My Miss Austen

A Belated Tribute

Have you been watching the excellent BBC adaptation of Gill Hornby’s novel, Miss Austen? My husband is usually allergic to costume drama, but even he seemed to have been enchanted by the story. Of course, it was greatly enhanced by the luminous Keeley Hawes, and a bevy of other wonderful actors, including Jessica Hynes doing a wonderful grumpy misery-guts, and an actor unknown to me, Synnøve Karlsen, playing the young Cassandra so touchingly. I have not read the book, and I have to admit I am not completely convinced that it answered the mystery of why Cassandra burnt so many of her sister’s letters…but it still brought a tear to my eye.

Keeley Hawes plays Miss Austen, courtesy of the BBC

Now of course, those of us familiar with the weirdness of the British social system, will understand why Miss Austen is always going to be the eldest unmarried daughter of the family, with all subsequent daughters being distinguished by the use of the Christian name. Do other cultures do this? So Cassandra is Miss Austen, and her famous sister will always be Miss Jane. Was it due to respect? Or to make sure that young men could not be confused and accidentally make approaches to a junior daughter when the eldest was still available and entitled.

For me however, every time I saw the programme advertised, ‘Miss Austen’ meant something very different and unleashed a wave of memories that have been haunting me this month. My Miss Austen taught me history at school, looming very large in my life for six years or more, and now that I spend so much of my time thinking about history, reading history and attempting to write history, I realise I have so much to be grateful to her for. And I don’t think she would have approved of that sentence construction, for starters!

I arrived at Lord Digby’s School for Girls, a grammar school in Sherborne in Dorset, in 1974, after a disastrous and miserable year trying out life as a boarder on the south coast. My parents had moved to the town from the Home Counties, and as the boarding life did not suit me at all, I was greatly relieved to find myself back at a school I could walk to and from every day. I think I already felt that history was a subject I particularly enjoyed, but then I met Miss Austen, and life became complicated.

Dorothy Austen was, I suspect, only in her early fifties when I first met her, but in the way of so many women at that time, presented as a woman in her seventies. She was from a generation of teachers that was disappearing fast, and to be in her classroom sometimes felt like a practical history lesson in itself. She wore her long greying hair in a complicated bun at the back of her head, secured with tortoiseshell combs that appeared to be driven into her scull. Her reading glasses hung on a chain round her neck. Her face was thin and fierce, with bright, beady eyes, a prominent nose and even more prominent teeth. She dressed in tweed suits; I can remember a particular grey and mustard yellow combination, with a tartan patterned skirt. Plain stockings, sensible brogues. She never seemed to walk anywhere, but rushed with a slight stoop, I think now driven by shyness: at that speed, and with her head at that angle, there was no risk that anyone would try to stop her to say hello. When she arrived in class, we stood to attention and parroted ‘Good Morning Miss Austen’ - surely a habit that was dying out everywhere else.

The first thing I learnt was that Miss Austen was universally feared, and hence disliked. Among the cool girls, ‘Dotty’ Austen was a figure of fun, but tinged with nervousness - you would definitely not want to be caught laughing or gossiping by her or at her. In fact, an unpleasant incident in the School Library, her particular responsibility, when she completely lost her temper with a giggling teenager and physically hauled her out of the room, while administering a verbal lashing, was the stuff of school legend. I seem to remember that she called the girl ‘a cow who should be out eating grass’, in a most extraordinary and very unusual loss of control. I can only imagine what the consequences would be today, but as far as I know, nothing was said. There is a scene in Winifred Holtby’s wonderful novel, South Riding, where a schoolmistress is driven to distraction and violence by cruel schoolgirls: it filled me with disgust and shame when I read it, as I remember only too well the misery that teasing, unthinking adolescents can inflict on well-meaning but ineffectual teachers.

