A Walk with Jane Austen (28 page)

Stoneleigh Abbey is lovely, a grand, white classical front that has been marred a little by smoke, with rows of windows looking out on a broad green lawn, with the slow River Avon running alongside. The house is built around an old abbey, so that one wing is completely “new” as of the early 1700s. Much of the rest dates back to the Tudor period, but there are parts of the twelfth-century abbey still in existence. Which makes it awfully similar to Northanger Abbey, where Catherine visits the Tilneys and is terribly discouraged to find so little of the original abbey left and so little in the way of romance and horror. I took the train here today on my way to Gill's cousin Niki's in London, and once again I have all of my suitcases and look like I am moving in.

This was the Leigh family's—Jane's mother's family's—ancestral home. Jane and her mother came to visit shortly after her father's death. The fifth Lord Leigh had died twenty years previously. He went mad apparently, left no heirs, and left the estate to his sister, but her recent death meant the inheritance of the estate was much in question. Jane and her mom went to visit her cousin, Thomas Leigh, who wanted to go to Stoneleigh to help make his claim for the estate. Mrs. Austen called the state bedroom—now a rather dark library—“an alarming apartment just fit for an Heroine,”
¹
and it seems that it is similarly situated to the room that was the deceased Mrs. Tilney's in the book, which Catherine visits on her own, hoping to find a scandal, hoping to find the poor abused wife hidden away, being starved to death by her secretly cruel husband. Jane would have written
Northanger Abbey
long before she came to Stoneleigh, although she did revise it later.

Humphry Repton, already working on Thomas Leigh's estate in Adiestrop, did the grounds after Jane's visit, which they say to some extent model those of Sotherton Court in
Mansfield Park.
I couldn't remember the description enough to tell, and I didn't have time to explore. But Repton—possibly the most influential landscape gardener England ever produced
²
—is much discussed in
Mansfield Park
as the one Rushworth wants to get to improve Sotherton.

There is a simple chapel as well, which seems to fit the description of the one there, though Jane didn't go into great detail with it. Jane took a great deal of pride in making her characters up from scratch— she was certainly inspired by people she knew, but her creations were all her own. There are so many great houses that claim to have inspired her, but I imagine she probably invented country estates the way she invented people, though she may have taken pieces from one and pieces from another.

In the midst of all the other history and non-Austen information (like the tiny bathtub Queen Victoria used when she stayed here), I was struck by a picture in one of the parlors of a pretty woman named Elizabeth Wentworth with dark hair, kind eyes, and a gentle smile. It seems she was a friend of the family who came to visit for five days and ended up staying forty years. I immediately wondered if there was any connection to Captain Wentworth of
Persuasion
,and they told me Anne's story is actually based on her. I've never heard of her before, but they say that Betty Wentworth's maiden name was Betty Lord. As a young woman, she fell in love with a naval officer whom her mother forbid her to marry. But love won, and she married him anyway in secret. Not until years later, when she was being pressured to accept another suitor, was the whole thing revealed. Different from Anne, but perhaps
this was Jane's inspiration. The timing would have been right since she wrote
Persuasion
well after her stay at Stoneleigh.

I heard writer Sue Monk Kidd talk once about the defining choice every woman makes between love and independence. There's no doubt in my mind right now what I would choose. I want to write, and I want to have a family. I want to go to grad school as well and travel and all other sorts of things, but if I have a chance at love, I would choose that. I know that now, at this moment in my life.

Some of us do get to make the choice between love and independence, but for many of us the choice simply happens—having found no one, having had no one find us, we land squarely and often sur-prisedly on the side of independence.

We may alternately long for it and turn from it, the question of the choice between independence and love not being a simple one, as it wasn't for Jane. We recognize the value of what we lose if we marry— and not merely the simple if significant ability to spend all of our time and money completely on ourselves, but the value of the completely self-directed life (although as a Christian I don't view my life as self-directed but God-directed, there is still an essential freedom here).

I love that freedom. And convolutedly long for someone to share it with. I long for someone to care about the quotidian things, to know about the daily turmoil and disruptions. I long for a sense of family. I find myself carrying on ten wonderful, in-depth discussions with ten excellent friends who rarely know one another, feeling incredibly grateful and incredibly stretched. So I long for someone to make a home with.

I long to be cherished.

And I realize that all marriages have their dark days—perhaps all come close to fissure at some point. I know that many women who
choose love lose out on both scores, losing independence only to have love drain slowly away over the years. The longer I continue in my single life, the more determined I become that only something great could lure me away.

I wonder if Betty Lords great love lasted, if it was worth her risk. How dashing was the real Captain Wentworth? Betty—and Jane as well— could only ever have limited independence, could never entirely get away from their families. So Betty chose love, against every prohibition, perhaps planting the grain of the story that would become dear Anne.

