Jane Austen's niece and her new-found land
I came across Catherine Hubback while leafi ng through papers at Jane Austen’s birthplace in Chawton, Hampshire. A loose photo in a fi le of correspondence revealed Catherine, one of Austen’s army of nieces: a 50ish woman with hair stowed neatly under a lacetrimmed velvet mob cap, a high forehead, widely spaced eyes and the glimmer of a wry smile, as if she knew that you might as well smile, after all. She wore a starched collar and a velvet jacket fastened by a brooch.
The photograph was taken in 1874 by the San Francisco photographer GD Morse. San Francisco? It was a long way from Chawton. Through the window flush by my desk, wintry light silhouetted the skeletons of ash trees, and frost tinged the soil of the fl owerbeds – a kind of anti-California. When I tracked her down, I found out that Catherine had arrived in America just months after the railroad joined the country together and shifted the frontier to San Francisco – a middle-aged English writer who went to America to start again: a second act.
Catherine Hubback, née Austen, was the daughter of Jane’s brother Francis. Born in 1818, the year after Jane’s death, she was the eighth of 11 children. Her mother died when she was fi ve. In 1828, when her father remarried, the family moved to Portsdown Lodge on a hill above Portsmouth in Hampshire. She remembered Lord Palmerston canvassing in Portsdown in the year of the Reform Act, when she was 14. He was not called Lord Cupid for his attention to buttered crumpets, and as a precautionary measure the adults sent Catherine and her sister out of the room when the great man appeared.
Catherine had deep-set hazel eyes and fair hair, all her aunt’s spirit and some of her intelligence. In 1842 she married John Hubback, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. John was a Northcountryman – his father, a hatter and furrier, served as mayor of Berwickupon- Tweed in Northumberland. John was ambitious and successful. In 1844 he published Evidence Of Succession To Real And Personal Property And Peerages, a door-stopping volume still consulted at the beginning of the 20th century. Three sons appeared in short order: John Junior in 1844, Edward in 1846 and Charles in 1847.
Then John experienced a catastrophic mental collapse. He was 37. In the family, they said it was a result of overwork. For his wife it was a draining of hope. In the end she had to put him into an asylum. He wrote her unfathomable letters, lost in his mind, which was now a foreign land where nobody spoke his language. Catherine, with three children under six, returned to Portsdown Lodge, and spent the next 12 years living with her father and stepmother. Now she picked up a pen in a bid to establish a settled life for her children. Her first novel, The Younger Sister, appeared in 1850, two years after John’s collapse.
The curtain rose on the second act when the children left school. Catherine’s status was obscure while her husband was still alive: neither a spin-ster nor a widow nor a married woman in any meaningful sense. She was free to make a fresh start in a country where she had no past, and in the autumn of 1870 Catherine sailed to America with Charlie, who was determined to settle in Virginia.
On arrival in New York, she continued West on the rails, planning to keep house for Edward, who was taking his chances on the grain trade in California. She had not left England since her honeymoon, and there she was clattering alone through Iowa and Nebraska and Wyoming, embroidering a handkerchief on a small wooden frame, listening to the rhythmic pounding of pistons and the wail of a steam whistle while mesas and desert chimneys sped by. She was 52.
In the arid semi-desert, the train stopped for water at lone homestead stations where women in calico dresses pumped at wells and cowboys on silver-pommelled saddles galloped away in a cloud of dust. The crouching black hills of Wyoming, moonlit pines in a canyon – it was a long way from the damp streets of home.
Edward had taken a house in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. In neatly written letters home to John and his wife Mary, Catherine included sketches of ladies in long fl owery skirts and parasols. The image of the woman indoors writing letters is a Jane Austen staple, and Catherine’s correspondence forms an epistolary novel more vivid than her 10 real novels. The pages tell a family saga, the story of the immigrant struggle, and from them Catherine’s inner life flares up.
While Ed commuted to San Francisco, Catherine gave lessons in lace making and embroidery. She took the ferry to shop at the wharf market, where Pacifi c halibut lay on slabs like murdered Roman emperors. In many ways she was a natural traveller, and she sucked up the energy of the frontier; its sense of optimism. She had the elan characteristic of the 19th century but a sense of the sad absurdity of life one associates with the 20th. She looked back ruefully at the first years of her marriage. ‘That was in ‘Catherine was free to make a fresh start in a country where she had no past, and so she set sail’ my prosperous days,’ she wrote once, ‘when I dressed well, and we gave dinner parties.’
But moans were few. In Oakland she founded an Improving Society aimed at raising moral standards.
In 1876 Edward announced his intention to marry. Catherine had never intended to remain in California once he was settled. That November, she moved to Charlie’s farm in Gainesville, Virginia. Charlie was eking out a homesteader’s existence, his farm unconnected to the turnpike by road. It was a bitterly cold winter. Within six months, Catherine was dead. Aged 58, she had succumbed to pneumonia. There were no regrets.
