A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really

that he was forced to rent out the family manor and move to Bath. Elizabeth would be coming along, of course, but her chosen companion would be, not the sister whose excellence she could never perceive, but an oily young widow named Mrs. Clay, all flattery and compliance, who had worked her way into Elizabeth’s affections.

Anne would go to stay with the Musgroves and play the role of spinster aunt that Austen knew herself by then so very well. She would take care of her nephews while Mary, a world-class whiner, complained about how put-upon she was; she would play dances for Charles’s lively, lovely younger sisters Henrietta and Louisa (who resembled Austen heroines far more than Anne now did); she would listen to everybody’s grievances about one another; she would make peace between them when she could; and above all, she would stay in the shadows, where a spinster belonged. It was to be a lesson, she mused, “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—not that Anne was much of anything even in her own circle.

* * * 

My circumstances, needless to say, were very different from Anne’s, but I shared her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. I hadn’t lost a parent or a home, but I had done what I could—what I had to do—to distance myself from both. I had wanted to be on my own, and now I was. I just didn’t realize quite how on my own I was going to be. When you’re young—when you’re in high school and college and even your early twenties—you take your friends for granted. Of course they’ll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden—and it can feel very sudden indeed— everybody’s gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone’s busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you’ve always been surrounded has evaporated.

I still didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. Yet just as it was for Anne, that’s how it was starting to look like it was always going to be for me. I still loved living in my own place and being out from under my father’s shadow, but my Austen chapter wasn’t taking me forever just because it gave me so much work to do. A lot of days, I didn’t even have the strength to face it. I would drag myself out of bed, only to sit around and stare off into space. The air would sag, the clock would point its contemptuous hands, my cat would look at me and seem to wonder why I wasn’t moving. I would feel ugly and worthless. Anne was depressed—that’s what it meant for Austen to say that her spirits were low—and let’s face it, so was I.

Austen herself had lost a home, a circumstance that Anne’s experience undoubtedly reflected. Right around her twentyfifth birthday, Austen’s parents suddenly announced that her father would be retiring—he had been rector of the same parish for forty years—and that they and the girls, Cassandra and Jane, would be picking up and moving, just like Sir Walter, to Bath. The news came as a terrible shock, and there was little time to get used to it. Within a couple of months, the household in which Austen had lived her entire life was going to be broken up.

Friends would have to be taken leave of, a world of familiar feelings left behind. Most of the family’s things were not even transferred to Bath, but sold or given away to Austen’s brother James and his wife, Anna, who were coming to take possession of the house: the piano on which Austen had learned to play; the family pictures and furniture, companions of many years; her father’s library—“my books,” as she called them—whose value to her we can only imagine. Austen was even pressured into surrendering one of her own important possessions, a move she defied with tart indignation. “As I do not choose to have Generosity dictated to me,” she wrote to Cassandra, “I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.” From a life of rural rhythms and settled routines, she was being hustled out of the only home she’d ever known.

Four years later, years of upheaval and adjustment, came another blow that would echo through Anne’s story: Austen’s beloved father died. “The loss of such a Parent must be felt,” she wrote to Frank, “or we should be Brutes.” “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?” Austen’s mother was no Sir Walter, but she was a difficult, hypochondriacal woman whom Austen poked fun at to Cassandra, and there seems little doubt that her father was the author’s favorite, just as Anne’s mother was hers.

After the Reverend Austen’s death, four more years of uncertainty followed before Austen’s mother and the girls would find a permanent home. The young woman who had tossed off three novels before the age of twenty- four—early drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey—was virtually silent, artistically speaking, during this entire eight-year stretch. The one piece of work that survives, the beginning of a novel called The Watsons, was abandoned after a few dozen pages. Was Austen discouraged at the fate of her previous work? (Pride and Prejudice was rejected sight unseen; Northanger Abbey was bought for ten pounds but never published.) Did she need stability to do her work?

Both undoubtedly were true, but Anne’s story makes us suspect that the formerly ebullient young writer was also suffering from her own feelings of depression. The Watsons, about a group of poor, unmarried sisters trying to figure out how to save themselves from destitution before the death of their ailing clergyman father—and thus a frighteningly close parallel to Jane and Cassandra’s situation—has been called “grim,” “bleak,” and “pessimistic.” Austen, said one critic, “seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threatens her style.” And that was before her father died—an event itself preceded, by only a couple of months, by the death of Anne Lefroy, the surrogate mother who had been a crucial figure in Austen’s life since childhood. No wonder she couldn’t summon the will to write.

One more circumstance must have contributed to Austen’s portrait of Anne, as well as to the novel’s somber atmosphere as a whole. At around the age of twenty-seven, the same age as the heroine, Austen rejected what she must have known would be her last chance at marriage. The man in question was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother to a trio of old friends and heir to a large estate, but a shy and awkward young man who was five years Austen’s junior. She accepted his proposal one evening, agonized about it the entire night, then rescinded her acceptance the next morning. It was, she surely knew, a decisive step. From there, says Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, she “hurried into middle age,” embracing the role of maiden aunt for once and for all. She was not lonely, but in a profound sense, she would always be alone. Now, in Anne, she created a heroine who was staring over the same cliff.

It was no accident that the novel began in autumn, or that Anne dwelled, like none of Austen’s other heroines, in the past and her own mind. On a walk with Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove and some of the other young people, while the rest of them chattered away, Anne mused wistfully on the declining year. Austen’s language swelled with unaccustomed feeling here, its normally satirical accents drawn, almost against their will, into a slower, more pensive rhythm. Anne’s own pleasure in the walk, we learned,

must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,—that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

And when something happened to interrupt her train of thought, a reminder of her own exclusion from the dance of youth, “the sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.”

But by then her memory had had a very different kind of work to do. When Sir Walter had decamped for Bath, he had rented the Elliot manor to a navy man, Admiral Croft, whose wife turned out to be none other than the sister of a certain Captain Wentworth—the very man the heroine had loved and lost those eight long years before. “A few months more,” said Anne when she had heard the news, “and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”

And so indeed it proved to be. And when the dreaded meeting came,

a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. . . . Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; . . . the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. . . . The room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.

“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”