I sat at the café at St. Mary's in Oxford, at the same table Jack and Spencer and I ate at on our last day there, eating the best omelet I have ever had—over toast, with a little balsamic vinegar on it, accompanied by a fresh salad with herbs. I was full of joy. I sat there outside just remembering, at this wooden table on the stone, watching the gray clouds over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera with the bright sun behind, praying the sun would win, and enjoying the weightiness of Oxford. Just as I sat there eating and drinking my almost-decent coffee, the sun did win. It stayed out all the rest of the day.

I went into the Ashmolean Museum, just for a few minutes, to see some sketches from da Vinci and Rembrandt, but I'm afraid I've lost all my patience with museums, so I walked down to Magdalen College again (once again, buying cigars en route) and sat in front of Lewis's
New Building to wait while they finished moving the college flock of deer so I could walk around quiet Addisons Walk. Big groups of people were out punting on the river in the sun—or, more accurately, trying to learn to punt—but the walk itself was almost empty. Jack said there was a wonderful view of the city here, but I couldn't find it and was too tired to look much and, honestly, too tired to do much thinking.

I walked the wide path all the way down the banks of the River Cherwell, manicured lawns on one side and manicured river on the other, with the occasional bevy of swans. I lay on the grass in the sun. I wanted to turn over again the things in my heart, every goodness from the trip, to prepare for whatever might meet me when I got home.

I went back to Christ Church Cathedral for Evensong. It seemed like a perfect little bookend for the end of the trip since that's how it began.

The choir was there. I was so glad. There is something about hearing the psalms sung as opposed to just having them read. I sat in a pew on the south side in the late afternoon light, facing one of the large stained-glass windows. My heart fully participated, in spite of my exhaustion—maybe in some ways because of my exhaustion. And then they started to sing, the glorious choir.

I didn't hear which psalm they were starting with, so I couldn't follow along, but the three they sang are closely familiar.

“The Lord is my light and my salvation,” they sang, “whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1).

Yes
,my heart responded.
Yes.

There are so many uncertainties, but this I know. This is what I seek, to dwell in the house of the Lord, to gaze upon his beauty. He will keep me
safe; he will shelter me and set me high upon a rock. He will hear my voice, be merciful to me, and answer me.

My heart says, Seek his face.

He will teach me his way and lead me in a straight path.

To the Lord I call, praying that he will not turn a deaf ear to me. If he is silent, it will be like death itself. He will hear my cry for mercy. I will lift up my hands.

The Lord is my strength and shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy.

Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Give him the glory due his name. The voice of the Lord thunders over the waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The voice of the Lord is majestic. He is enthroned forever.

I am confident of this, that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the hnd of the living. He will give me strength. He will give me peace.
¹

I do not know why, but I know these things more than anything else. They are dear to me, and in that moment in Christ Church Cathedral—with the stained glass and the choir and the prayers, the strong old hymns, all the blessings I have been lavished with and all the deep questions—I knew them to be true.

At thirty-nine thousand feet, somewhere south of Newfoundland, my pen exploded and I got ink on my jeans. Its truly a lost day. My
eyes
looked horrible—bloodshot and puffy—and I was beyond tired. I couldn't concentrate on anything for more than an hour, and that was a very bad, reading-incredibly-slowly kind of concentration. I could not abide the thought of a movie when I got on board, so I tried to read
the new
Harry Potter
book but didn't have enough energy for that either. I slept a bit but kept waking up with that jarring, falling, jumpy sensation that comes from trying to sleep on an airplane and not being entirely sure you wont fall out of the sky as a result. I had some minipanic attacks before lunch and knew that when you get this tired, fear overwhelms—irrational fears of very small things, like,
You want me to do what? You want me to eat lasagna? You want me to sit here in this metal tube hurtling through space while it fills up with dinner smells, people just eating and pretending that everything is normal?

My psyche wasn't entirely capable of that, so I ate my lasagna in very small bites and prayed I wouldn't pass out or somehow fall through the bottom of the plane.

Heathrow was nightmarish. There were masses of people everywhere, everyone going in different directions, so that it was impossible to move anywhere in a straight line. My incredibly long check-in line included insane French circus people carrying stuffed animals, making loud chicken noises, and wearing various fake noses—one of which was made to look like a man's private anatomy—and generally making themselves as obnoxious as possible. And then there was the French couple behind me kissing passionately the entire time we were in line.

In that moment, completely exhausted, hungry, trying to manage my suitcase, my ridiculously heavy backpack, and a carrier bag full of odds and ends that was now beginning to rip, surrounded by a sea of humanity and annoying French circus kissing people, I came to several stark realizations:

1. I do not like French people.
   

2. I do not want anyone to kiss me. Ever.
   

3. I am sure that Jack has no intentions whatsoever, and how could I not have seen that before?