Jane Austen (17 page)

Bath. This walk was spoken of as Bath’s Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens.

Jane made conversation with Edward’s Kentish neighbour, old Mr William Evelyn, who thought more of horses than of anything else, and she teased Cassandra by pretending to have flirted with him. Cassandra was shocked and reproved her sister for indiscretion. Wearily Jane explained she had been making the most of the story: she had only seen the man four times. Later he and his wife took Jane out for rides in their phaeton, which she found ‘bewitching’. In her letter Jane made the best ‘copy’ she could out of her dull social life, but the time in Bath was the low point of her experience. Aunt Leigh-Perrot had taken umbrage because a Miss Bond was offended that Mrs Leigh-Perrot had left Bath without saying goodbye, though the two ladies were not on visiting terms. Jane Austen described it as ‘the oddest kind of quarrel in the world’.

The proposed walk to Weston took place but everybody except Jane and Mrs Chamberlayne begged off. Mrs Chamberlayne was a good walker and climbed energetically up Sion Hill, arousing Jane’s competitive side. ‘I could with difficulty keep pace with her - yet would not flinch for the world.’ They stopped for nothing, marching on in the hot May sunshine, as if, Jane said, they were afraid of being buried alive. After this exhibition of mettle Jane was forced into a grudging admiration. A few days later they went walking together again and Jane managed to keep up with her. Such friendship as there was came to an end when the Chamberlaynes left Bath a few days afterwards. A Mrs and Miss Holder invited Jane and her mother to drink tea, and although Mrs Austen’s cold made it necessary for her to turn down the invitation, Jane went. It was the fashion to dislike them, Jane told Cassandra, but they were so polite and their white gowns looked so nice that she was won over, if only for the satisfaction of disagreeing with her Aunt Leigh-Perrot, who turned up her nose at the fashionable white gowns as ‘absurd pretension in this place’. Jane warned Cassandra that Miss Holder had an idea that Cassandra was remarkably lively: ‘therefore get ready the proper selection of adverbs, and due scraps of Italian and French.’ Miss Holder talked pathetically of her dead brother and sister. Death was never far away.

A girl called Marianne Mapleton, whom Jane had met on her visit to Bath in 1799, had died. ‘Many a girl on early death has been praised into an angel, I believe, on slighter pretensions to beauty, sense and merit than Marianne,’ wrote Jane, adding in the next sentence that the auctioneer Mr Bent seemed
bent
on being detestable, valuing the family books at only £70. Jane called on the Miss Mapletons the day after Marianne was buried to inquire after the family, not expecting to be let in, but found herself welcomed by Marianne’s pale and dejected sisters.

Another house the Austens looked at had damp in the kitchen and carried with it reports of discontented tenants and putrid fevers. Large houses in desirable situations within their means tended to be in poor condition. Affordable accommodation, compared with Steventon, was poky. Jane and her mother looked at houses in New King Street but they were also too small. Others were damp and an offer to raise the kitchen floor at 12 Green Park Buildings was not acceptable. Though the water might be out of sight it could not be sent away, as Jane remarked. At the end of May Mr Austen came back from Godmersham, having collected Cassandra from Kintbury on the way.

The family eventually moved into 4 Sydney Place at the end of Pulteney Street, flanking a part of the Sydney Gardens, which greatly pleased Jane. At that time Sydney Place was on the outskirts of the city, near open countryside. They had found the house, which now bears a plaque saying she lived there, as the result of an advertisement in the
Bath Chronicle
of 21 May. While the landlord was redecorating the Austens travelled. The roomy, commodious house had a pretty drawing room on the first floor with three tall windows which offered a view of the Gardens, with their sloping lawns and handsome trees. A green bank was crowned with a pillared classical pavilion. The Kennet and Avon Canal passed under an old stone bridge. On gala nights there were music, singing, cascades, transparencies, fireworks and illuminations. Jane watched some fireworks which she described as ‘really beautiful’ and she found the accompanying illuminations very pretty. The Austen parents thoroughly enjoyed their retirement and the cheerfulness of town life.

The Austens went to Sidmouth for part of the summer of 1801 at the invitation of the Revd Richard Buller, a former pupil of Jane’s father. Mr Buller’s vicarage was at Colyton in east Devon and he was recently married to a girl called Anna Marshall. Jane was growing sensitive about still being single herself and feared she would be embarrassed by displays of affection between the newly married couple but her fears were groundless. She even kept up a correspondence with Mr Buller afterwards. In 1805 he turned up in Bath, in bad health, and died at thirty. Jane also went to Dawlish where she found the library ‘pitiful and wretched’. The following year they went to Ramsgate and to Tenby and Barmouth in Wales and from there Mr and Mrs Austen and Charles, who had joined them, journeyed back to Hampshire, reaching Steventon on 14 August.

