Jane Austen: The Consolations of Chawton Cottage

I am pretty well in health and work a good deal in the Garden.

Jane Austen, letter to Anna Austen, July 1814

Let us have the luxury of silence.

Edmund Bertram, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

It is a May morning in East Hampshire, 1811. Jane Austen’s Orleans plums are budding. From her letters and relatives’ recollections, I have an imagined portrait of the author, sitting in her favourite spot: near the front door of the cottage, at a small, twelve-sided walnut table, writing on tiny sheets of paper. At the creak of the front door, the pages are tucked away. On this day, her family gives her seclusion, if not quiet. Page after page is filled with her tiny writing: dip, hover, scribble, cross out, scratch and dip. She works quickly, because she has little free time, and concentrates intensely because she has no quiet study of her own. Every so often, she puts down her quill, and conjures up a vision: Fanny Price trembling for the rake Henry Crawford, or stewing over the wickedness of theatre. Then she picks up the pen, and starts again. Eventually the sounds of cooking, cleaning and talk are too much. The plots and subplots of her novel chafe. The clanking pots and servants’ chatter are jarring, and her eyes hurt. Enough. Austen puts her pen in the inkwell, and walks out into Chawton Cottage garden.

It is an instant break from the cramped dining parlour. The air is fresher, the light brighter. There is room to move. As her letters record, Austen notices the mock orange’s bold white petals and thick, sweet scent. The peony, a recent migrant from Asia, has blossomed again. And what Austen does not see, she anticipates: pinks, sweet Williams, columbines and fat plums. She walks slowly, looks carefully, breathes deeply. But not for too long—Austen has the usual chores and errands for the afternoon, and her unfinished manuscript goads her from the parlour. But by the time she returns indoors, with her characteristic businesslike step, the garden has already done her good. Jane Austen returns to her tiny workbench refreshed—not by books or gossip (both in good supply), but by a short holiday amidst Chawton’s fruit trees, clipped turf and exotic imports.

With these working habits, Jane Austen wrote her last three novels in about four years—three of the most beloved books in English literature: Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Despite sickness, domestic duties and the bittersweet ties of family, Austen kept scratching away on her tiny table, creating her incomparable characters.

 

White Glare

Jane Austen was not always so prolific. Without a garden, her writing suffered. In December 1800, the very month of her twenty-fifth birthday, Austen basically stopped writing for a decade. She penned letters, of course—perhaps thousands, even if we only have a handful now. Nevertheless, her novels were left mostly untouched. She sold Susan to a short-sighted publisher, who shelved it (holding it for a £10 ransom). She tried writing a new novel, The Watsons, but its gloomy, embittered story went nowhere. From 1800 to 1809, Austen’s books disappear from the public and private record. The woman whom literary critic FR Leavis called ‘the first modern novelist’ was barely writing at all.

Behind Jane’s silence was a four-letter word: Bath. In December 1800, her ageing parents announced their retirement: Mr and Mrs Reverend George Austen, and their unmarried daughters Cassandra and Jane, were moving to Bath, on the west coast. Once a Roman resort, and then an English one, Georgian Bath was a brand-new, fashionable holiday destination and health spa. Aristocrats and the rich took vacations there, immersing themselves in the sea, the hot springs and the Pump Room gossip. Architecturally and archaeologically, the city was exciting. Roman ruins and artefacts stood alongside grand new hotels and shops, chiselled from Bath stone. And Bath’s urban amenities were balanced by the charm of the local countryside, where a pleasant stroll was never far away—including Prior Park, with its grotto, Palladian bridge and wilderness. ‘Bath is the finest place on earth,’ wrote Dr Johnson’s biographer, the often-pickled whore-hound James Boswell, ‘for you may enjoy its society and its walks without effort or fatigue’. For many, Bath was a vibrant, beautiful city, which offered all the modern comforts and amusements, without London’s grime and sprawl.

Jane Austen may have enjoyed Bath as a visitor. But as a resident, she hated it. Even in sunshine she thought it ugly. ‘The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations’, she wrote to her sister in her first year in the new town. ‘I think I see more distinctly through rain.’ She didn’t like its ceaseless balls and parties, its flirtatious mood or its stone (‘white glare’, she dubbed it in Persuasion).

