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CHAPTER ONE
 
Her Choice
 
 
 
After all, she was a woman, and could not make her own lot.… Her lot is made for her by the love she accepts.
 
GEORGE ELIOT, Felix Holt
 
THE chains of matrimony bound fast in the early nineteenth century when divorce was virtually impossible for most middle-class women and men. Sarah Taylor made her momentous choice of a lifelong partner in 1814 when, at twenty-one, she became engaged to John Austin and then spent ‘five years feeding on love and severe study to be worthy of being a wife.’ When the marriage finally took place in the summer of 1819 in Norwich, the young couple chose to forego a honeymoon. As Sarah’s mother explained, ‘They wish to do nothing but go quietly home to their own lodgings, and after settling themselves for a while come down here for a short time to see us and pack up what is left behind.’ The decision not to bow to the conventions of romantic love fits well with what we know of John Austin’s personality. This was a rational saving, a sign of his determination to practice the most stringent economy and lead a purposeful life. With married life in London in sight, Sarah was not likely to have wasted any regrets on the relinquished honeymoon. After all, what was this small sacrifice compared to the expectation of enduring happiness?
 
The wedding, on Tuesday, August 24, 1819, was a quiet, nearly somber affair, accepted by all her family with a sense of inevitability. By contrast, the announcement of the engagement half a decade earlier had caused quite a stir. Then it had seemed incongruous that this lively, attractive girl who sparkled in society should prefer the austere, serious John Austin to all her other admirers. Was this perhaps just another of ‘Sally’s’ triumphs to be chalked up to flirtatiousness and irresponsibility? Her incautious entanglements had stirred gossip before, but this was an official engagement acknowledged by her family. To outsiders the alliance between the ebullient youngest daughter of the Taylors and an untried, not-so-young law student was bewildering.
 
Sarah had in fact known John Austin for almost two years before the engagement announcement. They met in 1812 in Norwich, probably introduced by John’s sister Anne, a close friend of Sarah’s. They might well have come to know each other without this introduction, for both were from well-to-do East Anglian middle-class Unitarian families, had common acquaintances, and nineteen-year-old Sarah was striking and not easily overlooked. When she met John he had just left the army where he had served for five years since enlisting shortly before his seventeenth birthday. The unpredictability of army postings had taken him to Sicily, where he spent three years with his regiment defending the island against an invasion by Napoleonic forces that never came, and then to Malta for more waiting and stagnation. Well before he finally turned his back on the army he had become utterly disgusted with himself for succumbing to what he regarded as the indolent, aimless existence of an officer in the enclosed atmosphere of an army camp. When he wrote in his diary, ‘I am … convinced that my own happiness is commensurate with and inseparable from the progress I make in the acquisition of knowledge,’ he can have had little doubt that he was not well-suited to military life.
 
He was still pondering whether to resign from the army when a family tragedy helped him reach a decision: a distraught letter arrived from his father informing him that a younger brother had died from yellow fever while serving in the navy. His father pleaded with him to return home and offered financial help to enable him to rechart his course. John Austin thus returned to Ipswich, about forty miles from Norwich. It is not known what he was doing in those first two years back home, except perhaps reading and brooding over the decisions that lay ahead. At a time when he should have plunged single-mindedly into a new profession, he apparently allowed his mind and heart to speculate about Sally Taylor. Evidently he fell in love regardless of his unsettled prospects. Finally, in October 1814, he moved to London and began three years of law studies at the Inner Temple, and a month later proposed to Sarah by letter.
 
