And had he said compete? I loathed any kind of competition. The word was shorthand for hours wasted on redundant activities such as field hockey, long jump and tunnel ball, not to mention the cacophony of the annual swimming carnival. How I loathed the swimming carnival, having to fake enthusiasm over human bodies moving through water. The stink of chlorine. The snap of elastic. It would be at least 11 p.m., after piano practice and homework, before I could return to my bed and the sensuous miseries of Tess d’Urberville.
‘Eisteddfods are annual music competitions, arranged by age,’ Mr McFarlane explained. ‘You could still enter the twelve and unders this year, but I think you should compete in the fifteen and unders.’
It wasn’t a question or open for debate. Part of me felt excited that my new teacher wanted to nudge me into the older age group where he thought I was the right technical fit, but after quickly jumping over the successive hurdles of new teacher, new school and new friends, I just felt like another rug was being pulled from my feet. What excited me was learning new music and becoming a better pianist; I thought I could achieve that by practising alone at home. Unlike my teacher, I failed to understand the role of competition in pushing a young pianist beyond the level that was comfortable for her.
Each time Mr McFarlane shifted in his seat I got a whiff of his body odour. A sleeveless white cotton singlet beneath his short-sleeved white polyester shirt did little to control his tendency to perspire, evinced by damp patches around his armpits. At moments like these I was grateful for the flute lessons I had taken with Mrs Wilcox. Despite a few years of diligent practice, the instrument had bored me rigid; on the subject of woodwinds, I sided with Oscar Wilde, who is attributed with describing the clarinet as ‘an ill woodwind that nobody blew any good’.35 The silver lining was that, having learned how to breathe using my diaphragm, I could hold my breath for a long time. Until I met Mr McFarlane, that skill had come in handy only when swimming underwater—an activity that never made it onto the swimming carnival program.
‘I practise every day as much as I can—I wish it were more for his sake,’ wrote the twenty-year-old Jane Austen to her beloved sister Cassandra in September 1796. The man she refers to is her piano teacher, George William Chard, who had been the assistant organist at Winchester Cathedral since 1787.36 Austen’s father knew Chard, who was ten years older than Jane and by all accounts a lively and handsome man. To supplement his salary, Chard gave private lessons around Hampshire, riding forty miles to the rectory at Steventon to give lessons to Austen. She was his student during the time she started writing a novel with the working title First Impressions.
In a memoir, her niece Caroline Austen recalls that ‘Aunt Jane began her day with music—for which I conclude she had a natural taste; as she thus kept it up—tho’ she had no one to teach; was never induced (as I have heard) to play in company; and none of her family cared much for it.’ Not a terribly inspiring environment to play in—closer to Mary Bennett than Jane Fairfax. Of Anne Elliot in Persuasion Austen wrote that ‘in music she had been always used to feel alone in the world’. I wonder where she got that idea.
On leaving her childhood home in 1801, Austen sold her piano for eight guineas. She wrote little during the following years when she lived in Bath and Southampton; whether coincidence or not, neither did she have an instrument of her own. But in July 1809 she moved to Chawton, in Hampshire, where she had an allowance from her father’s estate of twenty guineas per year, and few social obligations.
There’s some confusion as to what proportion of her income went on her new piano. One source suggests that she blew a year and a half’s allowance on it: thirty guineas on a twenty-guinea budget. Perhaps her wealthy brother Edward contributed. A second source suggests that by the time Austen moved to Chawton, her allowance was closer to fifty pounds a year. Even then, to spend thirty guineas on an instrument takes a giant bite from the budget.
However she paid for it, Austen’s new piano announced to her family, and to herself, that at Chawton she would spend her money as she would spend her time: in writing books and playing the piano. Her domestic husbandry wouldn’t be focused on the procurement of a husband—she was thirty-three and well beyond the likelihood of marriage. Neither she nor her piano would be moving from Chawton.
Today any Janeite can visit Chawton Cottage and inspect the author’s music library. According to Caroline, Aunt Jane transcribed pages of waltzes and marches ‘so neatly and correctly, that it was as easy to read as print’. One book in her own hand contains thirty-six songs complete with lyrics and keyboard accompaniment; another one mixing songs with instrumental works runs to eighty-four pages of manuscript. This can only be described as a manual labour of love. Anyone who has written out music by hand can attest to its being a job for only the most detail-oriented and fastidious copyist.
After ten years in which she wrote almost nothing, the arrival of Jane Austen’s piano ushered in a period of great creativity. She began work on Mansfield Park in early 1811, revised First Impressions (which was later published as Pride and Prejudice), and in 1814 began writing Emma.
Austen’s women pianists—Anne Elliott, Marianne Dashwood, Mary Bennett, Jane Fairfax—are