Even if Bath had been virtuous and quiet, it was sorely missing one thing: it wasn’t her town in rural Hampshire, with her private garden. It wasn’t Steventon, where she was born and raised, and where she wrote her first three novels. Apart from two brief, painful exiles for schooling, Austen had lived for a quarter of a century—her whole life, in other words—in Steventon. A small village surrounded by agricultural land, Steventon was home to perhaps thirty families, alongside the requisite corps of chickens, cows, horses, sheep and pigs. Jane’s father, George, was the parson, and schoolteacher to many of the local boys (including five of Jane’s brothers). If she was excited by the ‘bustle’ of a journey west, and the promise of seaside living, Austen still felt a loss.

Country Hampshire wasn’t Arcadia: it could be freezing, lonely and dull. No doubt the village’s size and isolation occasionally stifled Austen’s expansive imagination. Before she left, she wrote to Cassandra, suggesting that her village had grown tiresome to her. But this reads like irony or bravado, not genuine complaint. Steventon was her home, and her archetype of civilised, genteel life. Its intimacy, airiness and domestic rhythms were crucial to her wellbeing. ‘The same household routines and daily walks in the garden … the same sounds and silences’, writes her biographer Claire Tomalin, ‘all these samenesses made a secure environment in which her imagination could work’.

So part of Jane Austen’s silence was undoubtedly shock: the sudden, unavoidable removal of her security. She was accustomed to change: travelling, life’s unexpected grief and her parents’ economic uncertainty, which she handled with her trademark stoicism. But Steventon was one tangible, familiar constant—the promise of home, after so many trips away. The landscape, neighbours, weather; the familiar walks, visits and conversations; the intricate knot of identity that entangles a place—nothing in polite, modern Bath could measure up to this. The Austens’ new terrace house was large, comfortable and located away from the city’s thumping heart. But it wasn’t Hampshire’s agrarian parsonage, and there was no familiar garden to escape to.

While she kept busy with travelling, socialising, bathing or the duties of ‘Aunt Jane’, Austen lost her voice in Bath—she left it in Steventon, soon occupied by her eldest brother, James, and his second wife, Mary (whom Jane disliked). Her letters, once lively, portray Austen as deflated, if not depressed.

Syringas in Southampton

With the return of a private garden came Austen’s familiar energy and productivity. In 1806, she moved with her widowed mother and sister to a new home, Castle Square, in Southampton on the Hampshire coast. Alongside snark and trivia, some of Jane’s later letters gleam with enthusiasm for the landscape. She was back on home turf—still maudlin and grumpy, but closer to familiar ground.

In February of the next year, she wrote Cassandra a long epistle, which she hoped was interesting. ‘I flatter myself I have constructed you a smartish letter’, wrote Austen in her closing lines, ‘considering my want of materials, but, like my dear Dr. Johnson, I believe I have dealt more in notions than facts’. For most of the letter, of course, she grumbled. She complained that Cassandra was so long returning to Southampton. She noted that other folk were having babies and taking lovers—not her. She carped about sole (or its absence at the markets). And she lamented the loss of shyness in England, replaced by confidence. There’s a Pythonesque tone to Austen’s letters—as if she were about to burst out with: ‘You had fish? Luxury. We had to salt some coal and call it cod’.

But amidst the groaning and bitching is a lovely passage. There is a quiet exuberance, missing in so many of her Bath letters; a playfulness, untinged with cynicism or coolness, suggesting a genuine change of mood. It describes the garden at Castle Square, and it’s an arresting glimpse into Jane Austen’s inner life. It’s worth quoting the ‘authoress’ at length:

Our garden is putting in order by a man who bears a remarkably good character, has a very fine complexion, and asks something less than the first. The shrubs which border the gravel walk, he says, are only sweetbriar and roses, and the latter of an indifferent sort; we mean to get a few of a better kind, therefore, and at my own particular desire he procures us some syringas. I could not do without a syringa, for the sake of Cowper’s line. We talk also of a laburnum. The border under the terrace wall is clearing away to receive currants and gooseberry bushes, and a spot is found very proper for raspberries.

Here, Jane’s simple, sincere enthusiasm for the garden is endearing: it lacks her characteristic irony, or sharp judgement. With her talk of the syringa, or mock orange, she effortlessly weds William Cowper’s poetry (‘Laburnum, rich/ In streaming gold; syringa, ivory pure’) to the joys of her own backyard. It’s joyful and uncomplicated. When she writes of Castle Square’s reputation for ‘the best Garden in town’, her pride is palpable.

