles north at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire as a window into, and perhaps out of, conventional Austen biography. What could be more appropriate to a writer who declared herself contented with the study of "three or four families in a country village" than to observe how enclosure, war and fashions such as "improvement" played out in a place familiar to her and detail some of the real-life dramas that gave ballast to Austen's fictional ones?
Jane Austen's "other family", the Leighs, were not short of glamour. Related by marriage to the dukes of Chandos, they had been significant landowners for centuries, public servants, scholars and eccentrics, all fiercely loyal to the Stuart cause. Sir Thomas Leigh was awarded a peerage after sheltering Charles I at Stoneleigh during the Civil War; several generations later at Adlestrop, the family was still drinking to "Church and King" before every meal. Mrs Austen was particularly proud of the Leighs' intellectual distinction: the fifth Lord Leigh was a discriminating bibliophile (whose library became a valuable bequest to Oriel College), her uncle Theophilus was a famous Oxford wit and Master of Balliol for over fifty years, and her cousin Mary pursued numerous independent scholarly and artistic interests from her home in Adlestrop Rectory. Mary Leigh's unpublished family history – astutely and extensively used by Victoria Huxley – has literary qualities that go far beyond the standard home-circle text; and she and her sister Cassandra Cooke both wrote novels too (Mary's haven't survived), which must have interested Jane Austen if only as examples of production and circulation. That Mary Leigh observed and approved of her Steventon cousins is clear from her thumbnail sketch of them in the "History", comparing their "simplicity of hospitality & taste" with that "which commonly prevailed in affluent families among the delightful valleys of Switzerland". Huxley unpicks this glancing tribute to egalitarian views and liberal manners, suggesting it is a benign way of describing what Jane's niece, snobbish Lady Knatchbull, later described as a lack of "refinement" among her Hampshire relations.
The Leigh anecdotes that appear in Mary Leigh's History must have been familiar to Jane Austen from an early age. She used at least one of them in a novel: Elizabeth Lord, an aunt of Thomas Leigh on his mother's side, went against her family's wishes by falling in love with a lowly Lieutenant Wentworth, a story – and name – that seems to have inspired parts of Persuasion. The improvements that took place at both Adlestrop Park and Stoneleigh Abbey at the turn of the century under the direction of Humphrey Repton, the most fashionable landscape architect of the day, fed directly into the Sotherton episodes in Mansfield Park (and Repton is one of very few real-life characters to be mentioned in Austen's fiction), and Huxley points out how each of Austen's novels has some reference to "Improvement": the management of estates and the relation between landscapes and purse-strings. It is at this subcutaneous level that the importance to Jane Austen of places like Adlestrop and Stoneleigh becomes most interesting.
Adlestrop was never insulated from the general rise and fall of prosperity. The Leighs probably saved their estate early in the eighteenth century by decamping to Utrecht for five years to economize (rather like Sir Walter Elliot letting Kellynch Hall in Persuasion, only with better results). By mid-century, the family was prosperous enough to renovate and gothicize Adlestrop Park in fine style, and the careful inventory made when James Leigh died suddenly in 1774 is a snapshot of a well-run home, with every bottle of old Madeira, every piece of linen and even the coins found in the master's pocket when he keeled over being scrupulously accounted for.
The heir, James Henry Leigh, didn't take up residence in Adlestrop until after his marriage twelve years later. He had spent the interval living in the ducal residences of his maternal uncle. He set about a new generation of improvements, calling in Repton and his Red Book to transform the look and shape of the Park, and thereby the village. The Adlestrop Leighs were also quick to exploit the opportunities that Enclosure Acts offered. Thomas Leigh, rector of the village for fifty years, enclosed the green and diverted a road for his own benefit, while James Henry grabbed a bit of the churchyard to add to the Park's pleasure grounds. Jane Austen had a ringside view of all these changes on her visits in 1794, 1799 and 1806, though she is unlikely to have approved of them much. Her taste was more for untouched backwaters such as Thornton Lacey in Mansfield Park and the centuries-old landscape around Donwell Abbey in Emma: "It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a bright sun, without being oppressive".
Austen is often criticized for being too materialistic a novelist, but her intense interest in property and money seems reasonable given the insecurity of the Austen family – always one sibling or one godparent away from a big legacy – by comparison with the fortunate Leighs. Huxley's careful explanation of the flow of money through the two families reveals the extent of the Austens' disappointments better than ever before. Stoneleigh, a former Cistercian monastery grandly remodelled in the eighteenth century, was always on a different scale from Adlestrop, and belonged to another branch of the Leigh family until the death in 1806 of the Hon. Mary Leigh, an eccentric and childless recluse. Her brother's ambiguously worded will then came fully into operation, leaving the property to "the first and nearest of his kindred, being male and of his blood and name". This formula had been exercising the family for two decades, prompting some strategic name-changes, but in 1806 the most direct heir seemed to be James Henry Leigh, of Adlestrop Park. His uncle Thomas, the rector, was older, however, so a compromise was reached: Thomas inherited a life interest in the munificent estate, bequeathing it to James Henry and buying out another claimant cousin, James Leigh Perrot (Mrs Austen's brother), with a whopping £50,000.
