A Walk with Jane Austen

by Lori Smith

  After Jane died, Cassandra wrote to her niece, “I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the hand which has struck this blow.”5 As though God were more than justified in taking Jane away at forty-one because her sister loved her too much, occasionally to the exclusion of others. I think this is so far removed from what God would have us understand of him, of the gifts he gives and takes away.

  Eight

  Steventon: A Solitary Walk

  To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles,

  or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone,

  quite alone! what could she mean by it?

  It seems to me to show an

  abominable sort of conceited independence.

  —MISS BINGLEY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

  Jane Austen was born just here. Or actually not here exactly, but somewhere very close-by. I am a bit in awe and can't get my scattered mind to actually understand the directions in my guidebook to find the site of the rectory where the Austen family lived, where Jane was born in the terribly cold December of 1775.

  I sit on a bench in the Steventon churchyard, which is very quiet, and I am blissfully alone. George Austen, Jane's father, was rector here at this sweet, small stone church, built roughly eight hundred years ago.1 My American mind cannot fathom a building—or any place really —having survived that long. History is more mythical to me, something marvelous that happened elsewhere, that cannot be touched, only imagined. But here I sit, in the village where Jane spent her first twenty-five years,2 next to the lane up which her father carried every baby for a public christening after he'd given the baby a private baptism at home,3 pondering the huge yew tree in the churchyard, which Jane herself would have known, where her father hid the church key. Somewhere nearby was the hill Jane rolled down as a child, like Catherine in Northanger Abbey,who “loved nothing so well in the world.”4 Across from the rectory, the barn, where she threw rousing family theatricals with her brothers. And somewhere close were the elm trees she mourned after a particularly violent fall storm pulled them down.5

  This was home. Jane loved it here. I've heard other writers describe the landscape as small, and I suppose it might be, but it seems to me everything an English country village ought to be. Houses and thatched cottages, only a couple of streets, the whole thing surrounded by gentle field- and farm-filled hills. Jane knew all of its lanes and seasons, loved its families. Her favorite subject was “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village,”6 and Steventon no doubt provided the seeds for Long-bourn and Meryton, Highbury and Uppercross.

  As a child, without knowing it I think I always longed for a place to be—not any place, but my place, my home. There was no quiet village, and our house itself seemed rather too quiet, our family too small. My parents did not take kindly to my asking for additional children. Mom always said that if we had slept through the night, she would have had a dozen, but we were difficult babies, so it was just me and my brother. (My sister would join us later, which is a complicated story and not mine to tell—aren't all families complicated these days?) Our little family was plucked up every two to four years, moving from one air force assignment to the next. The only permanence we had was our love for one another and our faith—both of which, however imperfect, left me with a sense of abundance. But I longed for someplace sturdy and old, something other than Sheetrock in various shades of builder's white.

  Even my home now, my town house with thinnish walls and threatening plastic pipes, feels hastily constructed, a bed in a precarious room so close to the street noises, the neighbors diesel truck that is always in need of repair, early morning cars honking and the crashing of trash day. Herndon, the town where I live, could hardly be called a village, though we do better than other suburbs. We have concerts on the town green on Thursday and Friday nights all through the summer, a huge spring carnival with a Tilt-A-Whirl and kettle corn and overpriced tacos from the local Mexican place in May, a farmers’ market every week in season. Its two distinctives, in my mind, are very bad parking lots and immigration—both legal and illegal.

  Shortly after I moved in, one of the houses next door was sold to a family from El Salvador, and there were eleven or twelve of them— brothers and cousins and sisters-in-law and babies—all going in and out. I practiced my Spanish, and the guys would ask me, “Eres casada?” and I would try to explain, no, I wasn't married, but I just wanted to be their friend. One night Jorge, the one they call Gordito (little fat one), knocked on the door with a box almost as tall and wide as he was. I tried not to take it, but he told me he bought one for him and one for me and begged me to open it. It was a mirror, painted with a South American beach scene, all garish colors. “Plug it in, plug it in!” he said. Sure enough, it lit up and made noises—birds calling and the whoosh whoosh whoosh of waves. I wondered if somehow he thought I loved him because I couldn't figure out how to tactfully give it back. And they would ask, “You live there by yourself? Where's your family?” It made no sense to them. I would hear them every weekend—occasionally throwing empty beer bottles into the trees, but mostly just being together, eating and laughing and talking.

  As a child, no matter where we were, we went to my aunt and uncle's home in upstate New York every Thanksgiving. This meant long, late drives in the station wagon with my brother and me in sleeping bags in the back or layovers in airports with comic books and art caddies in tow. Ginny and Steves home, though technically it was in just another suburb, had solidity—hardwood floors and a fireplace, with a woven rug, cream wallpaper in the dining room with a pattern of soft blue velvet, and a basement of cold gray cement. There would be waffles in the morning with bacon, and if we were lucky—and we usually were—snow.

