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Knight was, of course, the wife of Thomas Knight, who had adopted young Edward Austen and who would play an important part in Jane’s future literary career. Mrs Lefroy was a friend and mentor, who lived in a nearby parsonage.

      Jane Austen also makes a series of knowing jokes about the homosexual preferences of King James I and his circle. The ‘attentions’ of his courtier Sir Henry Percy ‘were entirely confined to Lord Mounteagle’, while ‘His Majesty was of that amiable disposition that inclines to Friendships and in such points was possessed of a keener penetration in Discovering Merit than many other people’. The nature of these ‘Friendships’ might be hinted at in the phrase ‘keener penetration’,23 but it is made explicit in the charade that Austen then slips into her ‘History’: ‘My first is what my second was to King James the 1st, and you tread on my whole.’ The answer is of course, car-pet, an allusion to Sir Robert Carr, the most notorious of King James’s homosexual lovers.24 Those who believe that Jane Austen could never have made a joke about sodomy in the navy (‘Rears, and Vices’) may want to reconsider their opinion in the light of her King James joke, made as a teenager. And read aloud to family and friends. The Georgians, as is clear from the thriving trade in caricatures riddled with double entendres, were a far cry from the prudish Victorians.

      Like all big families, the Austens had their own private language, their in-jokes. Many of the allusions are no doubt lost on us, but certain ones can be deduced. Jane was known to have red cheeks, so there are several jokes about young women who have too much red in their cheeks. Again, Jane drew on the names of family members in stories such as ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’ and ‘Henry and Eliza’. It is hardly a coincidence that a story dedicated to Frank includes a pious young man who is torn between entering the Church and joining the navy, and thus becomes a chaplain on board a man of war. Another story describes a boy who, like Charles and Frank, is ‘placed at the Royal Academy for Seamen at Portsmouth when about thirteen years old’. On graduating he is ‘discharged on board one of the vessels of a small fleet destined for Newfoundland … from whence he regularly sent home a large Newfoundland Dog every Month to his family’.25 And one suspects some sort of family joke in a story dedicated to Austen’s mother, in which Jane writes, ‘I saw you thro’ a telescope, and was so struck by your Charms that from that time to this I have not tasted human food.’26

      The little ‘History of England’ in Volume the Second is a genuine family production: it is peppered with caricature illustrations of the kings and queens of England, drawn by Jane’s sister Cassandra. They are jokily responsive to Jane’s narrative. Cassandra’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth presents her as shrewish and ugly with a long witch-like nose, while Mary Queen of Scots is full of face, pink-cheeked and beautiful with dark, curly hair. Edward IV, whom Jane notes is ‘famous for his beauty’, is drawn to look like a pig-farmer.

      Comparison of the cartoons with surviving portraits has led to the recent suggestion that ‘The History of England’ may be even more of a family affair than previous biographers have realized.27 Henry V, the exemplary soldier-king, bears an uncanny resemblance to Henry Austen, who was seriously considering a career in the army. James I looks somewhat like James Austen and Edward VI like Edward Austen. The ugly Edward IV, who appears to be wearing the garb of an Evangelical clergyman, is the spitting image of a cousin whom Jane heartily disliked – Edward Cooper, an Evangelical clergyman. Elizabeth I has Mrs Austen’s hooked nose. If this hypothesis is correct, there can be only one candidate for resemblance to the heroine of the piece, Mary Queen of Scots. It would appear that Cassandra painted her in the likeness of her sister Jane. Mary Queen of Scots has red cheeks, a small mouth, large eyes and a strong nose, a small but perfectly formed miniature of the seventeen-year-old Jane. This could well be the biggest joke of all: that the young author might just be visible before our eyes.

      ***

      ‘Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint –’: so says Sophia, one of the (anti-) heroines of ‘Love and Freindship’.28

      Though Jane Austen was a great advocate of the novel as a literary form, she was well aware of its limitations. In order to break the mould with her writing, she had to establish what she disliked and what didn’t work. Jane Austen loved the novels of Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney, but she was not afraid to parody their conventions. Thus one of her characters, Sir Charles Adams, is based on Richardson’s idealized hero Sir Charles Grandison. In a sly dig at Richardson, showing a finely tuned comic touch beyond her years, Austen has her egocentric hero remark: ‘I expect nothing more in my wife than my wife will find in me – Perfection.’29

      Cassandra’s drawing of Mary Queen of Scots in Jane Austen’s ‘History of England’

      Anybody reading through the vellum notebooks will notice a seemingly endless succession of heroines weeping and fainting. At the end of ‘Edgar and Emma’, the heroine retires to her room and continues in tears for ‘the remainder of her Life’. In ‘A beautiful description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds’, Melissa drapes herself in her bed – somewhat diaphanously wrapped in ‘a book muslin bedgown, a chambray gauze shift, and a french net nightcap’ – so that the devoted Sir William can minister to her in her distressed fit of extreme sensibility. A doctor asks whether she is thinking of dying, to which the reply is that ‘She has not strength to think at all.’ ‘Nay then,’ replies the witty doctor, ‘she cannot think to have Strength.’30

      It is tricky for modern readers fully to understand the genius of the vellum notebooks without placing them in the context of ‘sentimentalism’ and the late eighteenth-century ‘novel of sensibility’. Sentimentalism is a slippery concept, not least because what was first an approbatory term increasingly became pejorative. The cult of sensibility or sentimentalism was acted out in a code of conduct which placed emphasis on the feelings rather than on reason. A heightened sensitivity to emotional experience and an acute responsiveness to nature were perceived as the marks of the person of sensibility. Medical writers of the era connected sensibility to madness, over-taxed nerves and hysteria. In a sense, it was the eighteenth century’s term for what we now call manic depression. In the literature of the time, suicide was sometimes seen as the ultimate manifestation of extreme sensibility.

      Sensibility had its orgins in philosophy, but it became a literary movement, particularly in the newly emerging genre of the novel. Characters in sentimental novels are often fragile individuals, prone to sensibility, which manifests itself in tears, fainting fits and nervous excitability. Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling were exemplars of the genre which emphasized ‘feeling’ and aimed to elicit an emotional or sentimental response from the reader, usually by relating scenes of distress or tenderness. The most notorious of all sentimental novels was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which depicted a highly sensitive hero who kills himself because of unrequited love. It was said that every teenager in the land identified with the hero and shed tears when reading the novel, some even going so far as to commit copycat suicide.

      The flip-side of this popular sentimental craze was the contention that such extreme behaviour was mere narcissism and self-indulgent histrionics. Furthermore, anti-sentimental thinkers associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the violence of the French Revolution. After all, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse was one of the bibles of sensibility and it was that same Rousseau whose Social Contract and theory of the ‘general will’ underpinned the ideology of the Jacobins. The young, passionately anti-revolutionary Jane Austen belonged firmly to the camp of anti-sensibility – though twenty years later her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, would reveal a more nuanced and complex response to the phenomenon.

      During

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