Mr Darcy, the brooding landowner who, after a series of misunderstandings, seduces the spirited Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is one of fiction’s favourite romantic heroes. This week, a rare miniature portrait of the man who some believe may have provided the inspiration for him is going on sale.
One of only two paintings known to exist of Thomas Langlois Lefroy, a 20-year-old law student who met Jane Austen while he was visiting his aunt and uncle in Hampshire, it shows an attractive and sensitive-looking young man dressed in a blue velvet jacket and white cravat. An original watercolour by George Engleheart, it was painted in 1798 and is going on sale for ï¿¡50,000.
Austen was also 20 when she met the portrait’s subject, and for a blissful few weeks the young pair delighted in one another’s company, dancing and talking together whenever the occasion allowed. But their youthful flirtation was not to last. As the son of an impecunious family, Lefroy was expected to marry an heiress and as soon as his relations noticed the growing affection between him and Jane, he was whisked away from danger.
Last year, the film Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy, told the story of their relationship. Now, the sale of the miniature looks set to reignite speculation surrounding one of the only real love stories of the woman who brought so many romantic encounters to life in her novels.
The watercolour, which is painted on ivory and measures just 3 inches by 1 ? inches, is on display at the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, at Park Lane in London, from Thursday. It is by Engleheart, the great English miniaturist, and the only one which is dated and signed with the artist’s distinctive cursive E. The other portrait remains in the hands of Lefroy’s descendants.
Brian Harden, one half of the Gloucestershire-based specialist dealers Judy and Brian Harden, who are selling the painting, said: “We bought this at auction quite a long time ago and it’s been in our private collection since that time. We didn’t know whom Tom Lefroy was when we bought it – it went through the auction house unrecognised – but we were able to identify and discover the history of the sitter. It’s a very fine piece. The sitter is very handsome and personable. It was painted just two years after he met Jane Austen.”
He added: “George Engleheart was one of the major society painters. He was a meticulous recorder of his sitters.”
Austen, who met Lefroy in 1796, referred to him in a letter as “a gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man”. Later, she said he had “but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light”.
Whatever hopes Austen had of Lefroy, they were soon to be dashed. His family, who were of French Huguenot origin, were not wealthy, and were relying on him, as the eldest son of 10 children, to marry a woman of substantial means. Austen, a clergyman’s daughter, did not fit the bill and he was promptly removed from the situation.
Shortly before they parted, Austen wrote: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy … my tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.”
Three years later, Lefroy married Mary Paul, an heiress of whom his family approved, and he went on to enjoy a successful legal career, becoming chief justice of Ireland in 1852. In later life, Lefroy, who named his eldest daughter Jane, admitted that he had been in love with Austen, but described it as “a boyish love”.
This early experience of romance, coupled with the ensuing sense of injustice, may have provided Austen with the inspiration for the love affair between Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – although the novel, of course, has a much happier outcome. To add fuel to the speculation, d’Arcy was a well-known name in Anglo-Irish legal circles at the time.
However, the biographer Claire Tomalin, author of Jane Austen: A Life, believes that, while Tom Lefroy undoubtedly influenced the novelist’s fiction, he was not the model for Mr Darcy. “The first letter that has survived of Jane Austen’s is all about meeting Tom Lefroy. He was the nephew of close friends and neighbours of the Austen family. He came for a few days’ holiday and he and Jane went to the same dances and really liked one another. What seems to have happened is alarm bells rang – Jane Austen had no money, he had no money – so he was sent smartly back to London.
“This is how writers work. I think that she was in love with him and I think that she felt humiliated by what happened. She then used this emotional knowledge when she could to write about similar things in her novels. All writers draw on their own experiences, but Darcy was a landowner and Tom Lefroy a penniless law student. There’s no connection.”
Professor Janet Todd of the University of Aberdeen believes that Lefroy was nothing more than a youthful flirtation for Austen. She said: “She obviously did flirt with him, and she obviously felt pained at losing him, but I feel certain that he’s not the main love of her life. There’s somebody a bit later who is clearly really important. She talks about it with a lightness that makes it unlikely she was smitten. The letters suggest a flirtation, but she’s rather proud of the fact that she seemed to be a bit in love and lost. She sees herself as a fictional heroine.”
Professor Todd agreed with Tomalin: “Mr Darcy is everybody’s idea of the silent, passionate hero. I can’t see there’s anything in Tom Lefroy that seems like that. He seems more like Frank Churchill [a character in Emma, who flirts with the heroine, but is betrothed to someone else], very pleasant and talkative.”
When literature imitated real lives
James Bond, hero of Ian Fleming’s novels, inspired by Patrick Dalzel-Job
The 007 creator put a lot of himself into Bond, but other real-life characters have been cited as inspirations as well, among them Sub-Lieutenant Patrick Dalzel-Job.
The commando worked for Fleming as part of his wartime intelligence work in 30 Assault Unit and was described by Ben Macintyre, the author of a book accompanying the Imperial War Museum’s recent Bond exhibition, as “an extraordinary man of quite lunatic bravery”.
In 1940, at the age of 27, Dalzel-Job organised the rescue of 5,000 civilians using a fleet of 200 fishing boats from the town of Narvik in northern Norway as the Nazis approached. An accomplished skier, parachutist and diver, Dalzel-Job was then seconded to work for Fleming helping to sabotage the German war effort.
Despite the similarities, however, Fleming never confirmed that the young troop commander was one of the inspirations for Bond and in a recent interview with the Edinburgh Evening News, Dalzel-Job’s son Iain said that, when pressed on the subject, his father said he had “only ever loved one woman” and was “not a drinking man”.
alarm bells,amp,anne hathaway,antiques,antiques fair,becoming jane,blue velvet,elizabeth bennet,flirtation,george engleheart,ian fleming,james mcavoy,jane austen,miniaturist,mr darcy,Novel,painters,pride and prejudice,specialist dealers,velvet jacket,watercolour
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply
Please Note: Comment moderation maybe active so there is no need to resubmit your comments