A Walk with Jane Austen

by Lori Smith

  I walked back down today, past the ice-cream shops and candy stores, by stands for jacket potatoes and lovely seafood restaurants. There are children crabbing in the harbor and one brave and very white English guy in a Speedo wading into the water.

  Jane writes so warmly of Lyme in Persuasion:“the remarkable situation of the town, the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay.…with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of town.”1 And then of everything else around here:

  “A very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more, its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the wooded varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks…these places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood.”2

  I want to see Up Lyme and Pinny and Charmouth, to see the “green chasms between romantic rocks” and sit “in unwearied contemplation,” but I'm too tired to hike the cliffs, so tired I don't even much care. I would like to have come in November, like Anne, when it is quieter, with a party of friends. Jane vacationed here with her parents and sister and Henry and Eliza.3 I'm sure that's where her enthusiasm comes from, the fun they had exploring together.

  The beach is the backdrop of so many of my best memories. Not active memories, mostly just sitting-and-being memories, soaking in the sun and sitting in a chair by the tip of the waves, reading all the way to the end of C. S. Lewis's dramatic retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth in Till We Have Faces,wrapped in a towel against the cool clouds and intermittent sun, and a thousand other books. Walking into the quiet evening blue hour when everything glows and softens, as if watching the edge of the world get tucked in for the night. There is something about that hour at the beach—the softness and stillness and noise—that fills me with comfort and reminds me of what is holy. Then watching the tops of my feet turn brown and feeling the tightness and aliveness of a slight burn, tasting the salt in the air, smelling fish—dead and alive— watching the sea oats on the dunes, feeling the freedom and terror of wearing an acceptable kind of nearly nothing and just slipping on shorts and a T-shirt until the late, late afternoon. I love it in all its seasons, but I suppose more in the warm sun than in the cold, gray rain.

  My parents have a place in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina—a little strip of an island sticking out into the Atlantic. It is sort of a down-home southern beach. There are big dunes, campgrounds, and restaurants that seem to change every season. If you need groceries, you can go to Joe Bob's or the gas station. As a child, vacation meant Hawaii or camping under the pines at Myrtle Beach, where we went paddle boating in a lake with crocodiles, or the wide, wet slabs of Corpus Christi, where we hunted sand dollars in the edge of the waves.

  My father tells about going down to Santa Cruz with his family as a boy or to Carmel, where Uncle John (who was actually Grammy's uncle)—John who had come to America first, who had worked his way across the continent building the Canadian railroad—had a stone house that he'd built with his own hands. My skinny little sun-soaked father sat on the beach shivering from the cold water, bitten by sand fleas. And before my father there was the family homestead in the little village on the Norwegian fjord. I don't know why I like to think about my family so much—these people who came before me, whom I am so biologically close to but whose stories I will never know. I have pictures of all these Norwegian ancestors going back hundreds of years, lining the wall above my TV. One couple look like pilgrims, and one guy has a thick black beard and a balding head and one blue eye and one brown, and I think he must have been a lighthouse keeper, and I'm sure he knew the comfort of the waves.

  I put Emma aside and started reading Persuasion again last night. I couldn't be in Lyme, on my way to Bath, and not read it. Persuasion just makes me happy—in a different way than P&P It is quieter, not so “sparkling.”4 Its the product of an older Austen. How can anyone not love Anne? I am afraid, though, that I am too much like Mary, always thinking that someone else has something better—and always thinking myself ill and then eating more anyway.

  Jane was so particular about men. This is what she says about Mr. Elliot, Annes cousin who is trying to win her over:

  Mr. Elliot was rational, discreet, polished, but he was not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth of indignation or delight, at the evil or good of others. This, to Anne, was a decided imperfection. Her early impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.5

  Jane attributes the feelings to Anne, but they must have been hers as well.

  I am of two minds. One: if such a small failure as this is enough to disqualify a guy, how would anyone ever be good enough? And two: I am afraid about Jack, afraid this is his weakness, and afraid as a result that I cannot trust him.

  He was always polished; he always said the right thing. (I know, I know. Now are we to fault guys for saying the right thing and for saying the wrong thing?) But it was almost like he knew precisely what would sound best in each situation, and that's what he said. A little too perfect.

  There was one night, Monday, after we had sat by the river talking for so long, we walked back and went with a group to dinner at a little French crepe place. Greg, upon realizing that one of the guys who is a proctologist (or a “plumber,” as he calls himself) was a captive audience, launched into a long and detailed story involving kidney stones, shunts, catheters, an intern, and no anesthetic. I needed sleep. The noise of the conversation was too much for me. The shunts were too much for me. I alternately cringed quietly and put forth a great deal of effort to be pleasant, to what I'm sure was little effect.

  When we all first sat down, Sara said to Jack, “Do you want to sit across from your wife?” and I laughed and said, “Oh, we just met yesterday.” Then he got this determined smile on his face and said in his kindest voice, “But thank you though.” As if he couldn't imagine a better compliment. There was something about it. I sensed that he was probably cringing inside, but he would never let on. And I thought I would have to watch him, to see if he always said what he thought other people wanted to hear regardless of what he actually thought.

