1802 Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex-life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet? Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D.H. Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow gutted spinster’ indicates that some sexual intercourse would have improved her fiction no end.
One can only wonder, and focus that wonder on this day, in winter 1802, when the 20-year-old Harris Bigg-Wither proposed marriage to the 27-year-old Jane Austen. He did so in the impressive surroundings of his family home, Manydown Park in Hampshire. Harris was the heir to the estate and could expect to be very well provided-for. He was eminently eligible and a catch for a well brought-up, but not well-dowered, parson’s daughter who – like Anne Elliot at 27 – might be thought to have lost her youthful ‘bloom’. Harris was accepted. The fact was known to the families, who rejoiced. Then, after what one must suppose was a sleepless night, Jane rejected her young fiancé the following day. One of the shortest engagements in literature was at an end. The Austen company fled in a coach the same day.
It is not known why Miss Austen changed her mind. It might be that she was put off by Harris’s recorded clumsiness of person and manner. She may also have been put off by the prospect of children – something one can suspect from hints in Emma Woodhouse’s distaste for marriage, having seen her sister Isabella’s child-a-year ordeal after her marriage to John Knightley. Harris Bigg-Wither, on the rebound, married two years later. His wife bore him ten children.
Austen’s greatest fiction – at least in its final, canonical form – was still to come. The biographer Claire Tomalin has little doubt that the world has reason to be grateful for that doubt-tossed night in December 1802. ‘We would naturally rather have Mansfield Park and Emma than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world.’ Or ten Bigg-Wither babies, come to that.