Nevertheless, for Jane Austen to leave a settled and comfortable rectory—its bucolic peace, its long family history—would have required extraordinary feats of adjustment.
Swallowing hard, she seems to have made that adjustment. It wasn’t long before she was writing to Cassandra, “We have lived long enough in this neighbourhood, the Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline, there is something interesting in the bustle of going away & the prospect of spending future summers by the sea or in Wales is very delightful.”
These comments come soon after the first shock of the news, but they cannot be dismissed as mere bravery (the holidays by the sea and in Wales are meant to signal compensatory elements in a questionable new undertaking). She must have suspected, and resented, that her out-of-date country parents considered Bath to be good husband-hunting territory. The move to Bath might be seen as a desperate move, and even a sacrifice on the parents’ part, to assist their daughters in achieving independence.
Jane Austen chatters on to her sister about accommodations to be had at Bath, about which furniture can or cannot be transported, and, rather endearingly, about her parents’ bed that, it is decided, cannot be replaced and so must be removed to the new household. Her father’s five hundred books must be sold or otherwise disposed of. Certain new arrangements concerning servants were to be made—and the particulars teasingly concealed from Mr. Austen, who, like Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, might offer objections. Austen is fanciful about these servants, the novelist already in top gear, laying out the scene: “We plan having a steady Cook & a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former & sweetheart to the latter.—No Children of course to be allowed on either side.” The pictures and much of the furniture were to go to her brother James and his wife Mary, an arrangement Jane clearly resented. James, the oldest of the Austen children, had always been the least favorite of her brothers, though he matches her in her attachment to home. He had gone away to Oxford as a young boy, but in a sense he had never left home, returning frequently and taking up parish duties close by, and now moving into Steventon and into his father’s ecclesiastical position.
Jane Austen’s tone in her letters to Cassandra is merry, and expectant, and feverishly false. There is too much heartiness, and there are too many intervening letters after the first announcement that appear to have been destroyed by Cassandra. If we take Jane at her word, a new series of opportunities is opening up. If she had suffered a severe shock on hearing the news, she made at least the appearance of a rapid recovery and a quick recounting. Perhaps she remembered what her own Henry Tilney said in Northanger Abbey: “One day in the country is exactly like another.” Or else she looked ahead to hear Anne Elliot in Persuasion say, “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.”
In Bath, there would be a refuge from those ever-present, preying thoughts. There would be new people to meet, new social patterns offered, new circumstances in which to re-create herself, and at the very least, new distractions from her predicament: her spinsterhood, now established, and the lack of money to bring to any marriage bargain that might present itself. Bath was also a place from which excursions might be made, and there were the possibilities of visits from other family members. She must have weighed these conditions carefully, whatever her first reaction to her father’s decision to move to Bath, though the question remains: Did other choices occur to her? Were other possibilities offered?
Decisions surrounding the move were almost immediately being made for her, and these she resisted. A new degree of petulance radiates from her correspondence. Her parents and sister suggested how she might dispose of some of her possessions. Politely, tartly, she refused. “You are very kind,” she wrote to Cassandra, “in planning presents for me to make, & my Mother has shewn me exactly the same attention—but as I do not chuse to have Generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna [her niece] till the first thought of it has been my own.”
Mrs. Austen, while acknowledging that her family comprised two unmarried daughters, was able to think of her life without them. In 1797 she welcomed a new daughter-in-law, Mary Lloyd, by saying, “I look forward to you as a real comfort to me in my old age, when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire & Jane—the Lord knows where.” Cassandra, in this quote, possesses context; Jane remains unpredictable, a young woman whose ability to offer comfort and companionship to an aged parent is doubtful. There is a great shrug of resignation in such a casual dismissal, and there is also a suggestion of rupture between parent and child. The two daughters were troublesome, and the younger daughter in particular. Mr. and Mrs. Austen must hatch their plans without taking them into consideration.
11
IN CHAPTER TWO of Northanger Abbey there is a paragraph that begins exuberantly: “They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight.” This exclamation launches the novel, bringing Catherine, in effect, from the country to the city, and from girlhood to what will follow.
Jane Austen, and Cassandra too, when informed that they were to move from Steventon, must have asked, why Bath? True, Bath was a golden city, and not just because of the color of the local building stone—Jane Austen, in fact, expressed complaint about the “glare” of the fresh stone facades. The city glowed with newness, with history, with harmonious architecture, with the positive and curative effects of its hot springs, with optimism and with gentility. Jane Austen was familiar with London from a few short visits and knew her parents would never settle there. Bath was the only other urban center she knew, and it was a logical retirement location, which she must have realized once she had absorbed the idea that her parents were really to leave Steventon behind—and how reasonable and even predictable that they should choose Bath over their other favorites, Lyme Regis and Sidmouth.
Bath in 1800 would have presented a happy compromise for them, since, with its approximately 34,000 inhabitants, it was decidedly urban but without the stress associated with London. Tradesmen had sprung up everywhere along its streets. Unlike other growing urban centers, this city catered to people who had come from elsewhere, bringing money with them and the desire for pleasure and relaxation.