This tone of easy delight returned in later letters, once Jane was living in her final home, Chawton Cottage, and working on her last novels. Before settling in the house (which Jane hadn’t yet seen), she wrote to her brother about the grounds. ‘What sort of kitchen garden is there?’ she asked, combining domestic economy with private interest. There was also talk of having the turf ‘cropped’ before they moved in. In late spring 1811, once settled, Austen wrote to Cassandra in Kent, giving her a portrait of Hampshire life. Alongside newborns, illnesses, controversial marriages and the weather, she sketched the changes she saw in the garden. The flowers were blooming nicely, but Cassandra’s mignonette from Kent had ‘a wretched appearance’ (Jane frequently made comparisons with her sister—partly because she missed her and perhaps partly out of pride in her own green thumb). The plums were on their way, and Cowper’s syringas—obviously planted in Chawton as well as Southampton—were ready to blossom. Austen offers an attractive picture of an English cottage garden in spring. ‘Our young Piony at the foot of the Fir-tree has just blown and looks very handsome’, she wrote, ‘& the whole of the Shrubbery Border will soon be very gay with Pinks and Sweet-williams, in addition to the Columbines already in bloom’. Then Austen returns to family journeys, health, the spring storms.

Three years later, staying in her brother Henry’s London home, Austen was again struck by the gardens. In 1813, Hans Place was in a rural suburb of London, though hardly provincial—large houses, a good school, and fashionable gardens, all within walking distance of London city (Jane strolled there to do her shopping). Henry Austen’s abode wasn’t a palace with a large estate, but it was generous (at the time he was a well-to-do banker). His sister commended the house’s span and coziness, and then said simply: ‘the Garden is quite a Love’.

As with most of Austen’s private life, this is little more than a hint: of some more profound human partiality and pleasure. It’s difficult to gauge how much of her glee was caused by her removal from Bath—not so much where she was, as where she wasn’t. Nonetheless, as a reader it’s a relief to see Jane Austen so straightforwardly happy. Despite its vicissitudes, life has mood: themes and tones that colour the years. And the mood of Jane Austen’s Bath stay, like her time at boarding school as a child, was one of resigned dissatisfaction. But with the gardens of Castle Square, Hans Place and Chawton Cottage came simple enthusiasm—as if Austen were no longer obliged to suppress her sensual and imaginative delight.

This is why her Chawton talk of mock orange and Laburnum stands out. Amidst her usual frustrations and domestic record keeping, it’s a sanguine note. When we read of Jane moving her sister’s chilled pot plants into the cosy dining room, we can see quiet, domestic enjoyment; the rhythms and gestures that shape everyday life. And we know she was combining these homely, horticultural pursuits with her first love: writing. This is an important clue to Austen’s priorities in life. She adored the discipline of writing, but she also saw the garden as vital to her wellbeing. It lifted her spirits, and helped her to write so prolifically. But how?

In High Flutter

A good place to start is with her novels. A caveat, though: Austen was not her heroines; not the ‘young lady’ Sir Walter Scott saw in them. It’s convenient to conflate writer and character—particularly intelligent, unmarried gentlewomen of modest means from the provinces. But Austen published six novels in her lifetime, and not one of her heroines can be easily identified with their author. She had Elizabeth’s sharp tongue, but not her boldness in company; Elinor’s sense, but not her paralysing caution; Catherine’s love of literature, but not her Gothicism; Fanny’s piety, but not her priggishness; Emma’s curiosity for matchmaking, but not her conceited privilege; Anne’s loneliness, but not her late romance. In short, Jane Austen did not put herself into Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, as if this self were a simple, off-the-shelf phrase or paragraph.

Yet these characters came from somewhere: not life, raw and ready-made, but life as ore to be mined, refined, polished. She was not Anne Elliot, with her vain baronet father, or vapid older sister—but she knew enough of repression, disappointment, pride and boredom to imagine Anne’s life. The same can be said for her other novels: they were Austen’s experiences, skilfully transformed. This is helpful, because it reminds us that the reclusive author, with her many burnt letters, can still be glimpsed in her fiction. Her novels hint at the ideas that informed her writing and life—including her love of Chawton garden.