Mrs Austen and her daughters Cassandra and Jane were visiting Adlestrop Rectory at exactly the time that the will was being executed and went with the Revd Mr Leigh into Warwickshire to take possession of his prize. None of Jane's letters of 1806 has survived, but we can guess some of the impression the vast house made on her, with its old picture gallery, chapel, dozens of bedrooms and sweeping parkland from similar descriptions of Sotherton in Mansfield Park and from the grandeur of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice (though Darcy's income of £10,000 a year was significantly less than Mary Leigh's). Northanger Abbey also had its fair share of Stoneleigh, as is clear from Mrs Austen's lively letter to her daughter-in-law, which, as Huxley says, could have been written by Catherine Morland herself. "I had figured to myself long Avenues dark Rookeries and Dismal Yew Trees, but there was no such melancholy things", Mrs Austen reported. But there were gothic thrills to be found in the old state Bed Chamber "with a high crimson Velvet Bed: an alarming apartment just fit for a Heroine".
Widowed Mrs Austen clearly expected some benefit to her own family from her cousins' and brother's good fortune, but perhaps Jane's satire on the self-interest of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility (a novel she was rewriting between 1805 and 1811) reflects a less sanguine view of the probable outcome. In a painfully believable scene, the new heir to Norland is happy to interpret his father's dying wishes (that his stepmother and half-sisters should be looked after) as a prompt to haphazard and limited patronage. The feelgood factor he and his wife manufacture is feeling good about retaining more resources for themselves. The Leigh Perrots did this in real life, and claimed the added bonus of holding out to their worse-off relatives the promise that all would be made good in the future, which it was not.
When James Leigh Perrot died in March 1817, he left everything to his wife during her lifetime; nothing at all to his sister and sums to her children, including a substantial bequest to Jane's eldest brother James, that would only be paid on Mrs Leigh Perrot's death. The whole Steventon family was perturbed by the news, and Jane, who was terminally ill in the spring of 1817, quite overset by it: "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse", she wrote to Cassandra. "I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but a weak body must excuse weak nerves." Jane, of course, never saw the £1,000 promised her, but nor did James receive his much-mentioned jackpot, as Aunt Leigh Perrot outlived them both by many years.
These family dramas have been documented before, but the charm of Victoria Huxley's book is its grounding in location, putting this strand of Jane Austen's family history in place physically and emotionally. At times, there's an almost parodic affinity with a traditional tour guide – "Let us return to our perambulation into the heart of Adlestrop up Main Street's gentle incline" – but Huxley's intimate knowledge of the village and affection for it offers up other, deeper perspectives. When she reconstructs what Jane Austen might have seen on a walk, it is with a keen eye to what remains today: "When the weather is dry, the old track over which Jane's coach would have travelled can be clearly seen like a shadow on the manicured grass of the cricket ground". And she understands the changes in mood that a landscape can undergo. In Adlestrop Park, small adjustments to Repton's design over the years have erased his intentions, creating an eerie secrecy around the lake, sensitively evoked by the author:
"Perhaps because of its present isolation, the lake has a curious still atmosphere due to the surrounding mature trees that are mirrored in the opaque waters. In the summer the edges are threaded with yellow flags and meadowsweet and glistening white water lilies lie on the lake's surface. Swans, moorhens, herons, coots and mallards enjoy the lake and there is even a terrapin which basks in the sun on a jutting tree root on hot days. In the winter the water freezes frequently."
The quiet of latterday Adlestrop would have struck the forward-thinking Leighs and their cousins as bizarre and ominous. A stump is all that remains of the traditional place to gossip, the village pump, and it is perfectly possible nowadays, Huxley reports, "to walk through the village without seeing anyone in the street or in the surrounding fields", compared with 1801, when there were almost exactly the same number of dwellings but a third again as many inhabitants. In the century since Edward Thomas's train halted at the station, it is not just the station which has gone, but the smithy, the watermill and all but one shop (doubling as a post office). There's only one bus a week to this abandoned corner of rural England, but at least that isn't a Cotswold tourist bus. Adlestrop isn't sufficiently picturesque to attract such traffic, and is so small, as Victoria Huxley notes, that many strangers drive through before they notice they've arrived. Pragmatic Jane Austen would have found some comfort in that. Being nowhere in particular might be what has enabled this "quintessentially English" village to survive.
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