“Now that you are become and Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible…”
Jane Austen to her niece, Caroline Austen
October 30, 1815
Catherine-Anne Hubback (1818-1877), née Austen, was the eighth child and fourth daughter of (Sir) Francis Austen (1774-1865), one of Jane Austen’s brothers, a successful naval officer who became Admiral of the Fleet. His first wife, Mary Gibson, bore him eleven children. Five years after her death in 1823, he married Martha Lloyd, who had long lived with old Mrs Austen and her unmarried eldest daughter, Cassandra. Born in 1818, Catherine never knew her Aunt Jane. However, Cassandra, Jane Austen’s elder sister, was a frequent visitor, introducing Frank’s children to the works of their Aunt Jane, to the history of her life, and also to her unpublished writings. In Jane Austen; her Life and Letters, a Family Record, first published in 1913, William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh have confirmed that Cassandra not only read Jane Austen’s novels aloud to Frank’s daughters Cassy-Eliza, Catherine-Anne and Fanny-Sophia Austen, who were still at home at the time of her visits, but that she also took with her the untitled manuscripts of what have come to be known as The Watsons and Sanditon. Catherine apparently made copies for herself, one of which she was later to use in order to write the first completed continuation of Jane Austen’s novels, The Younger Sister, published in 1850.
In 1842 Catherine married the barrister John Hubback. Their first child, Mary, only lived long enough to be baptised and died in 1843. John Henry, the eldest surviving child, was born in 1844, followed by Edward Thomas in 1846 and Charles Austen — whose second name is yet another indication of the family’s cultivation of the Austen-connection — in 1847. In the same year John suffered a mental breakdown. After three years of disappointed hopes of his recovery, he was committed to an asylum, and Catherine returned to her father’s house. It was in order to support herself and her three children that she started writing fiction. Whether a completion of Austen’s fragment was seen as a guarantee of success, a desperate seizing of a plot, or simply the result of a long cherished youthful aspiration, sparked off during one of Cassandra’s visits, unrelated to any more “mercenary” motivation, has to remain a subject of conjecture.
Turning to her copy of one of Jane Austen’s unfinished fragments, entitled The Watsons by her sister Cassandra, and remembering the latter’s outline of the plot as allegedly projected by Jane before she abandoned the project, Catherine wrote a completion, published in 1850 under the title of The Younger Sister. In his autobiography, Cross Currents in a Long Life, privately printed in 1935, her eldest son, John Henry Hubback, recalls his mother’s and aunt’s ability to carry on “long conversations on all sorts of subjects, almost entirely by means of quotations from their aunt’s novels” and asserts that since Catherine “had studied this manuscript with her Aunt Cassandra so effectively,” “she was able to reproduce from memory the text of this manuscript almost word for word, despite the seven years’ interval since she had seen it”
Although born after Jane Austen’s death, Catherine contributed much to the perpetuation of family history. While The Younger Sister as an interpretative continuation of her aunt’s work has been unduly neglected, she has been called “one of the channels along which biographical information [about Jane Austen] was transmitted”. As a channel for biographical information about Jane Austen, the Hubbacks continued to be of importance. Together with his daughter Edith Charlotte, John Henry Hubback wrote a biography of Austen’s “sailor brothers”, his own grandfather, Francis Austen, and his youngest brother, Charles. Until the recent publication of Brian Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy, John and Edith Hubback’s book had been the only extensive account of Francis Austen’s life.
Between 1850 and 1863 Catherine Hubback published nine more novels, among them The Wife’s Sister, The Rival Suitors, and Agnes Milbourne, a story dealing with a young girl’s dilemma over the conflicting claims of the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian church and at the time her most popular work of fiction.
Following her second son, who had left England to seek his fortune in California, Catherine emigrated to America in 1870 where she lived until her death in 1877. Her letters from Oakland to her family are held in the Bodleian Library and have been the subject of recent research.