  They would drive us to see Ice Capades, and Uncle Steve would look at the girls through his binoculars, which seemed a little creepy, and then take us to a diner for ice cream sundaes. We went shopping in the city and came home with stuffed animals and bags of gold chocolate coins. And on Thanksgiving, we always got dressed up and had dinner on the good china, with the silver and the sparkly glasses, and maybe a cardinal would have his own feast on the bird feeder outside the sliding glass doors. On summer trips there was lemonade and snapdragons, picnics in great forests, and trips to see Niagara Falls. Their home became one of my Most Important Places, a place that always smelled the same, that was older than I was, somewhere secure.

  There is a place you belong. Maybe that's what all of us want to know. Maybe that's one reason we love Jane's books so much. They put us into little villages, places where everyone knows everyone and is known in turn, with a kind of familiarity we have largely lost.

  I cannot get the church door to open. A guy running his hounds through the neighboring field (they really should not wear shorts when they are so very white—especially with black socks) tells me it should be open, but I push and pull on the iron handles to no avail. The bugs and birds are quietly raucous. The sun is bright, and there is a little misting rain and a few high clouds, but I am determined that it will be fine. I have four glorious solitary hours, and I intend to head out across the fields Jane knew in search of her dear friend Anne Lefroy's house, with “a sort of conceited independence”7 of which even Lizzy would be proud.

  My book says, “Walk over the field towards the copse.”8 I do not know exactly what a copse is. And how, in the middle of the countryside, am I to choose which one to walk toward?

  By all accounts, the Austen family was a rather remarkable family to be part of. It was built on George and Cassandra's love for each other, which seems to have been warm and genuine. Once, when the boys were small, Cassandra went to help her sister in childbirth, and George wrote to his sister-in-law, “I don't much like this lonely kind of Life,” and when he talked about the family possibly paying a visit, he said, “I say we, for I certainly shall not let
my Wife come alone, & I dare say she will not leave her children behind her.”9 You can just see the country rector, who did not marry until he was almost thirty-three,10 in his rather plain small house, missing his dear wife. George had a wonderful disposition, described as “bright & hopeful.”11 Cassandra, who loved to write small, witty poems, seems to have been full of life.

  The Austens were a family that talked about things. There was much intelligent conversation and a great deal of laughter. George was made a fellow at St. John's in Oxford after finishing his divinity degree.12 He could have stayed on there, but he gave up academic life for this— a small parish, a dairy, a poultry yard, a walled vegetable garden surrounded by fruit trees, a weather vane that creaked in the wind, and a houseful of children.13

  George also ran Cheesedown Farm14 on the north side of the parish to help make ends meet and for nearly twenty-five years ran a small school for boys out of the Austen home, which, though rather plain, had seven bedrooms upstairs and three attics.15

  There were eight “very good Children,”16 six boys and two girls— James, George, Edward, Henry, Cassandra, Frank, Jane, and Charles. James was a scholar who followed in his father's footsteps almost exactly. When Jane was just three,17 he left for Oxford, joined the church, and eventually became rector of Steventon. George, the second oldest, was mentally disabled in some way and had fits. It's possible he was deaf and dumb.18 Many people who talk about the Austen family say there were only seven children, and I think it is because they are forgetting George. The Austens kept him at home for a while but eventually sent him to live in a neighboring village with a family that cared for Mrs. Austens younger brother, who struggled with similar difficulties.

  Edward was sharp and lovable, with a head more for business than Latin, and wound up being adopted by wealthy cousins and inheriting their estates. Charming, good-looking, and energetic, Henry was Jane's favorite. Active little Frank and Charles set off for the Royal Naval Academy at age twelve and eleven and began navy life in their early teens, sometimes leaving England for years at a time to sail to the Far East, the Mediterranean, Bermuda, and the West Indies, eventually both becoming admirals. (Frank actually left for his first tour of duty in the East Indies when he was just fourteen and wouldn't return home for five years.)

  We know that in their adult years, the siblings all genuinely respected one another, that there was a great deal of friendship and camaraderie. Jane must have been thinking of her own brothers and sister when she wrote in Mansfield Park that the fraternal bond could be stronger than even the conjugal. “Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply,” she wrote.19

  Their cousin Eliza wrote of the “uncommon Abilities, which indeed seem to have been bestowed, tho’ in a different way, upon each Member of this Family.”20 The Austen parents seem to have been incredibly good at channeling their children's energies into the areas where their natural strengths lay. There seem not to have been undue parental expectations that the children would turn out one way or another, or choose a particular career, and this underlying sense of freedom must have played a role in the choices Jane made—in her writing and choosing not to marry.

  Jane was closest to Cassandra, her elder sister by three years. They had an incredibly tight bond and “seemed to lead a life to themselves within the general family life, which was shared only by each other.”21Cassandra was no doubt the more practical, the more complying. Jane the more emotional, creative, and at times serious. Their nephew James Edward described Cassandra as “always prudent and well judging, but with less outward demonstration of feeling and less sunniness of temper than Jane possessed,”22 which makes me think their own relationship could have been to some extent a model for Elinor and Marianne's in Sense and Sensibility.(James Edward said this was impossible since Jane had not Marianne's failings. I expect, though, that she had enough to easily imagine greater.)