‘I don’t think,’ she wrote home, ‘you need pity me for any part of my Californian life unless it is that stockings will wear out so fast.’
O My America! Second Acts In A New World, by Sara Wheeler (Vintage Books, £10.99).
The photograph was taken in 1874 by the San Francisco photographer GD Morse. San Francisco? It was a long way from Chawton. Through the window flush by my desk, wintry light silhouetted the skeletons of ash trees, and frost tinged the soil of the fl owerbeds – a kind of anti-California. When I tracked her down, I found out that Catherine had arrived in America just months after the railroad joined the country together and shifted the frontier to San Francisco – a middle-aged English writer who went to America to start again: a second act.
Catherine Hubback, née Austen, was the daughter of Jane’s brother Francis. Born in 1818, the year after Jane’s death, she was the eighth of 11 children. Her mother died when she was fi ve. In 1828, when her father remarried, the family moved to Portsdown Lodge on a hill above Portsmouth in Hampshire. She remembered Lord Palmerston canvassing in Portsdown in the year of the Reform Act, when she was 14. He was not called Lord Cupid for his attention to buttered crumpets, and as a precautionary measure the adults sent Catherine and her sister out of the room when the great man appeared.
Catherine had deep-set hazel eyes and fair hair, all her aunt’s spirit and some of her intelligence. In 1842 she married John Hubback, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. John was a Northcountryman – his father, a hatter and furrier, served as mayor of Berwickupon- Tweed in Northumberland. John was ambitious and successful. In 1844 he published Evidence Of Succession To Real And Personal Property And Peerages, a door-stopping volume still consulted at the beginning of the 20th century. Three sons appeared in short order: John Junior in 1844, Edward in 1846 and Charles in 1847.
Then John experienced a catastrophic mental collapse. He was 37. In the family, they said it was a result of overwork. For his wife it was a draining of hope. In the end she had to put him into an asylum. He wrote her unfathomable letters, lost in his mind, which was now a foreign land where nobody spoke his language. Catherine, with three children under six, returned to Portsdown Lodge, and spent the next 12 years living with her father and stepmother. Now she picked up a pen in a bid to establish a settled life for her children. Her first novel, The Younger Sister, appeared in 1850, two years after John’s collapse.
The curtain rose on the second act when the children left school. Catherine’s status was obscure while her husband was still alive: neither a spin-ster nor a widow nor a married woman in any meaningful sense. She was free to make a fresh start in a country where she had no past, and in the autumn of 1870 Catherine sailed to America with Charlie, who was determined to settle in Virginia.
On arrival in New York, she continued West on the rails, planning to keep house for Edward, who was taking his chances on the grain trade in California. She had not left England since her honeymoon, and there she was clattering alone through Iowa and Nebraska and Wyoming, embroidering a handkerchief on a small wooden frame, listening to the rhythmic pounding of pistons and the wail of a steam whistle while mesas and desert chimneys sped by. She was 52.
In the arid semi-desert, the train stopped for water at lone homestead stations where women in calico dresses pumped at wells and cowboys on silver-pommelled saddles galloped away in a cloud of dust. The crouching black hills of Wyoming, moonlit pines in a canyon – it was a long way from the damp streets of home.
Edward had taken a house in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. In neatly written letters home to John and his wife Mary, Catherine included sketches of ladies in long fl owery skirts and parasols. The image of the woman indoors writing letters is a Jane Austen staple, and Catherine’s correspondence forms an epistolary novel more vivid than her 10 real novels. The pages tell a family saga, the story of the immigrant struggle, and from them Catherine’s inner life flares up.
While Ed commuted to San Francisco, Catherine gave lessons in lace making and embroidery. She took the ferry to shop at the wharf market, where Pacifi c halibut lay on slabs like murdered Roman emperors. In many ways she was a natural traveller, and she sucked up the energy of the frontier; its sense of optimism. She had the elan characteristic of the 19th century but a sense of the sad absurdity of life one associates with the 20th. She looked back ruefully at the first years of her marriage. ‘That was in ‘Catherine was free to make a fresh start in a country where she had no past, and so she set sail’ my prosperous days,’ she wrote once, ‘when I dressed well, and we gave dinner parties.’
But moans were few. In Oakland she founded an Improving Society aimed at raising moral standards.
In 1876 Edward announced his intention to marry. Catherine had never intended to remain in California once he was settled. That November, she moved to Charlie’s farm in Gainesville, Virginia. Charlie was eking out a homesteader’s existence, his farm unconnected to the turnpike by road. It was a bitterly cold winter. Within six months, Catherine was dead. Aged 58, she had succumbed to pneumonia. There were no regrets.
‘I don’t think,’ she wrote home, ‘you need pity me for any part of my Californian life unless it is that stockings will wear out so fast.’
O My America! Second Acts In A New World, by Sara Wheeler (Vintage Books, £10.99).