John Austin was a young man who did not fit the common mold. His upright character was evident, but his blend of intellectual arrogance and nervous diffidence could be unsettling. Characteristically, John Austin never sat for a portrait, but it appears he was slim, on the tall side, with large deep-set hazel eyes, and the erect bearing of his early military training. Born in 1790, he was three years older than Sarah, and surprisingly, when he proposed he had already turned gray, adding a distinctive quality to his appearance. What also marked him was his strong mind and the earnest, emphatic manner with which he stated his opinions. As a friend put it, ‘One could not see him at all without knowing something of the intellect which lay hidden in him.’ The impression he made varied greatly with his mood. When in good form, he was ‘glorious in talk’ and drew listeners by his vehement eloquence, but at other times he seemed extinguished, a banked-down fire, until stirred into flame. When approached in such a burnt-out mood, his fierce pride often led him to find cover in a cold, self-protective aloofness that intimidated hapless well-wishers. One unexpected visitor described how, on delivering some message, he was greeted by an ‘icy response,’ and a woman friend of Sarah’s, for whom he had little regard, spoke of always being afraid of him, ‘I don’t know why.’ As he himself was aware, he utterly lacked the common touch or any easygoing geniality with which to glide over the rough patches of everyday life. John Austin could not disguise his mental power or his unusual personality, and he did not make friends easily. The reverse was true of Sarah. They seemed born under different stars.
 
While John kept people at arm’s length, Sarah drew them to her. If beauty, as she once said, was a scepter bestowed by nature, she reigned with its aid. Yet it was not her good looks, her striking coloring, her ‘well-filled’ figure, or those unusually large, ‘deep grand,’ and ‘lustrous’ gray eyes, so arresting under emphatic dark brows, that her friends dwelt on. What engaged them was her animation and warmth. This is what Sydney Smith referred to when he congratulated her for not being among the cold blooded—‘a tribe to which you have no relation.’ These qualities also attracted Thomas Carlyle when he first met her. He described her to his wife as an ‘exceedingly vivid person not without insight’ and as having ‘a pair of clearest, warm blue eyes (almost hectically intense).’* So many others were to feel this same overflow of zest and warmth. It was Sarah’s hallmark, and it thawed the reserved, proud John Austin.
 
At times, however, Sarah’s ready feelings spilled over and led her into what her mother gently called ‘scrapes’ and what a friend spoke of as ‘extremes of display and flirtatiousness.’ She did not always conform to the demure behavior expected of a young woman in an era when Jane Austen was still alive and the reins of decorum bridled the behavior of a middle-class woman. Stimulated by vanity and love of admiration, Sarah could be tempted into wild feats of horsemanship and physical daring or allow herself the more dangerous pleasures of a romantic chase, all of which drew a barrage of censoriousness from the city matrons and others. There was little ‘becoming’ reserve in her clear enjoyment and ease in male company; there was no mistaking that she was attracted to men and they to her. As the youngest in a family of five brothers and two sisters, she had enjoyed the social traffic of her convivial family and since childhood had mixed with clever persons of all sorts, developing a formidable poise and confidence. Now she relished displaying her charm and ready wit to the aspiring ministers, young merchants, and radicals who gathered at the Octagon Chapel, the center of the influential Unitarian congregation, where her parents were among the leading members. Sarah’s social manner was not the vapid, fan-fluttering kind; she liked to spar and hold her own in the fray of conversation, and there may well have been an audacious edge to her clever talk. Of course, most of the young men of her circle were not among her critics; one of them noted admiringly how she was ‘all that was dazzling, attractive, and imposing.’ Evidently, however, she also was imprudent and played havoc with the hearts of numerous men, and the gossip she aroused was proportionate to her success.
 
Yet merely to bask in the sunshine of social success was unacceptable to a Taylor, and Sarah used her formidable energy and lively mind to engage with life. It cannot have taken John Austin long to discover that she was remarkably well educated for a woman of her time, with an intense interest in the world outside Norwich. Beneath the sociable, gay surface, there was ambition and a determination not to be one of ‘the common herd of little Misses,’ as Jane Welsh Carlyle called them. Certainly she was vain and all too conscious of her powers, but there was no mistaking her capacity and drive, and there were those in Norwich who felt that in spite of occasional ‘giddy’ behavior, she was a young woman of great promise. If she would settle down, this youngest daughter of the Taylors might well add luster to this middle-class family’s dynasty of talent.