A good example comes from the world’s favourite Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. Jane finished her earliest draft of First Impressions at twenty-two years of age. What she thought of it at the time is unknown—she was certainly confident, but this tells us little. Over fifteen years later, after it was published in January 1813 by Thomas Egerton, Austen had mixed feelings. Like most Janeites, she liked her heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. ‘I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print,’ Austen told her sister Cassandra in the month of its publication, ‘& how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know’. But she was less sanguine about the virtues of the book as a whole. She recognised its vivacity and charm, but saw it as unserious, and lacking in contrasts. ‘The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling’, she told her sister. Still, she certainly thought it worthy of publication—even if she didn’t put her name to it (the author was ‘A Lady’), it was hers, faults and all.

What Austen didn’t know—as a twenty-something neophyte with a freshly inked manuscript, or as a newly published authoress—was that Pride and Prejudice was to become one of the most popular novels in the English language. It was number one in UNESCO’s World Book Day ‘books you can’t live without’ survey, and is a reliable earner for many publishers (Austen outsold John Grisham in 2002). What American author William Dean Howells wrote in 1901 is true today. ‘The story of “Pride and Prejudice” has of late years become known to a constantly … increasing cult’, he said in Harper’s Bazaar. ‘The readers of Jane Austen’, he continued, counting himself amongst them, ‘are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a creed, if not a religion’ (out soon from Richard Dawkins, perhaps: The Austen Delusion).

There are many reasons for the enduring appeal of this book: the wit and intelligent charm of the heroine; the comic bite of the caricatures; the elegance of the prose; the conflicted, frustrated passion of Lizzy Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy—coupled with today’s drooling over high hats, bushy sideburns and high-waisted dresses. Pride and Prejudice lacks psychological nuance, but as a satire, a love story and a sometimes blistering portrait of manners, it is a corker of a novel.

Part of this brilliance is Pride and Prejudice’s wonderful set pieces—carefully orchestrated scenes that provide the story with its dramatic turning points—the ball at Meryton, Mr Darcy’s first proposal, and Lizzy’s confrontation with Lady Catherine de Bourgh, for example. One of the most striking is Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Pemberley, the family home of Mr Darcy (known across the civilised world as the home of Colin Firth’s wet shirt). In particular, the gardens of the mansion—described by Mrs Gardiner, Lizzy’s aunt, as ‘delightful’—afford Lizzy an opportunity for contemplation.

The story is familiar to all Austen-lovers, but it’s worth following the details. On a fine afternoon in Derbyshire, Elizabeth Bennet was excited but apprehensive. In an open-air carriage with her uncle and aunt, the young provincial lady was on her way to Pemberley, the grand estate of the Darcy family. She feigned indifference to the outing. No-one yet knew of Mr Darcy’s clumsy marital overtures, so Mr and Mrs Gardiner weren’t aware she was ‘in high flutter’. And she was trying to be aloof. Darcy was rich, intelligent, handsome and noble—but his pride, and his contempt for her family, rightly incensed her. He had slighted her looks and insulted her with his conceited marriage proposal. ‘Could you expect me to rejoice’, he fumed, ‘in the inferiority of your connections?’ Worse still, he had threatened her sister’s happiness with his intrusions. To Lizzy and her family, the great Mr Darcy was a stuck-up stick-in-the-mud.

But bit by bit, Elizabeth’s resolve was changing. Even as she cursed his ‘pride and insolence’, she was slowly taking to Darcy. He was honest, forthright and—as she soon discovered—genuinely kind. They shared a keen wit, eloquence and disdain for vulgarity. Despite her misgivings, she was intrigued. Of course she didn’t want to meet him, wandering like a tourist on his estate (‘She blushed at the very idea’). But he was away for business, and she was free to roam at peace, without fear of embarrassing discovery—or so she thought. As they neared Pemberley, Miss Bennet held her breath, and their carriage slowly drove into the woods.

They drove uphill for a while, the oaks and elms arcing over the carriage. I imagine the trees were hundreds of years old; high, thick branches with generous foliage. (‘A beautiful wood, stretching over a wide extent.’) While it was cool in the woods, perhaps sunlight sparkled through the leaves. Every now and then, the trees would give way to a set scene: a crisp, clean marriage of grass and water, or a neoclassical temple. After a long drive, they reached the top of the wooded rise, and stopped at a clearing. It was breathtaking, and Elizabeth (like her aunt) was ‘delighted’. Pemberley House stood on high ground across from a large stream, in front of forested hills. The pond was teeming with fish, and swans decorated the water. The undulating ground gave the impression of natural landscape, yet it was finer: artful, noble, serene. ‘She had never seen’, wrote Austen, ‘a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by awkward taste’. This is partly what changes her mind about Darcy. She sees in the gardens Darcy’s soul: expansive, multifarious, but of a piece. And while aroused by its beauty, and a sudden rush of feeling, the heroine’s mind is calm, clear. The scales have fallen away. ‘At that moment, she felt’, wrote Austen, ‘that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!’