  I have come to view my own family as a bit remarkable, precisely because, like the Austens, we talk about things and laugh a great deal. All we need is a meal and a bottle of wine, and we have hours of entertainment. And underneath everything is a great deal of love. I haven't always seen things this way, and perhaps we have not always been remarkable, but we grew up well, I suppose, now that we are finally in our thirties and approximating adulthood.

  Jane was a great walker, and I guess I may make some claim to the title. In Pride and Prejudice, she probably wrote Lizzys experiences out of her own, “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity.…with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.”23 That describes me wandering alone through the Hampshire countryside— with small amounts of terror thrown in.

  The walking directions from my book are, in fact, crazy. “Cross the railway,”24 it says, neglecting to mention the fifty yards of weeds and brambles. “Keep the pines close on your right”25—this in a near forest. Path markers are relatively small, sometimes no more than a three-by-three sign on a fence post, and if there are bigger signs, they are wood, making them difficult to see. Stiles—for clambering over fences—are often just a few pieces of board stuck at funny angles with just enough support to enable a foothold.

  The path crosses private property, occasionally beside fields of livestock. Friesian cows, hogging the shade, followed me with their glassy eyes. A pony with a red leather fringe tied around his head (to keep the flies off?) tramps after me along his fence, the whole time goofily eying my banana.

  I have not always been a great walker. On my thirteenth birthday, my parents took the family down to the Mall in D.C.—we had just moved there—and we walked the entire thing in the October sun. When we got to the Lincoln Memorial, I refused to climb the steps because I had walked quite far enough and because I was now a teenager and growingly annoyed to be with my entire family in public, walking around like tourists. I got over that—or most of it at least.

  Something my father said once changed my life. I was telling him that one of my dreams was to meet the writer Madeleine L'Engle, and he said, “Well, what are you going to do to make that happen?”

  Something inside me snapped—in the best possible way. I suppose there had been a growing realization that if I did nothing but think about doing things—like meeting Madeleine L'Engle—I would grow old having actually done nothing. The things I expected—the marriage and kids—had not come, and anything else that was going to happen I had to make happen myself. So I signed up for a writers’ retreat at a convent with Madeleine L'Engle for three years in a row. She broke her hip and then was unable to travel for various reasons and then stopped traveling all together, so I never met her, but I came very close. Then I went to Paris completely on my own, with just the barest of French, just because I dreamed of a romantic solo trip. I saw the roses in Rodin's garden in full bloom and the water lilies and irises at Giverny, went to the ballet at the Palais Garnier opera house, and saw hundreds of Monet's water lily paintings in a special exhibit at Musée de l'Orangerie, serendipitously ending up in a hotel room with a view of the Eiffel Tower.

  A couple of years later, I was telling my friend Dee, “One of my dreams is to hike the Grand Canyon.”

  She said, “Really? Want to go over Thanksgiving?”

  And there was that moment when I thought,I can either do this or not—I can live my dreams, or I can just talk about them. So I went. At twenty-seven I bought a pack and a water filter and broke in my hiking boots for fifty miles before we left and learned the intricacies of going to the bathroom off-trail (one of my all-time greatest fears) in a place where you have to pack out absolutely all (really, all) of your trash. We slept on a ledge in one of the side canyons, under a nearly full moon, and walked all the way down to the Colorado River and all the way back up, feeling like we knew parts of the Canyon intimately—its quietness and shades
, hot afternoons and freezing nights.

  Two years later I was carrying nearly forty pounds, walking into a thick Montana forest for seven days in Glacier National Park back country. I was afraid of bears there, the way I had been of scorpions and rattlesnakes in the Canyon, or that maybe I would die somehow on the trail—starved to death with a broken leg, happening upon a big grizzly in her dawn feeding. There are always fears. Maybe for some people there aren't, but I am not one of those people. C. S. Lewis said every time you make a decision, you change the central part of you that chooses.26 He meant moral choices—whenever you choose to lie, for example, or not to lie, you change the substance of who you are and what you are likely to do the next time you have a choice to make. I think the same is true, though, with our lives. Every time you make a decision—to live your life, to do the things that call you—you change what you are likely to do the next time you have a choice.

  So I'm wondering which row of pine trees to keep on my right, praying desperately that I don't get lost. (Sheesh. I make it sound like I am exploring somewhere when in fact I'm in rural England, with a mobile phone and a PowerBar, in white cropped pants with a green T-shirt and matching shoes.)

  I think the countryside must look something like it did in Jane's day. Walking through the fields, I begin to feel human again, the exertion somehow helping me recover from exhaustion. I have to stop every now and then just to take it all in, to wonder and feel giddy and pray.