Jane Austen Society of Australia

The Leighs:
The Revelations of Stoneleigh

Jon Spence, author of the biography Becoming Jane Austen, and editor of A Century of Wills from Jane Austen’s Family 1705-1806, brings his considerable knowledge of the background and family of Jane Austen to bear on Stoneleigh, and finds considerable food for thought.

Seeing a Great House

That [Miss Price] should be tired now, however, gives me no surprise; for there is nothing in the course of one’s duties so fatiguing as what we have been doing this morning – seeing a great house, dawdling from one room to another – straining one’s eyes and one’s attention – hearing what one does not understand – admiring what one does not care for. – It is generally allowed to be the greatest bore in the world, and Miss Price has found it so, though she did not know it.’

Mansfield Park, Chapter 9

I have to confess that I always think of Mary Crawford’s opinion when I’m traipsing through a great house – an activity I generally avoid. For Jane Austen’s sake, though, I’ll go almost anywhere, even to a great house! Not that I don’t put it off as long as possible.

But last July, finding myself only a short drive from Warwick (Stoneleigh Abbey is just a mile or so outside the town) and the day being a fine, idle Sunday morning (yes, Miss Anne Elliot, Sunday travelling is a habit with me!), I decided to have a look at Stoneleigh. I can’t even claim that Stoneleigh was on my list of Jane Austen ‘places’. After all, she only went there once for a brief visit; until the last decade of her life Stoneleigh had been in the possession of a remote branch of Mrs Austen’s family – the distance is indicated by the fact that Mrs Austen was sixty-seven when she made her first visit to the house.

The main attraction for me was that Humphrey Repton had ‘improved’ the grounds of Stoneleigh in 1809, three years after Jane and her mother were there. As we know from Mansfield Park, Jane Austen was interested in landscape improvements and in Humphrey Repton in particular. That would compensate for having to listen to stuff about architecture, the styles and origins of fine furniture, the craftsmanship of woodcarving and ornamental plastering. My heart sank at the prospect of being inside the house!

You enter the gates of the park from a quiet country road and follow the drive, crossing a fine stone bridge, which I soon discovered was built after Jane Austen’s visit. I was a bit confused, disoriented, because the classical stone façade I knew from photographs of the house did not come into welcoming view. Instead, what greeted us at eye level was a rosy brick gate-lodge and beyond it a house in the same style. The pale grey stone building that I thought of as the house was only glimpsed from the side. If I had been Repton, I thought, I would have had to turn the whole house around – or perhaps just rerouted the drive so that it led one around to make the great façade the first view you have of the house. I was already disappointed. The place looked like two different buildings, of wildly different styles, jammed together cheek-by-jowl.

This wasn’t far from the truth. The houses are in fact joined, but it’s hard to see just how. What I had thought of as the house, and what I had then thought of as one of the houses, turns out actually to be the West Wing, added to the original Elizabethan structure by the third Lord Leigh who was inspired by the classical architecture he saw when he made his Grand Tour to Italy in 1711, the year after he inherited the house. (I wondered if Repton or someone had ever suggested just tearing down the old house. Certainly, the West Wing looks big enough to accommodate a family – it has, according to Jane Austen’s mother, twenty-six bedrooms, for goodness sake!)

To see inside the house, you have to buy a ticket at the gate-lodge and be accompanied by a guide. There are several tours throughout the day, and we were lucky because one was starting in fifteen minutes. I was surprised by the size of the group gathering for the tour – thirty or forty people. I couldn’t help wondering why they had come. Surely not because of Jane Austen, whose association with the house I considered to be so slight as to be almost insignificant. Maybe they were interested in ornamental plasterwork! My heart sank again.

My friend told me to shut up and stop complaining even before we’d begun. I tried to get into Jane Austen mode. After all the Mansfield party didn’t go to Sotherton or Lizzy Bennet and the Gardiners to Pemberley because a great novelist had once been there. On the other hand, we had not been invited to Stoneleigh as guests of the owner, and unlike Lizzy and the Gardiners, we had had to buy a ticket! (I was also thinking that Mrs Gardiner promoted the expedition to Pemberley to see the grounds!)

Then our guide, Mrs Woodward, appeared and divided us into two groups, we were so numerous. And leading her group away, she began to talk about the house. That was when I suddenly found it possible to see this as a Jane Austen experience. Mrs Woodward might have been Mrs Reynolds, the Pemberley housekeeper, or Mrs Rushworth, the lady of Sotherton Court. She had a lot of information, spoke in an easy, chatty, informal way, and was clearly personally interested in her subject. Yes, I thought, this is really not so different; this must be a lot like what Austen’s characters experienced. I forgot to be bored and impatient, though of course I was eager for Mrs Woodward to get to Jane Austen’s connections with the house.

