Clergyman James still wanted a wife, so he offered his hand to Mary Lloyd, the smallpox survivor. She accepted, and this couple also married in 1797, on a snowy day. The match thrilled Mrs. Austen, who told Mary that if the matter had been up to her, “you, my dear Mary, are the person I should have chosen for James’s wife, Anna’s Mother, and my Daughter.” She felt sure that Mary would “greatly increase & promote the happiness of each of the three.”
Jane Austen thought that Mary lacked a warm and giving heart and could never like her. And although Eliza praised her as “very sensible & good-humoured,” Mary hated Eliza, who laughed and enjoyed life, regardless of what it held in store. Wearing stylish dresses and hats, and spoiling her tiny dog, Eliza drew the eyes of many men. Mary could hardly forget that this French-speaking cousin had been her husband’s first choice. She made it clear that Eliza was never welcome in her home.
Mary found it hard to love her stepdaughter as well. Four-year-old Anna went to live with her father and Mary, but she missed life at Steventon, especially happy times spent in the sitting room that her aunts shared. A grown-up Anna described this room, remembering fondly “the common-looking carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor,” and a painted press—a cabinet for storing clothes—with bookshelves above. In her mind Anna saw her aunt Jane’s pianoforte and her aunts’ twin sewing boxes, decorated with inlaid wood, which sat on a table between two windows.
Jane and Cassandra often walked from Steventon to Deane, to drop in on Anna and her family. On sloppy days they wore pattens, platforms attached to their shoes to lift them above the muddy lane. Anna liked to watch her approaching aunts, two best friends who wore identical bonnets. “I made it a pleasure to guess, & I believe I always guessed right, which bonnet & which Aunt belonged to each other,” she said.
The woman in this 1809 cartoon walks on pattens to protect her shoes and skirt from the mud.
Anna had a half brother before the nineteenth century began. James Edward Austen was born in 1798. By that year, Edward and Elizabeth Austen had five children and looked forward to more. Edward had gained possession of Godmersham Park, the Knights’ great estate, and much of their other property.
Jane’s parents had closed their school in 1796. By then the Reverend Austen’s hair had grown white, and his wife had lost her front teeth, but both remained healthy and longed to see new sights. A chance came in May 1799, when Edward and Elizabeth invited twenty-three-year-old Jane and her mother to travel with them to the resort town of Bath.
four
UPROOTED
I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their Lives for Love, if they can.
—Letter to Cassandra Austen, December 27, 1808
HOW THE Georgians loved Bath! The health-conscious drank the water that bubbled from its hot springs, believing it cured their ills. Edward Austen complained about poor digestion and hoped the water would bring him relief. Many single women went to Bath for another reason: to snag a husband out of the crowd that strolled around the pump room, where the wonder-working water was dispensed. Jane Austen’s own mother and her aunt Cooper had both met their husbands in Bath.
Invalids hoping to be cured line up for spring water in the pump room.
Tourists in this growing city had plenty to do. Bath offered public gardens, Roman ruins, dances, concerts, and plays featuring actors from the London stage. People with ailments real four or imagined could consult the many doctors who had offices there. Mrs. Austen’s well-off brother, James Leigh-Perrot, who suffered from gout, traveled often to Bath with his wife. (James Leigh became James Leigh-Perrot when he inherited the fortune of a great-uncle named Perrot.) Mrs. Austen had taught her offspring to treat the Leigh-Perrots with respect. The wealthy couple had no children, and she hoped they would leave their money to hers.
The Leigh-Perrots were to become minor celebrities in Bath. In August 1799, one of the city’s shopkeepers caught Jane’s aunt leaving his store with lace that she had not bought. Mrs. Leigh-Perrot was arrested and taken to prison. A crime like this was serious under England’s strict sentencing laws. A guilty verdict carried a sentence of transport to Australia or death by hanging. Jane’s aunt claimed that she had been tricked, that a clerk had placed the lace in her parcel while she was looking at something else. She accused him of trying to blackmail her.
It was useless to protest, though. She remained under lock and key for eight months, first in the local prison and then in the prison keeper’s dirty, noisy home, awaiting trial. In a letter from Steventon, Jane and Cassandra volunteered to show their support by attending the trial, but their rich aunt turned them down. “To have two Young Creatures gazed at in a public Court would cut one to the very heart,” she insisted.
Two thousand curious spectators packed the courthouse on the day of the trial. Those hoping for a good show went home disappointed, because the jury deliberated for just fifteen minutes before declaring the defendant not guilty. (Mrs. Leigh-Perrot went free, but was she truly innocent? A few years later, a girl spotted her trying to sneak a plant out of a gardening shop without paying. Such a rich woman had no need to steal, but logic cannot always explain human behavior.)
A cartoon from 1796 lampoons the fashions on display in Bath, especially hats with long feathers for women.
