I have been following Jane Austen around for a long time. Like so many people I was introduced to her work at school – Pride and Prejudice when I was fourteen, the perfect age. The school was in Dorking, or ‘the Town of D—’ as Jane Austen puts it in The Watsons. It was a short walk from Box Hill, site of the disastrous picnic in Emma. I didn’t notice any Mr Darcys or Mr Knightleys in Form 4A, but there were plenty of aspiring heroines like Catherine Morland. Pride and Prejudice was one of the first novels for adults that I fell in love with. It transported me from a world of boys who tortured wasps to Pemberley. I remember reading it in the garden of our house, which was in Reigate, not Dorking, in the company of a neighbour’s disreputable frog-killing ginger tom. I called him Ginger Wickham.
I am Jane Austen’s five-times-great-niece. It is a nice thing to be but no claim to fame. Jane Austen’s brothers had thirty-three children between them, so two hundred years on there must be thousands of Austen descendants. But when I visited my great-aunt in Winchester I loved looking at some little portraits of Jane Austen’s sailor brothers, Francis (my ancestor) and Charles, and what turned out to be a rare depiction of her father, the Reverend George Austen. These portraits are now on display at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire so I can visit them there.
I went to university in Southampton and still live in the city and teach creative writing at the university. There are still traces of the Southampton Jane Austen knew when it was her home before she finally settled at Chawton. The sea has been pushed back from where it once came up to the city walls so that she could see it from the garden she created with Francis’s family, her sister Cassandra and her mother. She liked the city – there was and is much more to it than the stinking fish mentioned in Love and Freindship.
From 2009 to 2010 I had the immense good fortune to be the writer-in-residence at Jane Austen’s House Museum. I reread all Jane’s works and her letters and had a wonderful year with the staff and volunteers, talking to visitors, running writing workshops, visiting schools, generally getting lost in Austen and working on my fifth novel. On Jane Austen’s 234th birthday, 16 December 2009, I was one of the first in the house. I remember going to open the shutters in Jane’s bedroom and desperately hoping that I’d catch a glimpse of her. I didn’t, but this book had its genesis during that year. Spending so much time where Jane Austen lived, where she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion and revised her three earlier novels, walking where she did and seeing the views from her windows was magical and inspiring. The museum isn’t haunted, but many of the staff, volunteers and visitors testify to its healing atmosphere. I have now run many writing workshops at Jane Austen’s House Museum and elsewhere, using Jane’s work and methods to inspire writers working in all genres. I’m so grateful to the museum for the opportunities it has given me and to the writers who have come to the workshops, sharing their writing, ideas and experiences.
I thought of those writers as I worked on this book. I hope it will be useful to them and to writers around the world who love Jane Austen or are less familiar with her work, and to readers, teachers and Janeites everywhere.
I hope this book will help you, whether you are writing a novel, concentrating on short stories or working in another form. People love Jane Austen’s work for so many reasons – the comedy, her sparkling dialogue, the unforgettable characters, the accuracy of her observations, her neat and satisfying plots, her use of language, the way she writes relationships, and how she captures what it is to be in love, lonely, bullied, wrong, disappointed, to be part of a family . . . The list goes on and on. Her letters give us wonderful insights into her life, and in them she gives advice on writing; I have included that too.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing this book was deciding which extracts to use and then having to limit their length. I hope you find the advice and exercises useful. I’m sure that the quotations will send you back to Jane Austen’s novels and letters themselves. There is no better place to go.
Rebecca Smith
Spring 2016