  I don't know. Maybe I am tired and crazy. And maybe to make an issue of this would be overly particular. Anne was right about Mr. Elliot. He was only there for the money; he could not be trusted. Jack, I am almost sure, can be.

  Sixteen

  Sensibility and Self-Expression

  An interval of meditation, serious and grateful,

  was the best corrective of everything dangerous

  in such high-wrought felicity; and she went

  to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the

  thankfulness of her enjoyment.

  —PERSUASION

  I found the perfect connection through Exeter, thrilled because Jane set Sense and Sensibility here—Barton Park was four miles north of Exeter, she says. So I looked out on Marianne's countryside; only I'd seen so many rolling hills and fields that I couldn't tell any of them apart anymore, and all of this looked just like the rest of England to me. Perhaps the hills were more gently rolling, or maybe they were higher and the fields darker green under a gray sky. My powers of observation were completely diminished, and I was convinced the other side of the train had all the gorgeous views. (Again feeling like Mary, “My seat is damp. I'm sure Louisa has found a better.”)1 And I became afr
aid all my clothes smelled of the frying oil of Lyme.

  I thought of how I love gossipy, kindhearted Mrs. Jennings, grave Colonel Brandon, wholehearted Marianne, and Elinor, who always exerts herself to do what's right, to be civil to everyone, to think the best of people, never to give rein to her emotions—at least until she finds that Edward Ferrars had not married Lucy Steele and was free to propose to her. Then she herself “burst [s] into tears of joy.”2 “Her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them,” Jane says.3 Only Elinor's method of governing is at times one of exacting and empty precision, in deep sorrow to prevent herself from saying anything at all simply because she has made a promise to the ingratiating, fawning Lucy Steele.

  In my own life I've had trouble negotiating the balance between selfishness and self-expression, which is the core conflict of the Dash-woods. It is, I think, one of the constant daily struggles in relationships—what to do with your emotions, how much to express them or subject others to them. I feel things more strongly than the rest of my family. My parents and my brother are matter-of-fact and even, and then there is me, with this extra bundle of pure emotion. If I look like both my parents, I don't feel the way they do. Emotionally, I think they may secretly wonder about my parentage. I have always wanted to be one of those easy happy people, and I think for a while I pretended to be that way, but really I am much more of an Eeyore. I think in some ways I will always be a mystery to them.

  This is the one thing my mother and I fought about growing up. She felt that I was imposing my bad moods on others; I thought I should be allowed to be depressed or sad if that's what I was feeling. She wanted me to exert myself. I was probably being a moody teenager, taking my moods out on others, or maybe I was feeding my feelings à la Marianne. But those arguments, combined with a Christian culture that is incredibly uncomfortable with lamentation and rushes to happiness, left me with an impression that only positive emotions are good and that everything else needed to be at a minimum subdued and sometimes covered over with smiles and cheerful voices, insincere thanksgiving and praise. There is a way to be sad or angry without overly imposing those emotions on others like a petulant teenager, of course, but I did not understand that at the time.

  I don't mean to imply that evangelical Christians are emotionally disabled, but there is a strain of evangelicalism, particularly among women I think, in which anything that isn't happy is viewed as dangerous. I can't abide that anymore. It doesn't work for me. I cannot be part of a religion that doesn't understand lament.

  I am still learning to just experience my feelings, to allow my emotions to simply be what they are without being afraid of them or trying to force them quickly into something else, still negotiating this balance in the course of everyday relationships. It is not an easy thing, at least not for me.

  I catch hints of Elinor in Jane's letters. Family tradition is that Jane fainted when she came back home to Steventon from visiting Martha Lloyd and was told that her parents had decided to move the family to Bath.4 She was twenty-five. It was the end of an era, the loss of her beloved family home (though it stayed in the family and went to her brother James, who took over as rector of Steventon from his father), her dear Hampshire countryside, and her small, steady group of friends. Moving furniture was not easy then, so they took very little with them, and Mr. Austen sold his library of five hundred books. In a sense, the Austens were repeating family history. Mrs. Austen's parents had moved to Bath when they retired; her father had died here.5 She met George and married him shortly after her fathers death—the hope of many parents who took their older daughters to Bath (not that they themselves would die, of course, but that their daughters would find husbands).

  But Jane wrote to Cassandra with characteristic cheerfulness in January, to talk about where they might live in Bath and what they would take with them when they moved, saying she was “more & more reconciled to the idea of our removal,” and maybe she was. Her letter is, as always, full of laughter. “We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood, the Basingstoke Balls are certainly on the decline,”6 she says. I wonder how deeply she felt this, how much she was exerting herself for the sake of her family. James Edward said that “depression was little in accordance with her nature,”7 so maybe she never fell into any lengthy emotional depths.