And Bath was familiar to the Austens, being the previous site of happy holidays and family reunions. Mrs. Austen’s brother, Leigh-Perrot, and his wife lived there in some luxury. The parents of Jane Austen had been married in 1764 at the old Walcot Church at the edge of the city. An entry in the Parish register reads: “Geo Austen Bachelor of the Parish of Steventon, County of Hampshire to Cassandra Leigh, Spinster. Married by license this 26 April . . .” Here, too, is the recorded death notice of Mrs. Austen’s father. And in 1805, just five years after his retirement, Mr. Austen himself was buried in the Walcot churchyard: “Under this stone rest the remains of the Rev. George Austen, Rector of Steventon . . .”
Bath is in Somerset, about a hundred miles from London. It existed because of its natural hot springs and their healing properties, which were known to the Romans, who built a city on the site. The elaborate baths, and a temple dedicated to the goddess Minerva, had long since fallen into decay and forgetfulness, and were not excavated until 1871. Astonishingly, the Austen family would have known nothing about ancient Bath, though it is hard to believe there were not legends in circulation and perhaps even the odd artifact. In the sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth I granted the city a charter, and with this stroke made it a fashionable pleasure resort. (Today Margaret Thatcher comes here to relax; the Clintons have dropped in and so have a number of film stars, including Elizabeth Taylor and Demi Moore. There can be no doubt that name-dropping was, and continues to be, part of fabled Bath.)
Art and history conspired to bless the city, as did the great spurt of economic growth in the late seventeenth century. Roads had improved—the London-Bath road was the best-maintained artery in England—making it easier for people to travel in search of improved health and also to advance thems
elves in society. As modern Bath emerged, it was as a planned city with an integrated architecture, unlike anything else in Britain. During the early years of the eighteenth century, streets were paved and well lit so that people could come and go in safety and could alight from their carriages without finding themselves ankle deep in mud ( Jane Austen’s novels are filled with references to this particular inconvenience). Commerce arrived in the form of elegant shops, circulating libraries, and banks.
But people needed accommodation for their short or extended stays, and so construction was soon underway to provide apartments for these many visitors. A theater was established in the middle of the eighteenth century, with well-known actors arriving from London and performing the latest plays. The baths themselves ensured that sociability flourished, and from them evolved the Assembly Rooms, where visitors gathered to drink the rather vile-tasting waters and to enjoy concerts. Dinners, dances, card parties, and chance encounters in the shopping streets brought drama to everyday life. It also brought a different sort of opportunity to the city, which became a place where marriages could be contracted and business could be done. Bath was, in short, an entrepreneurial dream.
It was a retreat for the wealthy, a spa, a place of sociability and fashion—all these things. But by 1800, when the Austens settled there, it was thirty or forty years out of date and more a destination for retired professionals like George Austen than for those in search of pleasure. Newer resorts and spas, like Brighton and Cheltenham, were attracting the young and adventurous.
Did Jane Austen’s parents, in choosing Bath, believe that the city might be an opportunity to exhibit, and perhaps find husbands for, their two daughters? It may have been one of many considerations; it may also be that they didn’t fully appreciate the fact that Bath was no longer as fashionable as it had once been. Or they might even have considered its old-fashioned flavor an advantage, a form of protection and unconscious consolation for Cassandra and Jane, whose futures as spinsters now seemed almost certain.
Bath became the main setting for two of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey and, later, Persuasion, and in these two background glimpses of the city we can see the social forces moving from the dynamic in the earlier novel to the staid in Persuasion, where both compromise and reconciliation colored what Bath society had to offer. Each of the other novels, even the slight Lady Susan, touches tangentially on Bath. Wickham, in Pride and Prejudice, escapes to Bath in his later life, leaving marital dullness behind. And where else should Mr. Elton of Emma go to seek a wife, especially a foolish wife, but to Bath? Other characters are called to Bath on business, or they travel there for reasons of health or to take refuge in times of trouble. Bath, real or mythical, was part of Jane Austen’s geography, a place and also an idea. It had lost some of its excitement and edge in the late eighteenth century, but never its respectability or its healing powers. Jane Austen’s use of Bath demonstrates her precise understanding of new attitudes toward money and leisure. With the accurate placement of Bath in her contemporary universe she proves herself an astute reporter on sociological change.
12
TOWAR D THE END of the old century, the Austen family—the parents and two daughters—embarked on the matter of moving house. This took time and patience. It also took careful economic management. Fragile furniture was cheaper to replace than to move, so it was finally decided that only the family beds could be taken to the new home in Bath. A favorite sideboard was abandoned, and the Pembroke tables. Not surprisingly, old painted sets from the family theatricals in the barn were left behind, and with them the childhood memories of a full, vibrant family life. Jane Austen’s pianoforte was another of the losses of the move, the pianoforte on which she played every morning not for an audience, but for her own enjoyment. George Austen’s five-hundred-book library went up for sale, and realized a disappointing sum, though many of the volumes devolved to his son James. Books, music, mementos, familiar furniture, the beauty of a mature garden—all this was to be surrendered. Perhaps even worse was the parting with old friends like Martha Lloyd, Anne Lefroy, and the Bigg-Withers at Manydown Park.