All we really know about Jane’s visit is that she went with her mother and a party of relations in August 1806. Her mother wrote a letter to a daughter-in-law giving details about the house and the grounds and about where they ate and walked and sat. So Mrs Woodward noted the rooms Mrs Austen found ‘rather gloomy’ and the one that had been the breakfast room where she said they sat because it was the only room with a view of the River Avon. I was glad Jane was given some attention, but I have to admit I didn’t feel the slightest frisson at knowing I was in a room Jane Austen had herself been in!

Just as I was about to get a little fidgety, Mrs Woodward unlocked and opened a door and announced, ‘This is the chapel.’ And ushered us into the gallery. Unlike Mrs Rushworth at Sotherton, she did observe the proprieties and we entered from above, looking down on the chapel. I was amazed, even shocked.

What I realize now is that in reading Mansfield Park, I had never really seen the chapel at Sotherton as a particular place; I didn’t really know what it looked like. I had imagined something rather dark and bare but not very dramatic. But the moment I went into the Stoneleigh chapel, I knew I was also at Sotherton:

Fanny’s imagination had prepared her for something grander than a mere, spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion—with nothing more striking or more solemn than the profusion of mahogany, and the crimson velvet cushions appearing over the ledge of the family gallery above. (MP, Chapter 9)

It is indeed a spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion. The altar is an elegantly carved table. No sign of the pulpit Mrs Austen said was draped in black, mourning for the late Hon. Mary Leigh. The room is not dark; on the contrary, it is all light and airiness. Mrs Woodward claimed the chapel for Sotherton, and told us that the crimson cushions still exist but are not on display. Of course, you can’t prove this is the place Jane Austen had in mind, but it’s hard for me to believe than anyone could see the chapel and doubt it to be Sotherton.

Now I was happy. Seeing the chapel had enhanced my ability to imagine that scene in Mansfield Park. That was worth the journey, worth the price of admission. Yet, you’d have to be a pretty intense Janeite to go to Stoneleigh just for that. People would always put Chawton and Bath, Lyme and Godmersham, higher on their list of ‘must see’ sights. This would be a mistake. For Stoneleigh offers something else, something as important as the chapel, perhaps even more significant. In her letter Mrs Austen mentions a parlour ‘hung round with family Pictures’. The pictures she saw are still there – at least, many of them must be; in addition, family portraits that she and Jane would have been familiar with from Adlestrop Park in Gloucestershire, where Mrs Austen’s father had grown up, have now made their way to Stoneleigh. So we have portraits of both branches of the Leigh family descended from Sir Thomas Leigh, Lord Mayor of London at the time Elizabeth I came to throne, all under the same roof.

Stoneleigh contains, in short, a visual history of the Leigh family, which means that it contains the history of half of what was Jane Austen’s family. It is, in that sense, a house that may not be all that important in Jane Austen’s personal history but one where we can find much of the history of Jane Austen’s family.

There is Sir Thomas Leigh and his shrewd, intelligent-looking wife, Alice, Jane Austen’s Leigh grandparents many times removed. There is Mrs Austen’s distant cousin, the sad, last Lord Leigh as a pretty youth before he went mad and died childless in 1786. Then, in another room, his sister, the Hon. Mary Leigh, whose death in 1806 was indirectly the cause of Jane and her mother visiting Stoneleigh and who left in her Will an annuity of £200 for the care of Mrs Austen’s own mentally disabled brother. Not so close in time, but closer in blood, are portraits of Mrs Austen’s grandfather Theophilus Leigh and his mother-in-law, Eliza Lady Chandos; her son James Brydges, lst Duke of Chandos, and his second wife, the celebrated Duchess Cassandra.

Most moving of all – and, incidentally, the most valuable pictures in the collection, according to Mrs Woodward – are two horizontally rectangular group portraits of nine of the children – five in one picture, four in the other – of Theophilus and Mary Leigh, Jane Austen’s great grandparents. It had not occurred to the curators and Mrs Woodward to connect this picture to Jane Austen, but I did: one of the children must be her maternal grandfather, Mrs Austen’s father, the Rev Thomas Leigh. Mrs Austen must have known which child was her father; she must also have known which was her beloved aunt Cassandra, after whom she had named her own elder daughter. Jane, who knew neither her grandfather nor her great-aunt Cassandra, would have been fascinated.

I yearned to spend a long, long time dawdling and looking at all of the portraits, putting faces to names I knew well and to stories I knew even better. We know what happened to all of those Leigh children, some in more detail than others. But these are not just names and faces or even stories. In some instances, we have voices, some of the portraits can, as it were, speak. We can read the letters of the Duke and Duchess of Chandos, many of them to their Leigh nieces and nephews.