Frank had been appointed Captain of HMS
Neptune
in 1801, but in 1802 the temporary Peace of Amiens meant he and his men were paid off. He was at Portsmouth. His parents, with James and Mary, visited to see his fine ship but Jane and Cassandra were at Godmersham for a stay of several weeks. Edward now had seven children. Charles brought his sisters back to Steventon on 28 October.

He had received £30 as his share for capturing a privateer and was expecting £10 more. He had bought gold chains and topaz crosses (now in the Jane Austen museum at Chawton) for Cassandra and Jane. Jane pretended to scold but immortalized the gift in
Mansfield Park
as a present to Fanny Price from her sailor brother, William.

On 25 November 1802 Jane and Cassandra went to visit Catherine and Alethea Bigg at Manydown, expecting to stay two or three weeks. On 2 December came Harris Bigg-Withers proposal to Jane. Seen in the context of her age, her dissatisfaction with life in Bath or trailing round with her parents, and her pinched life of poverty, her refusal of this opportunity is dazzling in its integrity. Her sister-in-law Mary, handing the story down to Caroline, said the young man was Very plain in person … nothing but his size to recommend him’. Caroline added, ‘I have always respected her for the courage in cancelling that yes the next morning. All worldly advantages would have been to her - and she was of an age to know
this
quite well. My aunts had very small fortunes and on their father’s death they and their mother would be, they were aware, but poorly off. I believe most young women so circumstanced would have taken Mr W and trusted to love after marriage.’ Caroline’s mother Mary thought Jane had made a mistake in changing her mind. We may think the decision was correct, and also, given the background, heroic.

It was at this time that Eliza, whose son Hastings de Feuillide had died in 1801, went back to France with Henry in an attempt to lay claim to her first husband’s land. For what may, if report be true, have been the second time in her life she was forced to flee. Had her command of the French language been less than perfect, she and Henry would have been interned until the end of the war, which was still far from over.

In spring 1803 hostilities broke out again. The Austens were at Bath and Frank and Charles returned to active service, Charles to his previous job as first lieutenant of the
Endymion,
 Frank to Ramsgate to organize volunteers for coastal defence. There he met and became engaged to Mary Gibson. They waited to marry until he had some more prize-money and did not do so until 1806. Jane visited her brother at Ramsgate where she was observed by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, brother of ‘Madam’ Lefroy. He was the author of an autobiographical novel,
Fitzalbini,
 which Jane had found feeble when she read it in 1798. He described her as ‘fair and handsome, slight and elegant, with cheeks a little too full… Even then I did not know she was addicted to literary composition.’ Although between 1795 and 1799 Jane had drafted three novels, in Bath her literary output ceased almost completely.

I
N SEPTEMBER
1804, after Mrs Austen had recovered from a bout of illness, the family, accompanied by Henry and Eliza, went to Lyme, the beauty spot on the Dorset coast which figures so memorably in
Persuasion
, inspiring a lyrical outburst on landscape in the Romantic manner unique in Jane Austen’s fiction. It was on this holiday that Cassandra, at a picnic, made the sketch of Jane seen from the back, wearing a blue gown and bonnet. This was their second visit, as they had also been at Lyme on 5 November the previous year when there was a catastrophic fire caused by Guy Fawkes Day celebrations.

Jane was early attracted by the writings of William Gilpin, a clergyman who toured Britain in the 1770s, describing and illustrating the beauties of the countryside. An artist of considerable skill, he popularized the concept of the picturesque, which had originated in France and Italy and was nourished by the experience of sublime scenery on the Grand Tour. Gilpin was born in Cumberland, which formed his taste for landscape. Nature for Gilpin was God’s work of art and therefore superior to any work of man. Natural scenery was a suitable object of reverence, lifting the contemplative mind through rapture up to the Deity.

Jane writes emotionally about the wooded cliffs of Lyme in
Persuasion
, despite having made fun of Marianne Dashwood’s romantic enthusiasm for landscape in
Sense and Sensibility
and of Catherine Morland for her ignorance of picturesque vocabulary in
Northanger Abbey
. ‘Picturesque’ to Gilpin meant merely something which would look good in a picture but by the 1790s enthusiasm for scenery and gardens artfully arranged to look like wildernesses with artificial ruins had generated new descriptive jargon.

