Jane Austen:
At Home in Hamphire

The American Revolution started in the year Jane Austen was born. When she was seventeen, the Reign of Terror began in France. Two years before her death, England and France fought the Battle of Waterloo. Jane Austen lived in a world torn by revolutionary violence — and she never wrote a word about any of it.

But she knew about it. Two of her brothers saw extensive combat as naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars. Her cousin and close friend, Eliza de Feuillide, was a guillotine widow. In fact, Eliza was staying with Jane's family in Hampshire when her husband had his head severed for the education and amusement of a Paris mob. Oh yes, Miss Austen knew all about it.

Rural Hampshire was a refuge for Jane Austen; although she lived elsewhere, she wouldn't write elsewhere. For the first twenty-five years of her life she lived happily with her parents and seven siblings in the tiny village of Steventon. After that, she suffered for eight unproductive years in the bustling towns of Bath and Southampton.

Then, nine years before her death, she was able to return to rural Hampshire, to live with her mother and sister in the lovely little village of Chawton, only a dozen miles from Steventon. It was in Steventon and Chawton that she composed all of her novels. These were novels of peace and serenity—novels in which, if gentlemen lost their heads, they usually ended up married instead of dead. She eschewed the Great Themes—war, death, suffering, revolution, injustice. Instead, she described her work as ". . . the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour. . . . Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on . . ." However, these are not merely novels of comedy and comfort, amiable young ladies finding eligible young men. Uncertainty and risk are the constant backdrop to comfort and pleasure; successful love is always fenced about by moral dilemmas and hard realism; and harsh satire is hurled at those who lack the backbone to do what is right. After all, Jane Austen is one of the few people you can cite as the greatest novelist ever and not get sniggered at, and she didn't get there by writing trivia.

The Austens at Steventon were a large, affectionate, prosperous family, headed by the village rector. The house itself (now long gone) was a fashionable Georgian structure, large by the standards of the day but bursting its seams with the Austen clan. Jane's father would have had a good "living" off the agricultural tax which supported his church, and off the farm lands attached to the rectory (known as the glebe). With the Austens, this was enough to hold up their end as a respectable gentry family.

The gentry were those country families who were not aristocratic, but had enough money so that they didn't get their hands dirty working on a farm. Not that they didn't work. The family head had to busy himself with managing the family lands and keeping the family prosperous. In the Austens' case, Father let much of his land to the Digweeds (who became close friends and later became gentry themselves), to better spend his time caring for his parish. Younger sons of the gentry would find their own way as lawyers, military officers, bankers, or churchmen, and Jane's brothers would go on to become admirals, bankers, and rectors. Daughters played a different part; they were expected to form marriage alliances with other families, bringing in useful social connections or money.

This is half of Jane Austen's upbringing at Steventon; you can see the rest of it yourself by driving there, a short distance off the M3 between Heathrow and Winchester. There you'll find a straggling line of cottages along a remote lane, with not so much as a pub or a post office to mark a village center. It looks prosperous now, so you will have to use your imagination to paint in the narrow lanes choked with mud, and the old cottages filled with two or three poor families each.

You'll have to look hard for its tiny medieval church; it's a half-mile up a lane on the village's east side. Dedicated to St. Nicolas, the Steventon church is little changed from the days when young Jane watched her father give his sermons. It's a simple rectangle with thick walls made of flints and covered in plaster. Like other such churches, each century has contributed something—a pulpit here, a pew there, a bit of carving or a memorial. The Austens lived at the other end of the lane, surrounded by gardens both decorative and functional (Mrs Austen liked growing potatoes). Jane grew up surrounded by beauty, nurtured by family, and in constant contact with symbols of stability, continuity, and eternity.

Anyone who has read a Jane Austen novel can guess what her life at Steventon was like. There were visits and cards and dancing; one of Jane's favorite destinations, The Vyne, is in the care of the National Trust and can be seen in all its glory, mute testimony to the quality of the Austen family connections. There were quiet family evenings, and whispered sisterly confidences. And there were long walks in the country. Jane loved to walk, and would volunteer to go down to the Wheatsheaf Inn on the coach road to pick up the family mail, a six mile round trip; the Wheatsheaf is still there, and is still a good place to down a pint. It was at Steventon Rectory that young Jane wrote Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and her greatest novel, Pride and Prejudice—all between her 20th and 24th birthdays.

You might expect such a happy life to produce happy novels, and happiness and comedy do tend to abound. However, Jane's heroines are anything but carefree. Impoverished by their sex and nearly helpless in determining their fate, they are faced with a family that could loose everything should they not "marry well"—get a connected man with enough money to bail everyone out. Her heroines live in an Indian summer, postponing a dismal choice between mercenary marriage and family betrayal. In a romance novel, the correct choice would clearly be that of Love, but Jane was no romantic. Love won't feed the babies, and the horrors of poverty would destroy love along with everything else.