It’s a well-told story, and Austen handles the dramatic tension brilliantly. But more important is what the author does not do in this scene. Given Lizzy’s forthright, articulate manner, we might expect a monologue from the heroine: praise, in elaborate Georgian detail, of Pemberley’s charms. Of course Elizabeth, like Austen, was no Romantic. But this was Eliza Bennet’s great Pemberley epiphany—surely a little gushing was in order?

Not a peep. Despite her ‘high flutter’, as Austen put it, Lizzy held her tongue. This silence wasn’t arbitrary for the author; not a random novelistic detail. And nothing reveals this more keenly than her characterisation of Pride and Prejudice’s prize fool, Mr Collins. Elizabeth’s unctuous cousin was also a garden-lover. The newly married minister was very proud of his parsonage—its neatness, its nearness to his patroness’s estate, and its well-kept grounds. But instead of enjoying it in silence, he was loud, long-winded and pedantic. He would not shut up. He counted the trees, measured the walks and elaborated on every horticultural nicety. ‘Every view’, wrote Austen, ‘was pointed out with minuteness which left beauty entirely behind’. He desperately wanted his companions to praise his garden, in which he’d spent so many days (‘one of his most respectable pleasures’). In this, the garden was a stand-in for Collins himself; for his ambitions and expectations. And it was pretty—‘large and well laid-out’, as the author put it. But Collins’ blather obscured this very beauty, just as his vanity and obsequiousness hid the clergyman’s better qualities. Despite his Oxbridge education and standing in the community, Collins’ verbiage undercut his botanical success and made him look like a idiot.

In this fictional contrast, between her heroine’s silence and the parson’s talk, Austen offered a fascinating hint of her philosophical interests in the garden. This is the silent, meditative Jane who bent to tend flowers at Castle Square and Chawton; who dutifully rearranged pot plants, ordered Cowper’s Laburnums, and picked currants and gooseberries. It is an approach characterised by quiet labour and reverie, rather than gossip or chores. And Austen clearly perceived this silence as valuable.

The One Infallible Pope

To understand the silence of Pemberley, it helps to know a little more about Austen’s philosophical outlook; about the ideas and intellectual movements that inspired her. The authoress was never a scholar or pamphletist, but she was a prodigious reader. While she has been trivialised as a ‘woman writer’—by which critics often disdainfully mean romance authors—she was familiar with a range of scholarly works. Simply because she didn’t quote from Robert Henry’s The History of England does not mean Austen was ignorant of its contents (having read it, the 25-year-old authoress promised her sister ‘a stock of intelligence’ when they next spoke). She enjoyed Dr Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, as well as a history of England by Oliver Goldsmith, Johnson’s brilliant, vain sparring partner. She also read sermons, praising one Thomas Sherlock to her sister. More surprisingly, we find Austen in 1813 remarking on the entertaining, forceful style of ‘An Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire’, by Captain Pasley. ‘The first soldier’, she writes to Cassandra from Chawton, ‘I ever sighed for’. Clearly, Jane Austen had catholic reading tastes, which touched on history, philosophy, theology, social commentary and the military.

