Jane Octavia Brookfield

Artist Info

Jane Octavia BrookfieldClifton, England, 1821 - 1896, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr92012131

Brookfield [née Elton], Jane Octavia (1821–1896), literary hostess and writer, was born on 25 March 1821, at Clifton, near Bristol, the youngest of the eight daughters (there were also five sons) of Sir Charles Abraham Elton, sixth baronet (1778–1853), of Clevedon Court, near Bristol, and his wife, Sarah Smith (d. 1830). Her father, who had possessed literary inclinations in his youth, was the friend of Lamb and Coleridge and the author of an elegy, ‘The Brothers’, written after his two eldest sons had drowned in the Bristol Channel, and commended by Southey to Landor. In 1837 the Eltons moved to Southampton. The teenaged Jane, 5 feet 9 inches tall (an immense height for a woman in the Victorian period) and nicknamed Glumdalclitch by her father, was by all accounts of striking appearance. Courted by the newly arrived curate of All Saints' Church, William Henry Brookfield (1809–1874), she became engaged at the end of 1838. The wedding was delayed for some time while attempts were made to find him a better job. The couple were eventually married, on 18 November 1841, eighteen months after Brookfield's appointment to the curacy of St James's, Piccadilly, London.

The nature of the Brookfields' marriage is open to debate. Twelve years older than his wife, and the son of a Sheffield solicitor, Brookfield was no catch. While Jane's letters to him are lively and agreeably complicit, their early years were characterized by genteel poverty—at one point Brookfield was reduced to sleeping in the church crypt—and Jane spent much of her time billeted on relatives. Subsequently, although Brookfield carved out a modestly successful career for himself as a clergyman (he became an honorary chaplain to the queen) and inspector of schools, he was conscious that he had not lived up to the expectations of his undergraduate days. This, together with his wife's self-confessed ‘foolishly blind fondness of being admired’, probably contributed to their later difficulties.

Although she maintained an influential literary salon, which included her husband's old college chum Alfred Tennyson, Jane Octavia Brookfield is chiefly remembered for her association with another of his old friends, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. The two met for the first time in 1842. Thackeray was initially cautious, as well as preoccupied with the incurable insanity of his own wife, but by the mid-1840s he and the Brookfields were on terms of considerable intimacy: letters and diaries from August 1845 record four visits from Thackeray in the space of a week. Although intense—at any rate on Thackeray's side—the relationship between him and Jane was almost certainly not sexual (there may have been a chaste embrace or two during the course of a joint stay at Clevedon Court, the Elton family's residence, late in 1848); but neither could it be indefinitely sustained. As early as 1847 Thackeray had to apologize for some ‘uncouth raptures’ (Letters and Private Papers, 2.272), of which Brookfield had complained. In January 1849 Jane's cousin, Harry Hallam, protested at Thackeray's behaviour and effectively warned him off, Thackeray maintaining his innocence. Prolonged by the birth of Jane's first child, Magdalene, in February 1850 and Thackeray's absence abroad, the situation was finally resolved in a flaming three-way argument in September 1851. Here, according to Thackeray, Brookfield ‘spoke out like a man’, and the affair was resolved. There was a subsequent reconciliation, but the former intimacies were never re-established.

After Thackeray's death in 1863, Jane Octavia Brookfield wrote four indifferent novels, two of which—Only George (1866) and Not too Late (1868)—have plots reminiscent of the Thackeray–Brookfield triangle. In some ways, however, her chief literary memorial is the contribution to the characters of Amelia Sedley in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Laura Bell in Pendennis (1850). Brookfield, whose health had never been good, died in 1874. Some years before her own death, on 27 November 1896 at 14 Walpole Street, Chelsea, London, his widow caused a minor scandal by publishing some of the Thackeray correspondence in an American magazine. She was survived by her two sons, Arthur Montagu Brookfield (1853–1940) and Charles Hallam Elton Brookfield (1857–1913). The former wrote several novels and stood for some years as a Unionist MP, then became a successful diplomat; the latter was an actor.

D. J. Taylor

Sources

C. H. E. Brookfield and F. M. Brookfield, Mrs Brookfield and her circle (1906) · The letters and private papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray, 2 (1945) · The letters and private papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray, 3 (1946) · The letters and private papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. E. F. Harden, 1 (1994) · G. N. Ray, Thackeray, 2 vols. (1955–8), vol. 2 · J. Sutherland, The Longman companion to Victorian fiction (1988) · m. cert. · d. cert.