Providing intriguing insight into the customs, prevailing attitudes, and acutely observed prejudices in the small communities in which Hubback spent the last years of her life, her letters conjure up a vivid description of domesticity in the American West as experienced by an elderly Englishwoman who saw herself as an outsider commenting critically on “American” behaviour, but became actively involved in the community, an insider writing detailed accounts of her daily life to relatives in England. Her comments on her naturalisation or assimilation and the adaptation to American life undergone by the two sons who settled there are moreover significantly juxtaposed with her vividly descriptive and wittily critical accounts of the increasingly multiethnic composition of American society. Detailed with the same merciless acuity that readers of Austen’s novels and her surviving letters are familiar with, Hubback’s America casts a different light on prevailing attitudes at the time, sharply contrasting ideologies and politics with daily realities. Ranging from the first finished completion of Jane Austen’s uncompleted novels, which clearly shows her indebtedness to Austen as well as the closeness of their writing, to letters about the domestic chores of Chinese servants in California, Hubback’s writing displays a breadth of interest informed by a satirical eye for inconsistencies and hypocrisies that single out her letters as unique representations of the ideals and realities of assimilation in 1870s America.
Catherine Hubback clearly capitalised on her relationship with the famous aunt she never met when marketing her books, although this tendency became more pronounced after the publication of the Memoir. In a letter to her son John, dated September 1871, she admits having used her maiden name as a publishing strategy for The Stewardess’ Story and refers to additional short stories intended to appear under her new pseudonym: “By & bye they can be all put in a vol. & published again. I mean in future to have my name printed Mrs C. Austen Hubback & make believe the A. stands for that. I never have written it at length so nobody knows and Austen is a good nom de plume” (Hubback, Letters: Sept 1871). The “A.” of course stood for Anne. Before the publication of The Stewardess’ Story Hubback had published as plain Mrs Hubback. In the dedication to The Younger Sister, she describes herself as a niece of Jane Austen who, “though too young to have known her personally, was from early childhood taught to esteem her virtues and admire her talents”. As a similar tribute to her aunt’s writing, Hubback named the heroine of her second novel, The Wife’s Sister, finished in 1851, Fanny Mansfield. The heroine’s name, however, is the only connection to Austen. A mid-Victorian story with a moral that is emphatically driven home, concerned with the shifting laws of marriage and the legalities of inheritance, the novel has more in common with Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s.
This shift is anticipated in Hubback’s completion of The Watsons. The Youngest Sister is modelled closely on what had been handed down as Aunt Jane’s intentions by her family, yet it adapts the plot to introduce specifically Victorian preoccupations. Mr Howard’s shortcomings, for example, are subjected to a phrenological analysis: “Had phrenology then been in fashion, it is possible that the origin of this weakness would have been discovered in the absence of the bump of self-esteem.” When Tom Mosgrove (Musgrave in Austen’s fragment) proposes to the heroine’s sister while drunk and then denies the engagement, her brother moreover instantly recognises “a brilliant perspective of litigation, an action for breach of promise of marriage to be conducted”. The Younger Sister is a self-consciously historical novel and at the same time, a fond recreation of the Regency that predates the large-scale “Victorianisation” of Jane Austen and her time in the Memoir. As a result, Hubback’s use of The Watsons caused resentment among some of her cousins for more reasons than one. An 1862 letter from Anna Lefroy to James Edward Austen-Leigh clearly shows their fears that Hubback might similarly appropriate Sanditon, Austen’s unfinished last novel: Have you seen or heard of E.A. Leigh’s vol — Lady Susan — I think he’s mean not to send it to me — very mean and real ugly, & I feel quite bad about it & shall not have a good time till I get it — I am real mad — (not that I am a bit — but these are Californian expressions — ). He has not said the first thing about sending it. I have to keep my Californian aired, for use in my stories, so I practice it on you. (Hubback, Letters: Sept 1871)
Dr. Tamara Wagner is the author of Rewriting Sentimental Plots: Sequels to Novels of Sensibility by Jane Austen and Another Lady among other works and is an expert in Victorian Fiction. This article originally appeared on The Victorian Web. Visit their site for more of Dr. Wagner’s research into the life of Jane Austen’s niece.