Lyme is 150 miles south-west of London, at the mouth of a narrow valley opening on a spectacular cliff-lined coast and fine sandy beaches. The town was first known as Lyme Regis (Latin for King’s Lyme) in 1316. As early as 1234 it was an important port. Jane Austen writes of Charmouth, which lies in a valley between the hills, with its ‘sweet retired bay backed by dark cliffs’ and its fragments of low rock among the sands. She could take a pathway along the top of the Church Cliffs, now so badly eroded that the cliff and its church have crumbled.

The Austens drove from Bath by way of Shepton Mallett, Somerton, and Crewkerne, joining the Lyme road where an old inn, the Hunter’s Lodge, stood. They passed through the cheerful village of Uplyme and down the long hill towards the charming old main street of Lyme, which seems to be, as Jane put it herself, ‘almost hurrying into the water’. Halfway down the street their chaise turned into a lane which ran westward and finally made a steep descent to the harbour. At the end of the little parade nearest the harbour on a grassy hillside was the long, rambling white cottage where they stayed. It had low ceilings and small windows, and a staircase so steep and narrow as to be dangerous. There were two doors, on different levels. In front was the entrance, with dining room and kitchen; at the top of the house the bedrooms opened out on to the bank behind.

On the middle floor was the drawing room, with a lovely view through its projecting bay window of the sea and harbour with the Cobb to the west and the picturesque chain of cliffs to the east. The Cobb is a massive, semicircular stone pier with upper and lower causeways. The steep flight of steps mentioned in
Persuasion
and known locally as ‘Granny’s teeth’ is still there. It dates from at least the early fourteenth century and figured in the 1995 film version of Jane’s novel.

Nearby, and visible from the projecting bay window of the drawing room, was a small white cottage perched on the corner of a sea wall near an old pier. This cottage was probably the original of the one in the novel where the Harvilles settled. Unlike other houses in sheltered Lyme, it was exposed to rough weather and would have necessitated Captain Harville’s ‘contrivances against winter storms’. Jane Austen’s brother Frank thought Captain Harville was drawn from himself. Only from the windows of that house could Captain Benwick have been seen after Louisa Musgrove’s accident, ‘flying past the house’ and towards the town itself for a surgeon.

When the poet Lord Tennyson visited Lyme later in the century his friends were anxious to point out where the Duke of Monmouth landed. The Duke was the illegitimate son of King Charles II of England. Monmouth raised an army and tried to seize the throne when Charles’s brother succeeded as James II but was eventually beheaded for treason in 1685. In one version of an often-told story Tennyson said, ‘Don’t talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!’

The Parade runs from the harbour to the old town. A stretch of firm sand served as a short cut for the horse-drawn wagons bringing freight up from the harbour to the town. Just beyond some thatched cottages stood the Assembly Rooms, perched on the eastern promontory of the bay and surviving till 1927. The Assembly Rooms, with music provided by three violins and a violoncello, opened their doors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The subscription was fifteen shillings and sixpence. Subscribers paid two shillings for balls, one shilling for card assemblies; on other nights tea and coffee cost sixpence, and sixpence was charged for cards, chess or backgammon. Everybody else was charged double.

It was about this time that Jane met the young man she may have been in love with, but who died. Cassandra knew the details but passed on to her niece Caroline only the vaguest possible outline. This is frustrating, as Caroline herself had a remarkably full and accurate memory.

Cassandra had gone to Weymouth. Henry and Eliza, who had moved from Upper Berkeley Street in London to a little terrace house, 16 St Michael’s Place, overlooking the then open fields of Brompton, had travelled down to Lyme with Jane and her parents. Jane wrote to Cassandra at Ibthorpe on 14 September to say she hoped Cassandra had reached Mrs Lloyd’s already. Jane sympathized with her sister’s disappointment that there was no ice at Weymouth. Before refrigeration winter ice was stored underground but supplies seem to have run out that summer. She was sorry too that Cassandra had arrived too late to see the Royal Family embark on the Royal Yacht the previous Wednesday. Jane had had a slight fever: there was a lot of it about. A Miss Anna Cove had been saved, according to her mother, from serious illness by the administration of an emetic. Mrs Austen had been playing cards. The game was Commerce. With characteristic dryness, Jane writes: