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Jane Austen was an occasional visitor at The Vyne, one of the grand country houses on
the Austen family’s social circuit in the Basingstoke (Hampshire) area. In 1803, the owner
William John Chute and his wife Elizabeth (Eliza) adopted his three-year old relative
Caroline Wiggett, a figure often linked with Fanny Price. (1) In this article I want to suggest
another fictional parallel: the embedded narrative of the two Elizas in Sense and
Sensibility, and the history of Mrs Wheeler and her daughter Hester at The Vyne.
The Vyne lies in the parish of Sherborne St John, where Jane Austen’s eldest
brother, James, became vicar in 1791, dining regularly at the house after taking the
Sunday service. He shared a keen interest in hunting with William Chute, founder and
Master of the Vyne Hunt. Although the Chutes were, of course, much grander than the
Austens, their circles overlapped in other ways. Eliza Chute’s journals and Jane Austen’s
letters describe regular social encounters at neighbourhood balls and visits. There were
occasional more intimate dinner parties, as on 26 March 1799 when Mr and Mrs Chute went to
dinner with the Austens at Steventon, and both Jane and Cassandra were at home. On 19 April
Jane herself, but not Cassandra, was entertained to dinner at The Vyne. (2)
However, Jane’s letters to Cassandra at this period suggest a rather caustic attitude
towards the Chutes. ‘William Chute called here yesterday. I wonder what he means by being
so civil’ (14-15 January 1796). ‘This morning we called at the Harwoods [where among other
acquaintances she met the Chutes] … They had meant to come on to Steventon afterwards, but
we knew a trick worth two of that’ (25-27 October 1800). (3) Eliza Chute was well connected
and well educated, a serious reader, artist and musician, pious and benevolent. As Claire
Tomalin says, she was ‘exactly the sort of young woman you would expect to become a friend
of the Austen sisters’, but no friendship developed. (4) However, Jane’s letters do suggest
her life-long interest in happenings at The Vyne. (5) Later, in 1828, James Austen’s only son
James Edward would marry Eliza Chute’s niece Emma Smith, so strengthening the ongoing social
relationships between the two families.
The real-life story of Mrs Wheeler and Hester, like Jane Austen’s story of the two Elizas,
covers two generations, mother and daughter. The setting is the early 19th-century world of
country house society and its decorums. In both cases, the history of these women is
embedded inside the main narrative, a story within a story told by others whose primary
focus is elsewhere. Like the two Elizas, Mrs Wheeler and her daughter are not immediate
members of the family, but are apparently regarded as dependents with some sort of personal
or financial claim. They are shadowy figures whose uncertain status is enhanced by some
suggestion of improper background or dubious morality. Nevertheless, they are protected
and cherished when they fall on hard times.
The last years and untimely death of the beautiful young Mrs Wheeler are described in two
memoirs written many years later, and in Eliza Chute’s contemporary journals. (6) Caroline
(Wiggett) Workman’s careful ‘Notes’ of 1869-70 look back to her childhood years at The
Vyne after her adoption there in 1803 when she was three. (7) Caroline Austen, born in 1805
to the Reverend James Austen and his second wife Mary Lloyd, was too young to remember
Mrs Wheeler herself. The account in her Reminiscences (written in the early 1870s) (8)
relies on her mother’s rather racy recollections of Mrs Wheeler’s history and on a romanticised
version of her death, as told to Caroline by Hester Wheeler when they enjoyed a brief
childhood friendship in 1814. Mrs Chute’s short, prosaic journal entries provide a
first-hand daily account of events as they occurred. (9)
In Caroline Workman’s five-page appendix to her ‘Notes’ she recounts ‘Another little
incident of my early life, which introduces a person of whom I was extremely fond, and who
died at the Vyne, when I was about 6 years old. A Mrs Wheeler. She was the most beautiful
woman I ever saw, the true oval face, perfect features, and lovely dark eyes, clever,
agreeable in conversation, lively and cheerful in manner, with an affectionate heart.
Her history was a romantic one.’ Described through the distant memories of childhood, Mrs
Wheeler’s history appears intriguingly uncertain. Caroline’s account contains some
significant gaps and provisos. She ‘believes’ that Mrs Wheeler’s connection with the Chute
family is through her great-aunt, who had been a governess to Caroline’s own Chute aunts
during their early life in Norfolk. ‘She had married (as was supposed) a Captain in the Navy,
but after a few months, he made some pretence to leave her, and she never again heard of or
from him, and it was proved he was not in the Navy at all. In course of time, a little girl
[Hester] was born, and when she was weaned, Mrs Wheeler found it necessary to go out as a
governess.’ Mr Chute’s sister Mary Bramston then recommended her to her close friend Mrs
Beach, where she became the nursery governess. The small Caroline was put under her care
during a visit to the Beach family, and became attached to her.
Caroline Austen’s account, as related by her mother Mary Austen, confirms Mrs Wheeler’s
singular beauty, her ill-fated liaison, and the birth of her daughter Hester. She maintains
the same tantalising uncertainties. ‘The entries in my mother’s well-kept pocket-books are
the authorities, on which I write of these events …the enlargements which I may make on
some of them, are from what she told me in after years.’ (10) Her mother must have provided some
gossipy details about Mrs Wheeler’s history not included in Caroline Workman’s account.
Apparently, Captain Wheeler was stationed in her home town of Norwich, ‘fell in some sort
of love with her, and married her. He also deserted her.… In time it came to be rumoured
that he was a married man when first he made her acquaintance, and even that Wheeler was
not his real name - but nobody ever knew.’ Mrs Wheeler’s precise background remains unclear
and there are conflicting details. Her daughter Hester told Caroline Austen that her
grandmother (Mrs Marshall) originally kept a shop in Norwich, and that the family were
‘in very humble life’. (11) Nevertheless, the general impression of Mrs Wheeler as nursery
governess is of a ‘pretty ladylike young woman … remarkably pleasing in manner’.
Mrs Wheeler’s tragic decline and death of consumption is eloquently described by
Caroline Workman. Leaving the Beach family because of her illness, she was cared for at
Oakley Hall, home of Mr Chute’s sister Mary Bramston, and at The Vyne, where she died in
the summer of 1807. Caroline Workman recalls her childhood pleasure at meeting Mrs Wheeler
again, mingled with her sadness at her condition: ‘Poor thing! She was much altered as she
was in a deep decline, which added to her interest.’ Her yearnings for her faithless
‘husband’ enhance the pathos of ‘the poor, sweet, broken-hearted creature’. ‘I remember
she used to start up if she heard a door open, and looked forward with the greatest anxiety
for letters always hoping she would still hear of her husband for whom she retained the
greatest affection. She wrote beautiful pathetic poetry.’ Caroline Austen’s account, an
imaginative re-visioning as told her by the child Hester, who was not present in the final
weeks, also foregrounds the romantic pathos of the scene: ‘The beauty of the dying woman
remained unimpaired to the end.… The devotion of her attendants, the picturesque chamber,
the bright summer sun, and the sweet roses clustering round the open windows, made the
picture; then there were the words of prayer, the last farewells … all this the daughter
loved to think on.’
Mrs Chute’s brief and more sober records counterpoint these affecting reminiscences.
Elizabeth Chute’s memorial tablet in the chancel of Sherborne St John church describes ‘the
many Christian graces of her character/ her warmth of heart … her tender and unwearied
sympathy with the poor’. Unobtrusively, she demonstrated these qualities through her care
of Mrs Wheeler in the last months of her life. ‘16 March [1807]: Mrs Wheeler very bad with
spasms … sat up all night with her.’ The sick woman weakened throughout the spring and
summer. Finally, on 13 August: ‘Poor Mrs Wheeler very ill all day respiration very
difficult … died 20 min after 12. … Prepared to die had prayers [read] … and prayed
herself fervently.’ (12) Her death occurred just after midnight so was actually on 14 August,
as confirmed by Caroline Workman. ‘Before daylight her sweet spirit had fled to her Eternal
rest. My Uncles and Aunt were with her.’ She was buried on 17 August in the chancel of
Sherborne St John church, alongside the Chute family remains, with James Austen officiating
as parish clergyman.
There is one other person who figures romantically at the margins of this story,
identified only by Caroline Workman. The thirty-five year old bachelor Thomas Vere Chute,
William Chute’s younger brother, was the other ‘Uncle’ present at Mrs Wheeler’s death.
Thomas Chute was in the militia, frequently staying at The Vyne to recruit in the
Basingstoke area, and to hunt with his brother. She writes of him as a favourite uncle.
‘Although he was very strict with children, he was very good-natured and kind, full of wit
and fun and I was extremely fond of him.’ Thomas Chute ‘took a deep interest’ in Mrs Wheeler
and her plight. ‘Uncle Thomas had been with us all winter [1807], helping to nurse our poor
invalid, and I have heard he became deeply attached to her, not much to be wondered at’.
Caroline Austen hints more cryptically at anonymous admirers. ‘Notwithstanding these clouds
of doubt and difference of station, more than one was deeply enamoured of her. I could
mention their names, but I shall not.’
Two years later in 1809, Jane Austen returned to north Hampshire and a more settled life
in the cottage at Chawton with her mother, sister Cassandra, and their companion Martha
Lloyd. Almost immediately, she started to write again, taking up her earlier stories of
‘Elinor and Marianne’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ to re-work them into the final version.
This was accepted for publication in late 1810 and appeared the following year as her
first published novel. It is impossible to know if her original manuscripts of the later
1790s incorporated the narrative of the two Elizas, or whether Mrs Wheeler’s tragic history
could have sparked off Jane Austen’s story within a story. We do know, through Caroline
Austen’s Reminiscences, that Caroline’s mother Mary Austen was familiar with the details,
and that Mary was of course the sister of Jane Austen’s life-long friend Martha Lloyd.
Jane herself revelled in intimate gossip, and her letters suggest that local news would
usually spread through the network of friends and relatives.
There are many resonances here with Jane Austen’s fictional story of the two Elizas
in Sense and Sensibility. (13) This cameo is unique in her novels as her only portrait of a
mortally sick and dying young woman. Colonel Brandon speaks of his lost love, the first
Eliza: ‘So altered - so faded - worn down by acute suffering of every kind! Hardly could
I believe the melancholy and sickly figure before me, to be the remains of the lovely,
blooming, healthful girl … she was, to all appearance, in the last stage of consumption.’
Like the accounts of Mrs Wheeler’s death, this description captures the poignancy of Eliza’s
hopeless situation, similarly enhanced by her irregular history. Colonel Brandon blames
Eliza’s ‘fall’ and ‘life of sin’ on a ‘series of unfortunate circumstances’, starting with
her forced marriage to his dissolute elder brother. By using Brandon as the voice that
describes Eliza’s sad plight, Jane Austen elicits the reader’s sympathy and neatly avoids
the moral censure she accords to her other figures of female impropriety such as Lydia
Bennet. In both the factual and the fictional accounts, the dying young consumptive is
tenderly cared for, surrounded by friends and protectors but without the husband or lover
who has abandoned her. Colonel Brandon remains faithful: ‘I visited her every day during
the rest of her short life; I was with her in her last moments’; so indeed was Mrs Wheeler’s
admirer, Thomas Chute. Colonel Brandon speaks of his deep love for Eliza, and his past
readiness to elope with her to Scotland. As Caroline Austen says of Mrs Wheeler, probably
knowing more than she reveals, ‘great prosperity’ might have awaited her. Could Thomas Chute
have been Mrs Wheeler’s suitor? But Caroline Austen glosses her comments with a stern piece
of Victorian morality that could equally fit society’s judgment about such women as the
fallen Eliza. ‘Such a tangled skein had been the web of her life, that even those who loved
her best, could not long have regretted her early death.’
Both women leave one child, a fatherless small daughter. Hester Wheeler, orphaned at about
five or six, was living with her maternal grandmother Mrs Marshall during this period.
According to Caroline Workman, this Mrs Marshall kept a school at Fareham, in south
Hampshire, about forty miles from The Vyne. (14) Hester also made extended visits to the
Bramstons at Oakley Hall and the Chutes at the Vyne. After her mother’s death, ‘Aunt
Chute finding she had not been christened [perhaps a further indication of the Wheelers’
unorthodox background] made herself one of her sponsors’. In the novel, the younger Eliza,
orphaned at three years old, is sent away to school because her guardian Colonel Brandon
has no home or family to offer her. Despite their kindly friends and relatives, the
childhoods of both Hester and Eliza appear to a modern reader as sad and disrupted,
‘a heritage of woe’ as Hester mournfully told her friend Caroline Austen.
When Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Hester was still a child. In Colonel
Brandon’s embedded narrative of the two Elizas, he speaks of ‘the unhappy resemblance
between the fate of mother and daughter’. Interestingly, there are also fascinating
parallels in the later fate of the two daughters, the real-life Hester and the fictional
Eliza, who both rebelled in their teenage years. As the novel appeared before Hester’s
escapade, the resemblance is obviously fortuitous. It could, though, be attributed to
their comparable characters and early influences as depicted. Both daughters appear as
spirited and independent, but are also rootless orphans with a dubious identity, an
unstable past, and an uncertain future. Jane Austen, psychologically astute, would have
been well aware of the emotional impact of such early experiences.
As Hester’s ‘sponsor’, the benevolent Eliza Chute thought it her duty to educate her, so
took over entire responsibility for her at the age of eleven. From Eliza Chute’s journal
entries, Hester seems to have been treated like a second daughter, accompanying Mrs Chute
and her adopted daughter Caroline Wiggett (Workman) on visits round the neighbourhood, and
having her clothes and other necessities purchased for her. (15) Hester was ‘a pretty, little
clever child’, wonderfully quick at learning. Destined to be a governess, she was taught
alongside Caroline, who consequently felt ‘doubly stupid’ in lessons. ‘As my Aunt
appreciated cleverness, she was blind to Hester’s faults.’ But something must have gone
wrong. ‘My Uncles soon discovered when she was older, that she was not a good companion
for me, so Hester was sent to a school at Winchester.’ After twelve months there, she
demonstrated her feisty independence, and perhaps also her misery, by running away.