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle speculates that Austen was also influenced by the Fourth Earl of Shaftesbury, the patron and student of Enlightenment luminary Thomas Locke. Shaftesbury’s work was shaped by many philosophers, but Aristotle was a particularly important influence. And certainly, Austen’s characters—intricate, subtle marriages of vice and virtue—are more reminiscent of Aristotle’s morals than the black-and-white ethics of her age’s Calvinist theologians (Ryle calls their moral psychology ‘bi-polar’). Austen’s villainous characters, like Willoughby, are certainly flawed, but not devilish—the dashing young libertine of Sense and Sensibility is weak, dishonest and inconstant, but not evil. There are no cardboard-cutout villains in her novels. In the same way, her heroines are not perfect creatures, without shortcomings or errors; from Lizzy Bennet’s prejudice to Emma’s conceit, Austen gave her women the nuance and variety of genuine human beings. In Austen, there are many moral ‘types’, rather than simply two camps—Saved and Damned, Good and Bad, Holy and Satanic. This, says Ryle, was Aristotle’s outlook, and from him to Shaftesbury. ‘Shaftesbury had opened a window’, Ryle wrote, ‘through which relatively few people in the eighteenth century inhaled some air with Aristotelian oxygen in it. Jane Austen had sniffed this oxygen’. In short, Austen’s deceptively simple novels were informed by some of the finest minds of her age: philosophers, essayists, biographers and historians.

But just as influential were the poets. Austen’s impressions of right and good conduct were shaped as much by poetry as by systematic thinkers. ‘The word “moralist”’, Ryle notes, ‘would cover Goldsmith or Pope as well as Hutcheson or Hume’. This is particularly true of Alexander Pope, arguably the eighteenth century’s greatest—and certainly the most quoted—English poet. His work is less read now, but many of his lines are still familiar proverbs: ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’, and ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’. While the two men grated on one another, even the brilliant French dramatist and provocateur Voltaire praised Pope’s work. ‘The best poet in England’, he generously told a correspondent, ‘and at present in the world’. High praise from a man who had felt belittled and ignored by Pope. If the poet’s ideas were sometimes hackneyed, the formulation was fresh, crisp and biting. Indeed, Pope was here upholding his own definition of ‘wit’: ‘Nature to advantage dress’d;/ What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’. The poet’s job was to give ordinary insights new and memorable expression.

In this light, it’s no exaggeration to say Pope dressed the thought of the Anglophone eighteenth century, including that of Jane Austen. Like Shaftesbury and Austen, Alexander Pope was in the Aristotelian tradition: more interested in human variety than the Calvinist battle for souls. He saw character as subtle, various and fickle. While each man had a ‘ruling passion’, all was change: ‘Manners with fortune, humours turn with climes’, he wrote in a letter to Lord Cobham, ‘tenets with books, and principles with times’. Accordingly, Austen quoted Pope in two of her novels, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, and in a letter to Cassandra, she joked that he was ‘the one infallible Pope in the world’ (ironic, given his Catholicism). In the same letter, Austen used the poet to demonstrate her own stoicism. ‘Whatever is, is best’, she wrote, poignantly paraphrasing a line from Pope’s moral poem ‘An Essay on Man’.

And it is Pope’s ‘Essay’ that gives an outline of Austen’s unarticulated (but by no means inarticulate) philosophical worldview. Like Austen, Pope’s starting point was simple: man’s ignorance. By this, he didn’t mean just misinformation or inaccuracy—the sort of ignorance overcome by fact checking or detective work. Instead, Pope was talking about the basic limitations of human perception and knowledge. Whereas God sees and knows all, he argued, we can only ever know a tiny portion of our tiny world (let alone the cosmos); we are petty, small, vulnerable and easily confused creatures. Pope’s God has a magisterial grasp of the whole, while humankind clumsily clings to a part: a little patch of earth, and an even smaller snatch of eternity.

Perhaps more importantly, Pope said there’s little point in questioning this cosmos. First, he argued, our ignorance makes any exhaustive answer impossible. We can no more understand the cosmos than an ox can the farmer’s agricultural plan—like the ox, we are simply not up to it. Second, even if we were to miraculously comprehend the universe in its totality, it would be foolish and futile to expect anything to change. ‘Of systems possible it is confess’d’, wrote Pope, ‘that Wisdom infinite must form the best’. In short, we have the finest cosmos possible. From our bounded horizons, things might seem ugly, unjust or unreasonable, but actually it’s a balanced, harmonious system; an infinitely precise means, working toward His divine ends. Every species of mite, bird and mammal is an instrument in this symphony, but none, save the maestro, knows the grand dénouement. And to want to alter our part is absurd and dangerous, for the tiniest discordance or missed beat ruins the composition. Imagine the universe as an exquisite, delicate music box, with countless gears, wheels, springs: the slightest damage ends the song. ‘From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike’, he wrote, ‘tenth, or the tenth thousandth, breaks the chain alike’. This is a perfect, unified, rational harmony. In Pope’s world, all is as it should be, as it must be.

