A Walk with Jane Austen (14 page)

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.

“Walk ahead over a large field aiming for the left-hand corner of a strip of woodland,”
²⁷
the guide says.
Aim left through a large field?
I think. But when I cross a stile under the trees, I find a field full of high summer wheat, with a green walking path cut through the middle, aiming for the left corner.

I walk into the field and stop in the sun. I don't think these are the paths Jane walked, of course. But I imagine this may be the way she felt walking them: gloriously alone, surrounded by the heat and health of nature, with friends waiting at the other end.

An hour and a half of walking takes me to lovely Ashe House, on a quiet lane. The entire village of Ashe appears to consist of this little street with brick homes and gardens and the church. Ashe House is a simple Georgian structure, red brick with a row of front windows and a fanlight above the door, vines and roses climbing along the front. It looks like the perfect house—tasteful and simple but quietly grand—and would
have been dear to Jane as the home of her friend. Its rumored that Tom Lefroy chased Jane through the garden here.

Anne Lefroy was more than a friend; she was like a mentor to Jane. She was twenty-six years Jane's senior and met Jane when she was seven—just a girl, but a smart girl who already loved literature. Madam Lefroy, as she was known, was intelligent and kind. She loved poetry, taught the village children to read and write, and personally vaccinated the entire neighborhood for smallpox.
²⁸
She was beautiful and gracious. Her husband was rector here at Ashe Church.

I can imagine the influence she had on Jane's life, this lovely woman who lived out her faith among the poor, who loved those around her with more than words, and who could also meaningfully discuss poets and playwrights. She was strong in an age in which women were not thought to be so, educated when most women were not. She must have had a streak of independence as well. I think Jane learned something from her about the possibilities of life, of what it could be like to be a woman who was strong and yet not improperly so, about the purposes and value of wealth not for its own sake but as it might be used for the sake of others. Anne's values would have been much like George and Cassandra Austen's, but sometimes these things are easier caught from those who are not your parents.

We all must strike a certain balance, which I tend to think of when I am in ballet and my foot must be more pointed, my legs more turned out, my heel back, stomach held in, the proper triangle between my outstretched arms and solar plexus, and the whole thing stretching up, up, up, like I am pulled by a string. It is never right; there will always be adjustments. But all of us have this balance in our lives, attempting to work out our faith within our particular cultural context. We must
be more humble (or perhaps I should say I must be) yet use our strength and maintain compassion when we are bombarded with needs in a world where everyone now is our neighbor and we know everyone's tragic stories. Anne's balance was to stretch within her late-eighteenth-century world where women's roles were so limited, where the Christian faith was often in name only, where it would have been more than acceptable for her to learn nothing and do nothing. But—continuing this analogy—she danced.

I'm thankful to have had dance instructors of my own, chief among them Beth, whom I think of as kind of my own Anne Lefroy. She is lovely and probably the best natural communicator I know. Beth is fourteen years my senior, and her oldest daughter fourteen years my junior, and I believe I met her when I was fifteen or sixteen. I would come to clean her house every week, and little two-year-old Anna would follow me around to help, but it was never so much about cleaning as it was about building a relationship. Our families melded together in a way—we went to the same church, and Mom watched her kids every week, and over years of holidays and simpler days we grew close. I held all of her five children when they were small, and she has heard all of my love stories. She will always be like family, one of the people I count on to help me understand where the balance of my life is off and how to correct it.

Anne interfered a bit with Jane's love life—not always in the most welcome ways. She was the one who sent Tom home, of course, when there seemed to be a growing attachment, and she was the one who encouraged the somewhat ridiculous Samuel Blackall. I think perhaps
Persuasions
Lady Russell, who keeps Anne from Wentworth once and later encourages the duplicitous Mr. Elliot, may have been partly based
on Madam Lefroy. She died tragically in a riding accident on Jane's twenty-ninth birthday, when her horse got away from her and she fell off. Jane wrote a poem in her memory, speaking of her “solid Worth” and “captivating Grace.”
²⁹
She was not perfect, but she was wonderful. If there are traces of Madam Lefroy in Lady Russell, I do not think she could have rivaled the “genuine warmth of heart without pretence”
³⁰
of Jane's dear friend.