These were matters of personal concern to the young Miss Austen. Her family's genteel life depended on her father's living—and this would die with him. Young Jane knew her obligation to her family. In fact, at least one neighbor considered her to be a tremendous flirt, a "husband-hungry butterfly." Nevertheless, Jane was unable to marry her first suitor (the first of four unsuccessful petitioners) because neither had enough money; their alliance would have brought too much disadvantage to both their families.

In 1801 Jane's father retired, handed his rectory and his living over to his oldest son, and moved to Bath. In this era unmarried daughters stayed with their parents no matter what, so off went Jane and her sister Cassandra. Jane despised Bath. She hated its crowds, its obsession with fashion and appearances, its vicious gossip, and its Byzantine social ins and outs. Later, Jane would add long, acidic descriptions of Bath to her novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, lampooning it as a pit of insincerity and superficiality, a place where silly people go to be seen and evil people go to find victims. To make things worse, Jane couldn't get her novels published. As a woman Jane couldn't speak for herself, and her father was ineffective as an author's agent (although he did try). When Jane's father died their finances worsened; she, her mother, and Cassandra moved to Southampton to save money.

Fortunately for the genteelly poor Austen women, Jane's brothers were out earning a living, and one was getting outright rich. Brother Edward had been adopted by a wealthy, childless family, becoming Edward Knight. When Edward inherited his adopted family's considerable property, this included his new family's ancient estate, Chawton House, in the rural Hampshire village of Chawton, not too far from Steventon. Edward moved his mother and sisters into an old and respectable brick house in Chawton, right on the coach road and not two blocks from his manor house.

At Chawton, Jane returned to her old ways from Steventon—long walks in the country, balls at the local manor houses, reading with her mother and sister in the parlor. Jane found Chawton to be a lovely village, a single row of thatched cottages along a lane. It was also a convenient location. Not only was brother Edward living in the local manor house and brother James preaching at the old family homestead, but brother Henry ran the bank in nearby Alton. Jane and Cassandra would walk to Alton every day to pick up the family's mail from Henry.

Here Jane started writing again. This was brother Henry's doing. Henry would take Jane's manuscripts with him on his trips to the bank's main office in London, to drum up interest among publishers. It worked; Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811, earning Jane a tidy 140 pounds (about $9,000 in today's money). Jane immediately set about revising Pride and Prejudice, making it a collaboration between her younger and older selves. (The third of the Steventon novels, Northanger Abbey, would be published posthumously, by Henry.) Pride and Prejudice was an immediate hit, bringing favorable attention from Sir Walter Scott and the Prince Regent.

Today, Jane Austen's house is a wonderful museum, with rooms on display, an authentic 18th century garden, and a large collection of memorabilia. Brother Edward's Chawton House is being restored to its 18th century grandeur, becoming a library and research center dedicated to the women novelists of Jane Austen's time. The village itself is little changed from Jane's day—a row of closely spaced thatched cottages with immaculate gardens. The two main differences are improvements: there's a first-rate pub now, just across from Jane's home (the Greyfriar, founded in 1840); and the village road is empty of traffic, a bypass having been built in 1971.

As you tour the Jane Austen museum, Jane's writing habits become clear. Jane would write in the family parlor while her mother and sister sewed. She sat at a tiny round table, not much bigger than a modern lamp table, using smaller than normal pieces of paper. She placed the table by a large window, not on the private, garden side of the house like you would expect, but right on the busy coach road. She thrived on the noise, the busy-ness, and even the odors (the dining room window, in the next room, was bricked over to keep the smells out). But she insisted on privacy to write her novels. When anyone came in, a squeaking door would warn of their approach, giving Jane time to hide her tiny pieces of novel manuscript under larger sheets of letter paper. This served a double purpose, allowing the amiable Miss Jane to be welcoming without giving any sense that the visit was an intrusion, and preventing the intruder from spying out her newest novel. In this way, the Jane Austen we meet in family memoirs is sweet and smiling Aunt Jane, always welcoming, always courteous, always mild. Quite a different Jane Austen appears in the letters she wrote to Cassandra; here she vents a wickedly sharp humor at the silly people who tried her patience.

Now Jane was on a roll, writing Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion in succession. These were more subtle than her earlier works, showing ordinary life with such rich character and sublime humor that bustle and incident seem intrusions. Here she foreshadowed literary forms unknown at the time but common now. Yet (as one critic put it) to call Jane Austen "modern" is merely to acknowledge that we have done a little bit towards catching up with her.

With Persuasion, Jane was at the peak of her literary powers, but no more books would be written. She would finish Persuasion on her death bed, as she slowly succumbed to Addisons disease. She died in July 1817 at the age of 41, in Winchester (where she had moved to be close to her doctor). She is buried in Winchester Cathedral; fresh flowers are kept by her grave.