For the poet, this had a clear moral lesson: enough of the speculation and lamentation; just get on with life. Of course we might rail against privation, or rage against slights; we might regret lost chances, or be fearful of the future. But all in all, we have precisely the power, authority and capacity we should have—and all of the world’s forces are competing and colluding to produce a stable, law-like cosmos. We can’t interrogate it, or change a single letter or line of the blueprint; it all stands, universal and eternal. Better to give up on cosmic conceit and get on with the business of human life, with our everyday victories and defeats. This is the source and sense of Jane Austen’s misquoted phrase, in her letter to Cassandra. ‘Spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite’, wrote Pope, ‘one truth is clear, Whatever is, is right’. Austen’s credo, via the poet, was a simple but powerful one: all’s well up there, so save your energy for down here.

If the theology is suspect, there are, nonetheless, several bold ideas in this cosmology, which resonate with Jane Austen’s moral universe. Most obviously, Pope was suggesting that there’s no point taking issue with the facts of physics or biology, or worrying about the grand ‘why’ of the universe. Better to take care of our families, be loyal to our friends and leave something beautiful or useful behind us when we die. More crucially, Pope was arguing that the scope and scale of this human life is worthwhile; that we have our allotted powers and potential, and they are a valuable part of a beautiful whole.

Common to Pope and Austen was this combination of enthusiastic worldliness and quiet, consoled faith. Like the poet, Austen read broadly, and with a sharp eye for detail and an ear for style. But she was no metaphysician: the sublime intricacies of Leibniz’s ‘best of all possible worlds’ were beyond her interest, if not her comprehension. She believed in a cosmic order—and had no wish to probe or overthrow it. ‘Religion is there’, writes Claire Tomalin in her sparkling Austen biography, ‘an essential part of the fabric of her life. It was never something to be questioned or investigated … more of a social than a spiritual factor’. Behind Austen’s literary marriages, families, and portraits of virtue, and upholding her own perseverance and patience, was faith in the order of things. This is precisely why the authoress could focus on her domestic squabbles, romantic intrigues and economic struggles: they were her domain of sympathy, aspiration and knowledge. Pope’s striking lines capture this entirely:

Know then thy self, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is Man.

Placed on this isthmus of a worldly state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great.

In this crisp portrait of humanity’s alloy, we have Austen’s flawed characters and familiar plots, and her own quiet faith in a world beyond her own rural England. Her novels were this ‘proper study’.

Tolerable Comfort

This calmative is what Lizzy Bennet quietly savoured at Pemberley. Not its promise of wealth and status, but its quiet representation of harmony and order. It reminded the anxious young woman that her world, with all its grief and worry, was not everything; that there was dignity, restraint and grace in nature—the virtues she also saw in Darcy.

What Austen put into Pride and Prejudice, she herself experienced in Chawton, Castle Square and her Steventon acres. She could endure the draining vicissitudes of family and art—from boredom to grief to elation and back—and then withdraw to Southampton’s Laburnum, or Chawton’s beech. Regardless of siblings’ squabbles, the threat of war with the French or the stubbornness of a character who will not ‘fit’, the bulbs still flowered every spring. ‘I hear today’, wrote Austen to her sister on the last day of May 1811, ‘that an Apricot has been detected in one of the Trees’. This is more than another trivial fact; more than gossip or mild amusement. It is a nod to the eternal signs of life. In Chawton’s garden, Austen could encounter Pope’s perfect cosmos: a reality less ambiguous, flawed and transient than that of human affairs. It reaffirmed her quiet faith—that permanent backdrop behind the foreground action.

If Austen could be unsentimental in her letters, she was certainly willing to be comforted. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery’, she wrote famously in Mansfield Park. ‘I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody … to tolerable comfort.’ Even allowing for the usual pinch of Austen irony, she was serious: her published novels always pursued happy endings, in which even Marianne Dashwood gets her colonel. Despite her recognition of psychological, social and economic reality, the authoress was happy to seek and offer consolation: ‘tolerable comfort’ in Pope’s metaphysical guise. Austen was rediscovering what the theologian Augustine described as ‘occasions when human reason is nearer to some sort of converse with the nature of things’: sowing seeds, planting cuttings, grafting slips. Chawton Cottage garden was a lesson in what’s now called ‘the big picture’—but Jane Austen savoured it on a smaller scale.