I stop for a moment simply to remember Anne in the Ashe churchyard, by the moss-covered Lefroy graves. It is peaceful and sheltered, gated with intricate wood arches, and shaded by trees.

One of my favorite images of Jane is that of her sitting by the fire with her mom and their neighbor Miss Benn, reading
Pride and Prejudice
after it had just come out—the already best-selling novelist reading her new book (the one she called “my own darling Child”
¹
) out loud with her mother, who couldn't get the voices right, and their old neighbor friend. Jane never put her own name on any of her books—a lady never would—so when
Sense and Sensibility
came out, it said only,
By A Lady
²
(except some of the printers misprinted it to read
By Lady A.
,which created some speculation in society about other ladies with last names beginning in
A)
,and when
Pride and Prejudice
came out, it said,
By the Author of Sense and Sensibility.
She hoped to keep her authorship a secret, and she and her mother endeavored to hide the source of their enthusiasm for the new novel, but it seems Miss Benn quickly guessed that they were more than just interested readers. I sit in the abbey, in my favorite spot at the desk by the bay window looking out on the garden, thinking over everything I have seen today—
the topaz crosses
³
that Jane scolded Charles for buying for her and Cassandra, Mrs. Austens red riding habit (which she wore when she got married and for two years following, because she could not afford another dress, then made into a coat for little Frank for his boyish hunting exploits),
⁴
a quilt Cassandra and Jane and their mother made, a lace collar Jane herself made, some of her small, perfect handwriting—neat and elegant—a lock of her hair (faded) and a lock of her father's hair (white), the small bedroom she and Cassandra shared (twelve by twelve?), her writing table by the bay window in the dining room. The table is tiny, small angles all around the top, on a little pedestal, not what I expected, and I thought she wrote in the drawing room and not the dining room. But there it was, in the dining room with the squeaky door so she could put her writing away if she heard anyone coming.

Chawton Cottage, the cottage Jane and her mom and sister shared along with their dear friend Martha Lloyd—where she sat by the fire reading her darling
P&P
—is now Jane Austens House Museum, restored to look the way it did when they lived there and full of family things. Chawton was Edward's estate, and the cottage was his gift to his mother and sisters after his father died. Well, not a gift exactly, but he let them live there. It's where Jane lived when her work began to be published, where she wrote or edited almost every story. Truthfully, the cottage looks like a big brick box, but it's quaint inside and the flower gardens are lovely.

I talked Susan and Lane and Catherine, my friends from the abbey, into coming with me today. (Or rather, they offered because they have been graciously driving me all around, public transportation in the Hampshire countryside being slightly difficult.) We went first to St. Nicholas Church—a different St. Nicholas, this one on the grounds of Chawton
House. It was a living Jane's brother Henry wanted, and Edward offered to buy it for him (because church positions were bought and sold then), but Mr. Papillon, to whom it had been promised—and whom some family members were always expecting to propose to Jane, which was a great joke—was not willing to give it up.
⁵
There were huge round sheep in the field outside, unshorn, with a few little ones too. We spent half an hour reading all the gravestones of the various Edward and Elizabeth Knights and found the graves for Jane's mom and Cassandra.

Edward seems to have been officially adopted into the Knight family when he was fifteen or sixteen, though he had been singled out by them much earlier.
⁶
Thomas and Catherine Knight were distant cousins of Mr. Austen. They came through Hampshire on their honeymoon and enjoyed young Edward, then just twelve, so much that they took him with them for part of their trip. (Which sounds very strange to us, but it was not unusual to have other friends or family on a wedding tour then.)

When it became clear that they wouldn't have children of their own, they began inviting him for holidays, which Mr. Austen grudgingly allowed, fearing Edward would get behind on his Latin grammar. But gradually it became evident that they wanted to adopt Edward and that he would not need his Latin grammar much longer. It was incredibly advantageous, landing Edward in a completely different realm of society. Edward wasn't eager to get away from his real family, so it was years before he went to live with the Knights permanently, and he waited until his adopted father and mother died before taking on the Knight name along with his inheritance.
⁷