As time went on, the numbers taking history dwindled as other options were presented, and by the time I reached the sixth form we were a small group and mostly enthusiastic for the subject. The syllabus seemed far more extensive and interesting than the equivalent subject today - I have been disappointed by how little history my children were ever taught, and so completely exam focused. They seemed to study Eleanor of Aquitaine on more than one occasion, and the admirable need to teach diversity means they knew more about Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole than Gladstone or Disraeli. But in Miss Austen’s class I learnt British History, from the Romans right through to 1939. There are some slightly shady areas, I’m not terribly good at the eighteenth century. Yet there is a reason I recently won the tiebreak question in the village pub quiz by knowing about the Monmouth Rebellion, and I put it down to Miss Austen. She taught the syllabus, but she filled in the gaps as well. Most importantly, she constantly reminded us that history was about people: yes, we covered basic political theory and economics, but what I learnt from her, which is reflected in everything I try to write, is the impact that personalities, and personal ambitions and failings, can have on the course of history.

I owe her even more. My school was not large enough, or ambitious enough, to have an ‘Oxbridge’ sixth form - so although it was generally agreed by the teachers and my parents that I might have a shot at getting into Oxford, I would have to work for the entrance exam under my own steam. And here Miss Austen suddenly took charge. She found me a tutor to cover European history. She introduced me to a friend, a retired teacher, who would improve my essay-writing. And once a week she and I met in a little room to tackle the mystery of the General Paper. She set to improving my general knowledge, particularly of current affairs. The reading lists were long and sometimes seemed random: I remember one week ploughing through biographies of David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, presumably I had expressed some interest in modern Israel.

It soon became clear to Miss Austen that there was a major problem to be overcome: she knew that what Oxford wanted was people who could make an argument. And I’m generally acknowledged to be a very nice person who never argues with anyone. I tend to agree with the last person who spoke, I always think what they said was very reasonable. It drove Miss Austen mad. Hence our weekly sessions became more and more combative, and more and more uncomfortable.

Yet…I passed the entrance exam, and after some difficulties at interviews with colleges that probably wanted the sort of argumentative self-confidence that the public schools were dishing out, I found my perfect place at friendly, state-school focused Mansfield College. And the rest, as they say, is history. To this day I am aware that I was never sufficiently grateful to Miss Austen for all her hard work in getting me there.

That might have been the end of the story, but in fact there is more. Some of you may remember that I spent the summer before Oxford as an au pair with a family in California. The mother was Dorothy Austen’s niece - it was Miss Austen who first suggested the scheme to my parents. I am sure she thought I needed toughening up - and the whole experience was indeed ‘toughening’, although not necessarily in ways that Miss Austen might have anticipated - but that’s a tale for another day. I understood that the Americans had paid my airfare, and in return I minded two stroppy children, cleaned, ironed and cooked, and generally worked hard to be grateful. It was only at the end of the two months, when my flight had to be changed, that it transpired that they thought that my parents had paid for the ticket. Two extraordinary things dawned on me simultaneously: that Miss Austen must have paid for the flight herself, but also that I had worked pretty hard for the family for two months and it hadn’t cost them a penny! I was so mad!

My parents and I finally deduced that by the time Miss Austen realised that her niece was not proposing to pay for the ticket, she was too embarrassed to tell us, and so put up her own money. There was absolutely no need, of course my parents would have paid. But I never had the chance to talk to her about it. By the time I got home, Miss Austen was in hospital. I think it was a massive stroke, or possibly a tumour? I did try to visit her in the horrible Nissan huts that the Bristol neurological service called a hospital in those days, but she was huddled under blankets with a thick bandage round her skull, and either was asleep or pretending to be asleep. I didn’t try to wake her.

Miss Austen never returned to teaching. She left Sherborne and moved to be near her sister in Cirencester. We began to exchange letters: I would tell her about my career, and then about my children. She would tell me that she was helping out at ‘meals on wheels’ and, a lifelong vegetarian, was learning how to cook mince. It seemed, worryingly, to involve stirring in a lot of flour. Not long before she died I took my little children to meet her, and she took endless trouble about feeding them (deciding, sensibly, that the local Little Chef would suit them best) and buying them colouring books and crayons. She was absolutely charming and friendly and it was hard to remember that I was ever frightened of her.

Miss Austen was always very clear that her surname was spelled with an ‘e’ not an ‘i’ : there was some connection to the more famous Jane, but it was not a boast, just a fact. I am aware that this is a very different Substack to my usual…normal service will be resumed shortly. But, prompted by Keeley Hawes and the BBC, this feels like the thank you I never really said, all those years ago.