  Tradition, though, is that if she ever was depressed, it was here, a suspicion bolstered by the fact that she seems to have written very little during the Bath years. She recopied Susan,which later became Northanger Abbey,and started to work on The Watsons8 but never finished it. She seems to have preferred not to be too much part of society, and living in Bath may have forced her out of her quiet daily routine. There were “tiny, stupid” parties that she hated because they required the exertion of talking to everyone and because the people were generally dull.9 When she finally left five years later, it was “with what happy feelings of Escape!”10

  In spite of dear Jane's experiences, I have come to be happy at Bath. It is raining. Ah, rain in Bath! How lovely. It always rains in Bath. The honey-colored Bath Stone buildings seem to glow. My room is gorgeous, decorated in pale greens and deep reds and mauves, with thick wallpaper and expensive bedding, which lacks the ring of dirt that was the particular distinction of the room in Lyme. The small en suite bath has lovely white tile, with only a bit of the kind of mold with which I am most familiar, the faint orange stuff that I cannot keep from growing on my shower at home.

  My B&B—the Villa Magdala—is across Pulteney Bridge and just up the street from the stylish Laura Place,11 the square of town houses where Lady Dalrymple stays in Persuasion.(Readers don't get to see much of Lady Dalrymple, but apparently the best thing about her to most concerned—particularly to her vain Elliot cousins—is that she is, in fact, a viscountess.)

  I walk over half the city, around the abbey and by the baths, up toward the Circus and Royal Crescent, feeling the luxury of being here and being halfway through Persuasion. In the evening, beyond exhausted, I am lured out by the chance to see the green pools of the Roman Baths by torchlight.

  I am wearing my jeans again. I have worn them every day since Margaret's, and now they are filthy. Every outfit I packed, I was thinking of Bath—which exists for shopping and being fashionable—and now it is too cold to wear them. Last night I wore my whole ensemble—jeans (of course) with a T-shirt, fleece, and Gore-Tex jacket, and I was still cold. I have no idea what the temperature is because of the Celsius-Fahrenheit conversion, which I can't be bothered to figure out.

  Jane did not particularly enjoy fashion, according to tradition. Her letters are full of references to this or that muslin gown, or a new dress for a ball, or what she should buy for Cassandra in Bath for her new hat because fruit was now fashionable. So cherries or a plum?12 Neither sounds like a particularly good idea. While she seems to have taken some pains, rumor is that she was not actually very good with clothes, and I think her main goal was simply to be acceptable. She doesn't seem to have hoped for—or unfortunately attained—anything more than that.

  I think it took me thirty years to develop some sense of fashion, and I am officially mourning every outfit that will sit in my suitcase for the next four days while it rains in Bath. I used to think I had few regrets in my life, but now I realize that I have worn some very bad outfits, and particularly bad bathing suits, and I'm not sure what it says about my character that I regret this almost more than anything else.

  I meandered aimlessly through Bath in my jeans and fleece, fighting off a bit of traveler's malaise. I sat in the abbey for the beginning of morning service, then headed back to the baths. There are multiple pools, the main bath with an open roof. Inside rooms include separate pools for men and women, an ancient hot tub, a massage room with heated floors. And all of this around the time of Christ. The Romans came here to worship the healing goddess Sulis Minerva, and there are remnants of the temple. They threw curses in the water, or prayers, but mostly curses it seems, for anyone who had offended them or who may
have stolen their favorite amber pendant. Ridiculous but in some way satisfying I'm sure.

  I walked up to the Royal Crescent, still the most fashionable address in Bath, a magnificent semicircle of grand Bath Stone town houses from the early eighteenth century, close to the top of the hill on which the city is built. Number 1, Royal Crescent is now a museum fitted up the way it would have been when the Duke of York, George Ills second son, lived here in 1776.13 It is gorgeous, of course, but the thing that most struck me was a tiny little marble scratcher, like a back scratcher on a much smaller scale, that was used to help dig the bugs out from under ones wig. Apparently they rarely removed them and rarely washed their hair, and little things flourished under there. Wigs were going out of style in Jane's day, and men were laying off from powdering their hair, as well, and beginning to wear it short. When Jane's younger brother Charles opted to go cropped without any powder, it was an item of concern to his rather more posh brother Edward.

  There are Austen remembrances around every corner. The center square contains the abbey and baths and Pump Room, which is now a restaurant and still has the fountain drawing up water from the baths for drinking—I don't think I will drink the water, though you still can—and a few little cafés. And then there are small alleys and wide streets with boutiques and restaurants and town houses. (I don't think there are any actual houses here in Bath, only town houses.) Most of the spots I know from Austen—Laura Place, the Circus, the Royal Crescent, Queen Square, where Edward stayed when he came to town—are all just various shapes of town house assortments. The Circus is a circle, of course, around a central green. (Doesn't the name make it sound like it should be more than just a place to live? Or like they all must live raucous lives there? It's terribly sedate for being called the Circus.) It seems like it would be a lovely thing to live in Bath.