My own favorite voice is that of Lady Chandos, who wrote such a no-nonsense letter to her poor ill-fated daughter Mary (the mother of the nine children immortalized by the painter) warning her against dressing ‘tricked up like a bartlemew-babby’: ‘I am not against your going decent & neat as becomes your fathers daughter but to clothe yourself rich & be running into every gaudy fashion can never become your circumstances ...’ Mrs Austen’s own letters show she inherited something of her great grandmother’s style and forthright way of speaking. And Jane raised that voice to the level of great art.

After we finished our tour and parted from the excellent Mrs Woodward, my friend and I strolled about Repton’s landscape. I didn’t mind now that it was not the landscape Jane Austen had seen! I pondered what seemed to me a great irony: Here in this house is the history of the most important, in the worldly sense, part of Jane Austen’s family. And yet, we don’t really know that it is there. If Jane had not visited Stoneleigh we might not even think of the place as being connected to her at all.

I feel no doubt that if there were such a repository of the history of the Austen family, it would be high on the list of places to visit, equal to Chawton Cottage, perhaps more important than Godmersham Park or Chawton House. It is strange that we have more or less neglected the maternal side of Jane Austen’s heritage, as if she were somehow more an Austen than a Leigh. Odder still considering that we know so little about the Austens – just a few facts and a few voices and one face before Mr Austen’s generation. Mr Austen’s grandmother, Elizabeth Weller, wrote a ‘memorandum’ about her family’s troubles; her husband, her father-in-law, and some of her sons left their voices in their wills. Mr Austen’s uncle Francis became rich and his portrait now hangs in a museum.

JASA has made an important contribution to Jane Austen studies – and inadvertently provided something of a guide to the portraits at Stoneleigh – by publishing wills from her family, especially in making available wills from the Leigh family. It is owing to that book that I know so much about individual members of the Leigh family and their connections to Jane Austen. But not until I visited Stoneleigh did it come home to me so strongly what a storehouse of information we have still to be explored.

Wandering along the Avon on that hot summer afternoon – things were looking a bit pale and parched – I wondered what Jane Austen herself made of Stoneleigh, made of the family history and of the portraits, both those that she saw at Stoneleigh and those at Adlestrop. How interested was she in the great house? Or in the less grand, but impressive, house at Adlestrop? Did she see those houses as the most important outward signs of her heritage, the glory of her background? Somehow, I think not. She was too sensible to take much pride in the reflected glory of the bricks-and-mortar of past generations, to console herself with the thought that poor as she and her immediate family were now, the Leigh part at least had been and indeed still was very rich and very grand indeed.

Nevertheless, she must have seen herself as marginally a part of the world signified by those houses. Such places loom larger in her novels than they seem to have done in her everyday life. But what interested her most deeply, I suspect, is the people who lived in those houses, the Elinors and Mariannes, the Darcys, the Bertrams, the Emmas, the Tilneys, even the Elliots. At Stoneleigh I could imagine Jane Austen going from room to room, gazing at the portraits, trying to determine the character of each sitter, recalling what she knew about each one, asking questions to supplement her knowledge. We know that she looked for Mrs Darcy and Mrs Bingley in exhibitions she attended in London; perhaps she found among the portraits now at Stoneleigh images of her heroes and heroines.

Neither Jane Austen herself nor her creations are ever going to be pinned down, but a visit to Stoneleigh is, perhaps, a necessary corrective to our preconceived notions of Jane Austen as the poor spinster daughter of a parson. She knew something about the great world and had real connections to it.

Not least of the revelations of Stoneleigh for me was the discovery that Jane’s cousin Chandos Leigh, whose father was to inherit Stoneleigh only seven years after Jane’s visit and four years before her death, was at the time of her visit to Stoneleigh at school at Harrow with Lord Byron. Chandos and Byron were close friends and are said to have dined together on the evening before Byron left England forever in April 1816, a few months before Jane Austen began to feel unwell with the disease that was to kill her the following year.

Was fifteen-year-old Chandos at home from Harrow for the summer vacation that August of 1806? Did he go with his parents and all the assorted uncles, aunts and cousins to inspect the great Warwickshire estate that he would one day inherit? Did he sit in that sunny breakfast room with his somewhat imperious but utterly unpretentious old cousin Mrs Austen and her shy, clever spinster daughter Jane? Did he glance up from his letters to his friend Byron to gaze out at the Avon? Did he surreptitiously write poems that he thought every bit as good as his friend’s? (He did have ambitions to be a poet.) Did Jane ever discover his interest in literature and talk to him about it? I doubt it, but it would be pleasant to think she did. I do suspect, whatever the truth in this particular case, that Jane considered herself far more connected, however indirectly, to the great world than we are accustomed to supposing.

Go to Stoneleigh and think on these things. It is a revelation! You may dawdle, but, Mary Crawford’s wisdom notwithstanding, you will not be bored!

Jon Spence

Photos: Stoneleigh Abbey

FEEDBACK: info@jasa.net.au

13 January 2004

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