In Bath, Jane and her mother occupied “two very nice sized rooms, with dirty Quilts and everything comfortable,” Jane said. They joined their relatives to see the sights, but Jane found little to like about Bath. She joked that an outdoor concert would “have more than [its] usual charm with me, as the Gardens are large enough for me to get pretty well beyond the reach of its sound.” Outdoor music at Bath was not renowned for its high quality and held no appeal for a dedicated musician like Jane Austen. She was still having piano lessons in 1796, the year she turned twenty-one. George Chard, an organist at Winchester Cathedral, traveled the roughly fourteen miles between Winchester and Steventon to instruct her.
Nevertheless, Jane made mental notes of everything she saw and heard. She was planning another novel, one set in Bath. It was going to be a humorous story about a girl with a busy imagination who reads gothic novels. The writing had to wait, though, because when it was time to leave Bath, Mrs. Austen decided to do more traveling. She wanted to visit cousins and an old friend in the counties of Gloucestershire and Surrey. And she expected Jane to come along.
With the visits over at last, life settled down and Jane returned to her writing. She added pages to the novel set in Bath, which she called Susan, and she rewrote Elinor and Marianne. She rejected the epistolary, novel-in-letters form that she had first chosen for this story. She wrote it instead as a straightforward narrative, in paragraphs and chapters. The new approach freed her to tell a broader tale, focusing on a larger cast of characters. An epistolary novel can relate only what the letter writers have to say. The new form allowed the author to speak up, to insert her own thoughts from time to time. Austen also changed the novel’s title to Sense and Sensibility.
She took a break from writing in November 1800 to attend a ball, escorted by her brother Charles. The next day, Jane wrote to Cassandra, who was at Godmersham Park, giving her the latest gossip. One woman at the ball, Mrs. Blount, “appeared exactly as she did in September,” Jane wrote, “with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck.” Another person, a Mr. Warren, was “ugly enough; uglier even than his cousin John.” Jane had been polite to two women she called the Debary sisters, as polite “as their bad breath would allow me.” Jane’s jokes had sharp edges, but she saw much more than she reported to Cassandra. Every ball or social call offered lessons in human character to an observant novelist.
Cassandra was away from home, helping Edwards wife, who was having her sixth child. The baby girl was named Elizabeth, like her mother. Cassandra would be gone for a long time; she was to stay at Godmersham until February and then make a brief stop in London before returning to Steventon.
&
nbsp; Jane, meanwhile, visited Martha Lloyd, who had moved with her mother to Ibthorpe, twenty miles away. She came home before Cassandra, at the end of November, bringing Martha with her. As the two friends entered the parsonage, Jane’s parents announced that they had reached some decisions while “the girls” were away. Their father, who was nearly seventy, was retiring, and James was taking over as minister at Steventon. This meant that James and his family would live in the parsonage. The Reverend Austen, his wife—and their two unmarried daughters—were moving to Bath. The news came as a complete surprise to Jane. Her parents had given no clue that they were even thinking of such a plan. Stunned by this series of blows, Jane fainted.
The heroines of Love and Freindship were always swooning, but not Jane Austen. For her to faint meant that she was deeply upset. People today can only imagine the anguish she felt about losing her lifelong home and being forced to change her daily routine. She was a single woman without money of her own, so others controlled the course of her life.
Anyone would assume that Jane wrote to Cassandra right away, to pass along the shocking news and pour out her feelings. Maybe she did, but no such letter survived. If Jane wrote one, then Cassandra tore it up. In fact, no letters from Jane to Cassandra Austen are known to exist from the entire month of December 1800.
To save postage and paper, nineteenth-century letter writers squeezed as much news as they could onto every page. One common method was called cross-hatching. After filling all the space, the writer gave the paper a quarter turn and wrote over the previous lines, but in a different direction. Jane Austen employed cross-hatching in this 1807 letter to Cassandra.
The first letter written after this catastrophe that Cassandra spared is from January 1801. By then Jane had begun to accept the fact that the move would take place. She told Cassandra that she had no regrets about leaving the village of Steventon or its people. “We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood,” she wrote. Also, being in Bath would make it easier to travel to seaside towns for the summer holidays.
It made her sad, though, to see the family’s possessions sold. The Austens parted with everything from farm equipment to furniture, including Jane’s piano. They sold many of her father’s books and even the painted scenery from the plays that the children had performed. The pictures hanging on the wall would stay where they were and become the property of James and Mary.
“The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expence of another,” Jane wrote to Cassandra. This was what bothered her most: James and Mary seemed all too eager to take over the parsonage, and the Reverend and Mrs. Austen appeared all too willing to help them. Her father’s brown mare was to be James’s when he moved to Steventon, but the animal “has not had the patience to wait for that, & has settled herself even now at Deane,” Jane remarked. “Everything else I suppose will be seized by degrees in the same manner.”
Someone made the mistake of hinting that Jane might offer her cabinet to James’s daughter, Anna, the little girl who had lived at the parsonage until she was four. Jane complained to Cassandra, “as I do not chuse to have Generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.”
The Austens’ home in Bath was modern and new. From their tall drawing-room windows, Jane, Cassandra, and their parents could see the Sydney Gardens, a spot that the royal family liked to visit. They could walk easily into the center of town. Still, Jane was far from happy. She summed up Bath as “vapour, shadow, smoke & confusion,” and she griped about having to attend “stupid” parties. She had to be nice to too many people, including a Miss Langley, who was “like any other short girl, with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress, and exposed bosom.”
