But that wasn’t how it ended.
True, she never married, there would be no fatherly husband, the kind she came to like best, a Mr. Knightley or Colonel Brandon, for her.
But it turned out she didn’t need one, because one fine day in 1808, Jane Austen and her mother and sister were offered a house. Not just a house, but a wonderful house, called Chawton Cottage, with six bedrooms, a garden, and in Hampshire, no less, so not just a house, but a home. In the land she loved, the hills she could “explain,” only about fifteen miles from Steventon, where she’d grown up. It had come to her rich brother from his benefactor, and now it occurred to him that it might serve for his mother and sisters, and then, just like that, their exile was over.
Jane Austen was almost giddy with joy. She wrote, of the house, to another of her brothers:
. . . how much we find
already in it to our mind;
And how convinced, that when all complete
It will all other Houses beat,
That ever have been made or mended,
With rooms concise, or rooms distended.
And, “Yes, yes,” she wrote to her sister, “we will have a pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 guineas, and I will practice country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews and nieces.”
Nephews and nieces whom she loved and was loved by. “Aunt Jane and I walk every day in the garden.” “Aunt Jane and I drove about shopping.” “Aunt Jane and I very snug.”
“The whinnying of harpies”? “Mean” Jane Austen? Or a single woman sheltered at last? In out of the “white glare” with its pitiless appraisals, sheltered enough to think once more of the pleasures of her own life, of playing her beloved country dances on her new pianoforte, and then, finally, and at last, that half-secret, most intense of all pleasures of which she was essentially deprived all these long silenced years—her work.
The Austen women moved into Chawton Cottage in the winter of 1809. They invited a close friend, Martha Lloyd, to join them, partly because that was how women lived in those days, and partly so Jane wouldn’t have to be alone with her mother when Cassandra was traveling. The logistics of having Martha while leaving guest rooms for those nieces and nephews meant that Jane and her sister would have to share a room, but they likely would have anyway. “They are wed,” their mother would, annoyingly, say. But they were wed, in a way—bound by sheer inclination even beyond the blood tie of being sisters. They truly liked each other, trusted and missed each other, shared tastes, opinions, and a private laugh at the world. Put into words by Jane.
There was no dressing room off the bedroom at Chawton for a desk, but it was a house of women, and quiet enough that Jane Austen found she could write downstairs and be mostly unbothered. Unbothered enough so that the first year at Chawton, she sat and revised “Elinor and Marianne” into Sense and Sensibility. Her brother Henry, living in London and mixing with a fashionable set, got it sold and published for her, and the small edition sold out. That was in 1811.
Meanwhile, she was “lopping and chopping,” as she put it, “First Impressions” into Pride and Prejudice. This was published in 1813.
Suddenly life was less bleak; life was, one might even say, beautiful. All the doubts, all the slights, subtle or less so, had been transmuted into art, and turned out to be just what she needed, what she drew on, to preserve her light touch from superficiality. The depths under her thin black ice.
Even her unmarried state, her childlessness—true, there were no little replicas of her own clear hazel eyes, her pink cheeks, “too full.” But had she married—let’s say Harris Bigg-Wither, to whom she’d said yes that strange night eleven years before—would she have been our Jane Austen? Harris himself did marry a few years later; went on, in fact, to father ten children, five girls and five boys. Would Jane Austen Bigg-Wither, in the throes of perpetual pregnancy, have found a moment to turn “First Impressions” into Pride and Prejudice? Would she have even survived all that childbirth? Many—very many—didn’t.
But she—she suddenly found that from being “least and last,” she somehow now had it all. Money of her own, and the exaltation that brings to one who has been so long dependent. It wasn’t even that it was much—she received for the four books published in her lifetime £684—but it was hers. She rushed out to buy beautiful material for gowns for herself and Cassandra. “Remember, I am very rich,” she joked to her sister. No more dowdy caps for them. Her new money had made her “less indifferent to Elegancies. I am still a Cat if I see a Mouse.”
“Old maidish”? Then bring on the old maids, and their children. “I have had my own darling child from London,” she exulted to Cassandra, Pride and Prejudice proofs in hand. She had even seen one of the characters, she teased, at an exhibit of paintings in London, a Romney portrait that seemed to her a perfect Jane Bennet, and “there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her.” Lizzie, on the other hand, would be “in yellow.”
There was no Lizzie to be found, though, not even among the late portraits by Sir J. Reynolds. “I can only imagine that [Darcy] prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling—that mixture of love, pride, and delicacy.”
Ha, ha. So what if D. H. Lawrence didn’t get it? She wasn’t the only one, by the way, thinking about Lizzie and Darcy, Marianne and Elinor. The Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, thought that she and Marianne were “very like in disposition, the same imprudence . . . I must say it interested me much.” Her father, the future George IV, insisted on sets of both books at each of his residences.
The books had, by the way, been published anonymously, as “by a Lady,” but her brothers were hard-pressed to keep the secret. Charles Austen, the naval commander, wrote that when he “praised [Sir Walter Scott’s best-seller] Waverley highly, a young man present observed that nothing had come out for years to be compared with Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility. As I am sure you must be anxious to know the name of a person of so much taste, I shall tell you it is Fox, a nephew of the late Charles James Fox,” the great opposition leader in Parliament.
And who on board ship wouldn’t own all, as did Charles? But so did brother Henry, a banker in London, with less excuse but more temptation—when he heard his sister’s novels praised, he, too, spilled the beans and basked in her growing glory.
And though unwilling at first to be viewed as a “lady novelist,” “a wild Beast,” as she put it, she found herself beginning to take a breath on the whole thing, beginning to uncurl a bit in that sun. She even wrote to a niece of “the pleasures of vanity . . . at receiving the praise which every now and then comes to me, through some channel or other.”
She went to a dance and found herself in “the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago,” she wrote to her sister. “I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.”
Quite as happy—happier, even proud. She had chosen her work over what you might call “life”—marriage, children, security, riches—and how many do that? Especially women then—who had the guts? No one. Statistically no one.
What women do is to go on “trusting to love after marriage,” and it works, they learn to love their nice rich husbands whose features smile up from the crib by their sides. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, she trusted to something else, something bigger, and mostly that doesn’t work out. Mostly, in life, she would have lived and died quiet as a mouse, unnoticed, unknown, at the far end of the table, “last and least.”
But this time, the work, that spark she’d trusted, had caught fire, and lit her life. And she was happy, she found, “a Cat,” on her own terms, and even the weather was wonderful. November in England, but “I enjoy it all over me,” she wrote to her sister, “from top to toe, right to left, long, perpendicularly, diagonally.”
And there they all are, her own brave fighting girls, Lizzie and Marianne, Emma and Anne Elliot, and even Eliot’s future Maggie Tolliver and Brontë’s Cathy Earnshaw and on and on, all of them enjoying November, from top to toe with Jane Austen.