On this day in 1808. . .

One hundred and fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

Jane Austen, it seems, took a rather jaundiced view of the frequent childbearing that characterized Regency marriage.

There’s her infamous dead baby joke, made in 1798, when Austen was twenty-two. (Letter #10, in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence)

There’s her recommendation of delayed marriage, made to her niece Fanny Knight in 1817, when Austen was forty-one: “By not beginning the business of Mothering quite so early in life, you will be young in Constitution, spirits, figure & countenance, while [a friend] is growing old by confinements & nursing.” (#153)

Less than two weeks later, there’s Austen’s commentary on the rapid procreation of another niece, Anna Lefroy: “Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.—I am very sorry for her.” (#155)

By the time of her 1817 letters, two of Austen’s brothers had lost their wives to childbirth complications, and after Austen’s own death, a third sister-in-law would meet the same end. But Austen’s views were formed before these tragic family experiences, as the letter (#56) she finished writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 217 years ago today makes clear, in an aside that seems to combine disbelief and exasperation.

“Mrs Tilson’s remembrance gratifies me, & I will use her patterns if I can,” the thirty-two-year-old Jane wrote to Cassandra, who was visiting their brother Edward’s family in Kent. “But poor Woman! how can she be honestly breeding again?”

The Mrs. Tilson in question was Frances Tilson, married to James Tilson, a business partner of the fourth-oldest Austen brother, Henry. By 1808, when Austen wrote her letter, the Tilsons had been married for more than eleven years and Frances, who was about thirty-one, had given birth to seven children. The pregnancy that startled Austen was the eighth, with three others* still to come over the next five years.

It’s a rate of production that would make most modern American women send up a prayer of thanks for reliable contraception. Apparently, Jane Austen agreed.**

But her throwaway remark carries a further tragic irony. In October 1808, Cassandra was visiting Edward’s home to help out after the birth of his eleventh child, and initially, all seemed well. But eight days after Austen finished her letter, with its incredulous commentary on “breeding,” Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, died suddenly—the first Austen sister-in-law killed by the risky practice of nineteenth-century childbearing. But not the last.

* Or perhaps more! Le Faye describes the Tilson brood as including “at least” eleven children, not all of whom survived to adulthood.

**A later owner of this letter--probably Austen's great-nephew Lord Brabourne, known for bowdlerizing phrases he found too vulgar for Victorian sensibilities--apparently felt Austen's remark was so indelicate that he crossed it out, Le Faye reports. Fortunately, however, he wasn't thorough enough to render the sentence illegible.