Over the next few summers, Jane, Cassandra, and their parents traveled to resort towns like Teignmouth and Dawlish, on the English Channel. Along the coast of Wales, Jane waded in the sea. She used a bathing machine, a wheeled carriage that was propelled into the water, usually by horse power. A lady could then open the bathing-machine door and step into the sea, safe from the eyes of gentlemen. Jane especially loved Lyme, where white, barren cliffs surrounded the coastal town, and a high seawall protected land and people alike from being washed away during storms.
Bathing machines changed little between the early 1800s, when Jane Austen vacationed at the seashore, and the early 1900s, when this photograph was taken. Ladies emerged from the “machine” after it was pulled into the water and swam in privacy protecting their modesty.
A steep wall protects the town from high seas at Lyme, a place Jane Austen loved.
The Austens made the acquaintance of other summer travelers. Many years later, Cassandra Austen reminisced about meeting a gentleman when the family traveled to the Devonshire coast in 1801 or 1802. This man and Jane formed an attachment, and when the time came to part, he asked where the Austens planned to travel the following year. Cassandra understood that he hoped to see them again. She expected him to propose marriage to Jane, and she thought that her sister was inclined to accept him. Not long afterward, however, they learned that the gentleman had died.
No one knows her lovers identity, but a historical mystery appeals to people’s imaginations. In his 2009 book Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love, author Andrew Norman suggests that this obscure suitor was the Reverend Samuel Blackall, the man Austen met through the efforts of Anne Lefroy Normans theory is intriguing, but some key facts contradict it. For example, the mystery man was said to have died soon after the meeting, but Blackall lived until 1842. Until researchers find solid clues to his identity, the lover must remain unnamed.
For the Reverend and Mrs. Austen, these years of travel were “the short Holyday of their married life,” said their granddaughter Anna. A handsome man in old age, the Reverend George Austen attracted notice wherever he went. His snowy hair formed soft, glossy curls over his ears and was his finest feature.
Jane and Cassandra also made visits throughout the year. The country gentry commonly stayed with relatives and friends for weeks at a time. People who were not employed could spend long stretches away from home, keeping their friends and loved ones company. This was fortunate, because traveling involved hardship and danger. Mud, holes, and stones in the road slowed the progress of horse-drawn coaches. Bad roads caused vehicles to tip over and injure passengers, sometimes fatally. Riders’ purses were at risk, too, with highwaymen roaming the countryside. These bandits thought nothing of stopping a coach and robbing the passengers of their valuables.
Visiting gave single men and women time to meet potential mates and possibly become engaged. It gave social climbers a chance to connect with richer and more powerful people. For a number of reasons, it was wise to make a few long visits instead of many short ones.
A gentleman with a large estate, like Edward Knight, saw hospitality as a duty. Henry Austen often stayed at Edward’s home, Godmersham Park. Henry was a welcome guest, because he knew how to please. Calling Godmersham “the Temple of Delight,” he brightened holiday celebrations and children’s games. Henry had left the army to become a banker, with offices in London and Hampshire.
Austen’s brother Edward Knight wears clothing typical of an English country gentleman. His long cloth coat is simply styled and in a solid color. His shirt is ruffled at the collar and cuffs, and his legs are covered by close-fitting britches and long socks. By the early 1800s, the rich brocades and powdered wigs of the previous century had fallen out of fashion.
He visited Godmersham sometimes with Eliza and sometimes alone. His stepson, Hastings de Feuillide, had died in 1801, at age fifteen. “So awful a dissolution of a near & tender tie must ever be a severe shock, and my mind was already weakened by witnessing the sad variety and long series of pain which the dear sufferer underwent,” Eliza wrote at the time. She hoped that Hastings had exchanged “a most painful existence for a blissful immortality.” Eliza’s precious son was buried beside his grandmother Philadelp
hia Hancock.
The Austen sisters made several trips to Godmersham Park during their years in Bath. In Edward’s great house, Jane could call for food whenever she was hungry and sip fine French wine with dinner. She could seat herself in one of the twenty-eight chairs that furnished the library and read for hours, warmed by two fires. On pleasant days, she walked the paths that wound through Edward’s vast grounds, pausing to take in the beauty of walled gardens or clusters of trees that sheltered small game.
When staying at Edward’s estate, Godmersham Park, Austen enjoyed luxuries she could not afford at home.
Cassandra was a more frequent guest at Godmersham than was Jane. She helped Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, whenever a new baby came, and Elizabeth simply preferred her to Jane. Jane clearly was the most gifted woman in the family, and her “accomplishments” may have aroused her sister-in-law’s jealousy. “A little talent went a long way” with Elizabeth, Anna Austen observed, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”
Edward and Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, Fanny Knight, saw something else: Her aunt Jane “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.” She explained that “Both the Aunts were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c).” Still, “Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of commonness’...& teach herself to be more refined.”
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