Caroline Austen gives further details: ‘Poor Hester, with all her charmingness, was far
from perfect. She was self-willed and she could be rebellious, and … serious differences
arose between her and her school mistress, differences which were terminated by Hester’s
walking away’. Fortunately for her, she was saved from the hazards of the road by a
passing coach, returned to The Vyne, and sent back to Norfolk soon after. Eliza Chute’s
journal for 1815 records Hester’s departure for school and payment of her half-yearly school
fees (£6 7s 6d) in January, then that on 10 June she ‘drove to Winchester brought Hester
back’, and finally on 17 July that ‘Mrs Scawen[?] left us and Mrs Collins, and her baby -
they took Hester with them’. (16) This may well have been Hester’s final departure to a life
elsewhere in Norfolk, and Mrs Chute mentions her no more.
Jane Austen’s second Eliza also reacts to her unsettled life by running away. In her
fourteenth year, Colonel Brandon removes her from school, ‘to place her under the care of a
very respectable woman … who had the charge of four or five other girls’. After two years,
Eliza suddenly disappears during a stay with a friend in Bath. She, of course, has absconded
with Willoughby, who then leaves ‘the girl whose youth and innocence he [has] seduced, in the
situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help, no friends, ignorant of
his address!’ When Colonel Brandon eventually seeks her out, he finds her near her delivery,
and afterwards removes her and her child into the country. ‘There she remains.’
So finally, both these young women are forced to take up new lives elsewhere, distanced
from their original friends and protectors, and from the focus of the various narratives.
Hester’s story is completed in both Caroline Workman and Caroline Austen’s accounts. She
became a governess in Scotland, married happily but had no children, dying young in 1834
of a heart complaint. Of the fictional second Eliza, banished to the country, we hear
nothing more, and are never told her final fate. She has served Jane Austen’s purpose
of a moral warning to Marianne about the dangers of excess romanticism and undue
sensibility, and the potential fate of those who succumb to a seducer’s charms.
Notes
1 Guidebook: Maurice Howard, The Vyne, Hampshire (London: The National Trust, 1998), p. 61;
Christina Hardyment, Literary Trails: Writers in their Landscapes (London: The National Trust, 2000), p. 78.
NB The Vyne was often known as The Vine.
2 William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, revised and enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye
(London: The British Library, 1989), p. 103. Confirmed in Eliza Chute’s journal for 1799, Hampshire Record
Office (HRO), 23M93, 70/1/7.
3 Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Letters 2 and 23.
4 Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 95-6.
5 Letters, e.g. Letter 44, 21-23 April 1805, Letter 49, 7-8 January 1807, Letter 152, 26 February 1817.
6 Mrs Wheeler is always referred to by surname. The Parish Register of Sherborne St John church, where she was
buried on 17 August 1807, give her details as Susan Constance, daughter of [?W] Marshall, wife of [?] Wheeler; HRO 14M72 PR4, CB, 1807-1841.
7 The ‘Notes by Caroline Workman, sister of W.L.W [Wiggett] Chute’, with its five-page ‘Appendix’ about Mrs Wheeler,
were written in 1869-70 for her nephew Chaloner Chute. HRO 31M57/1070, pages unnumbered.
8 Reminiscences of Jane Austen’s Niece Caroline Austen, rev. edn with an Introduction by Deirdre Le Faye (Chawton: The Jane Austen Society, 2004), pp. 1, 30-7.
9 Eliza Chute’s journals cover the years 1790-1840; there are nineteen in all, and many years are missing; HRO 23M93, 70/1/1 to 70/1/19.
10 Mary Austen’s diary (pocket book) gives very brief records of social engagements, etc. Her diary for 1814 states that ‘Hester came’
on 16 June; ‘Hester left us’ on 28 June; ‘Hester spent the day here’ on 4 July; HRO 23M93, 62/1/5.
11 Caroline Workman says that Hester’s grandmother (Mrs Marshall) kept a school in Fareham [Hants], see below; Caroline Austen here relies
on what Hester herself said, and Hester shows some signs of being a fantasist - she was then about twelve. There is obviously some sort
of Norfolk connection, as the branch of the Chute family that then owned The Vyne (the Lobb Chutes) originated there.
12 Eliza Chute’s journal for 1807, HRO, 23M93, 70/1/11.
13 Sense and Sensibility, ch. 11, ch. 31.
14 Mrs Marshall’s school at Fareham must have been respectable, as according to Caroline Workman the sons of the Wither family (friends of the Austens) attended it for a year or two when small.
15 Eliza Chute’s journals for 1813 and 1815 (1814 is missing) make frequent mention of Hester; she also kept careful accounts, e.g. ‘July [1813] - To 1d [dozen]gloves for Hester 3s 9d’. HRO, 23M93, 70/1/12, 70/1/13.
16 HRO, 23M93, 70/1/13.
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