Family feelings went sour during the relocation, at least between Jane Austen and her brother James, who, with his wife Mary, was to move into the rectory. Those items that were not sold or otherwise disposed of went directly to James’s family, and Jane’s letters of the time give the impression that she and Cassandra and her parents were being in-sensitively pushed from the family home, or at least politely hurried along and encouraged in their move to Bath.
Austen was obliged to leave the countryside she loved and become a city dweller. Even before departing from Steventon, she was, like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, “dreading the possible heats of September in all the white glare of Bath, and grieving to forego all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country . . .” The countryside, especially a landscape as familiar as Jane Austen’s corner of Hampshire, fostered contemplation, and was not only un-threatening but also heartening. She was rooted in its midst. We don’t often hear from her the trilling tones of the exuberant nature lover, but we can read in all the novels, and in all the major characters, an acceptance—and a preference—for country life. Would Mr. Knightley, that inveterate reader of agricultural reports, pull up stakes and take Emma off to live in London? Or in Bath? Never. It would be unthinkable.
There can be little question that Jane Austen’s rather fragile frame of creativity was disturbed following the move to Bath. Since returning from school at the age of eleven, she had found her place in her family, amusing those around her with her writing, winning their approval, and then growing to maturity and learning to divert herself with her carefully crafted novels, novels in which young women—Elizabeth, Catherine, Elinor and Marianne—find ways to liberate themselves from their circumstances. Her own existence as the younger daughter in a large family had reached a point of stasis, but her creative life soared within her particular set of circumstances, in which she was protected, encouraged, and—it must be said—left largely alone. She had, after two or perhaps three enforced separations, to a foster home during infancy and then to school, mastered the delicate trick of living within her family and, through her imaginative work, leaving them behind. Readers are sure to be puzzled by Jane Austen’s silence in the ensuing years unless they understand how unarmored she was against change, against a new and superficial society, against those who had not known her from childhood and who were unfamiliar with her history and the direction of her thoughts. Bath was a showcase city; everyone, and everything, was up for display. Display was why people went to Bath: to see and be seen, to judge and be judged.
Austen had also witnessed the phenomenon faced by the younger children of large families who watch their older brothers and sisters drift off into the world, leaving them behind in a diminished family nest, often with aging parents who are unwilling or unable to renegotiate the parental role and who are more and more focused on the remaining “children.” This not-at-all-uncommon situation requires immense tolerance on all sides and subtle readjustments that call for an openness of expression. It is difficult to imagine such a psychological rearrangement taking place at Steventon, and even harder to envision a free exchange of ideas. The uneasiness of the situation might be recognized on all sides, but be too awkward to be brought to the surface. In Jane Austen’s novels daughters grow up and very often become their parents’ advisers. In her own family it seems this did not happen; her parents continued to act, as they had always done, without her counsel in decisions that radically affected her life.
Jane Austen was particularly adrift at the time her parents announced the move to Bath. Cassandra, her only real confidante, was, during those months, visiting in Kent where the shock of impending change must have been muffled by distance and by distraction. Jane’s letters to her in 1800 and the first part of 1801 are particularly sour. We can read her loss and confusion through the satiric bite of her observations, and ther
e is, as well, a sad sense of lowered consequence. She ordered two brown dresses in January of 1801, one for herself and one for her mother, and insisted that the shades of brown must vary slightly so that the difference between them would provide a topic of conversation. There was much going on in the world at the time, including the immensely popular heroics of Admiral Nelson and the naval successes of Austen’s own brother Captain Frank Austen, but Jane Austen, twenty-five years old, felt herself reduced to discussing shades of brown and sniping at neighbors: “Mr Dyson as usual looked wild, & Mrs. Dyson as usual looked big.” There is in the letters of this period very little of the buoyancy that had formerly compensated for her verbal thrusts, no little darts of joy or the hope of intervening circumstances. She was a spinster daughter, living with elderly parents, exchanging her family home for rented rooms in a city where she would have no real intellectual companions other than her sister, Cassandra. Her self-mockery stops well short of humor.
She never announced herself to be in a state of depression, but certainly she understood the condition. Both Fanny Price and Marianne Dashwood (Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility) are immobilized by sadness and powerlessness, and even Emma is paralyzed, momentarily, when brought face to face with her own imperfections. Jane Austen was too private and too wary of self-pity to declare her state. We apprehend it, today, through the bitterness of her correspondence, but mostly through the abrupt cessation of her novels, a flow of words that had poured from her pen since late childhood. Now it dried up. As a writer she was disabled and profoundly discouraged.
Jane Austen Page 8