Frank disappointment

Jane Austen seems to have adored her older brother Francis. In the handful of letters that survive from their correspondence, she invariably addresses him as “my dearest Frank.” Readers of Austen’s novels have drawn parallels with the sweet-tempered, domestic Captain Harville of Persuasion. Apparently, even Frank himself saw the resemblance.

Indeed, in the playful poem she sent after the birth of his eldest son, Austen described Frank as “considerate & kind;/All Gentleness to those around,/And eager only not to wound,” voicing the hope that “In him [the new baby], in all his ways, may we/Another Francis William see!” (Letter #69 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence).

So it’s disappointing to report that Frank Austen’s memoir—published online recently, after a much-ballyhooed communal transcription effort—suggests he was kind of a pill: self-confident to the point of arrogance, alert to ancient slights, and adept at sucking up to social superiors. Worst of all, he didn’t like Americans.

Although previously known to scholars, the manuscript in question—it’s couched in the third person but believed to be an autobiography written c. 1863, as Frank was nearing ninety--was in private hands until 2023, when Jane Austen’s House bought it at auction. As blog readers will recall (see here, here, and here), the museum earned oodles of free publicity a year ago by asking for volunteers to help transcribe the forty-one pages of Frank’s sometimes barely legible nineteenth-century handwriting.

Within twenty-four hours, more than two thousand Janeites offered their services, and those who got the nod went to work on a single assigned page. (One of the transcribers, British novelist Diane Setterfield, wrote a charming account of the process here.)

Now the results are online, and they are . . . underwhelming. If there was an Austen family storytelling gene, Frank didn’t inherit it: His account of his successful career in the Royal Navy is long on catalogs of ship names and descriptions of the money and merchandise awarded him by admiring colleagues, but frustratingly short on vivid pen portraits of human beings or arresting reflections on his situation.

I have no doubt that Frank’s memoir carries great historical interest for scholars of the British Navy. And if you, unlike me, are a fan of sea stories, perhaps you’ll be gripped by Frank’s economical accounts of naval battles, like this tale of the 1806 “action off St. Domingo,” for which Frank earned a medal and Captain Wentworth a promotion:

"Soon after 10 the Battle commenced by the Superb firing on the headmost of the Enemy, which from some accident shortly became unmanageable and threw the whole of the French line into confusion[.] In a few minutes every Ship was engaged, nor was Victory long doubtful; By Noon the Enemy was compleatly beaten three of his Ships having surrendered and the other two to avoid a similar fate, having run on the rocks, where they were totally lost.”

Myself, I yawned.

More entertaining, if unintentionally so, is the tale of twenty-one-year old Frank, then a lowly lieutenant, pulling an all-nighter to produce a drawing requested by his superiors, only to have his captain fail to give him due credit:

“It might have been expected he would either officially to the Admiralty, or in a private communication to some of the Naval Members of the Board, have mentioned the name of the person to whom he was obliged for the Charts,” Frank notes, “more especially as he owed to him not only the execution, but also the very idea of them. . . . He did not however mention it either publicly or privately.”

Frank’s account of this slight—a grievance apparently still fresh, despite the intervening sixty-seven years—takes up more space than his story of the action off St. Domingo.

But let’s face it: Most Janeites will read Frank’s memoir hoping for tidbits about his most famous sibling. And this is what they’ll find: “Shortly after his marriage he fixed his abode at Southampton, making one Family with his Mother and Sisters.” And, nine pages later: “He resided for some years at or in the neighbourhood of Chawten where his mother and sisters were living.”

Yup, that’s it. Those sisters don’t even get names, let alone detailed accounts of their observations on love, slavery, or the craft of novel-writing. But to be fair, Frank mentions only one of his seven siblings by name—“Mr. Knight.” Edward Knight was, of course, the rich, well-connected Austen sibling—and after plowing through Frank’s name-dropping of every single titled patron who ever offered him a job, a compliment, or a dinner, I can’t believe that’s a coincidence.

For Jane Austen’s sake, I would like to give her beloved brother the benefit of the doubt. By the time he sat down to write his memoir, he was very old. He had buried his parents, his siblings, both his wives, and six of his eleven children. Life may have felt sad and lonely. Perhaps grief and regret colored his recollections of the past.

And yet. To paraphrase Elizabeth Bennet, I could easily forgive Frank’s self-regard if he had not mortified my patriotism. For here is Frank’s account of an 1847 visit to Saratoga, New York:

“They lived whilst there at the Table d'hȏte of one of the Principal Hotels and had an opportunity of seeing something of American manners & habits,” he writes. “What they did see did not inspire them with favourable impressions of either. The men have some vile habits especially that of frequent discharge of Saliva, and that without much regard to the where they may be, whether in a carpeted room or wooden floor, and there was a sort of flippant air amongst the women which seemed rather at variance with the retiring modesty so pleasing in the generality of English women.”

The Bingley sisters couldn’t have put it more succinctly.