A room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf urged for women writers, did not seem to be something Jane Austen needed. Or not deemed necessary, because it was not customary? Even in her later years she shared a bedroom with her sister Cassandra, although in the house in southern England’s Chawton, which they inhabited as a four-person household from 1809 onward, it would not have been necessary.
Nor did she retreat to a silent little chamber to write; she worked at a tiny, one-legged round table in the great dining room – the most public room in the house, which anyone could enter at any time.
That must have been uncomfortable for several reasons, not least because Austen kept her writing a long time secret. Her nephew Edward Austen-Leigh, who published a book about the aunt half a century after her death, recalls: “She took care that her occupation appeared unsuspicious in the eyes of servants, visitors, indeed of all persons outside the family circle. She wrote on small scraps of paper that she could quickly hide or cover with a blotting paper.”
Burlesque Early Works
Perhaps she kept her papers in Chawton in the same portable little writing desk she had once received as a gift from her father. Little Jenny Austen was a child full of imagination and by her teens wrote several burlesque early works, whose humour would only later refine into the much-praised Austenian irony. The family into which Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775 as the seventh of eight children provided a stimulating, satire-leaning intellectual environment.
On December 16, there is the 250th birthday of the author Jane Austen to celebrate, who, as a woman, could initially only write in secret and who became a great classic of world literature. The marks this anniversary with a Jane Austen Week: Every day we illuminate one aspect of her works. All published texts can be found here.
The Austens belonged to the “Gentry,” that very British, fluid social stratum that subsumed lower nobility and well-to-do bourgeoisie alike. Father Edward Austen was a pastor in Steventon, a village west of London, and ran a kind of mini boys’ boarding school in the family home.
Cassandra Austen, the mother, came from a somewhat higher tier of the landed gentry and wrote humorous poems. As the children grew up and the five elder brothers brought many external stimuli into the house, theatre was even performed there.
Also Jane and Cassandra, the two eldest sisters, were the only daughters and had been sent away temporarily for educational purposes as children; but while the boys were taught Latin, Greek, and history, girls were supposed to learn “accomplishments”: needlework, housework, a little music or painting, and, with luck, some French. The rest the sisters taught themselves with unlimited access to their father’s library and as users of a rural lending library.
Cassandra Destroyed Many of Jane’s Letters
From her sister Cassandra Austen, to whom Jane once wrote that she was the wittiest author she knew, no letters survive. And of the roughly 3,000 letters Jane herself wrote over the course of her life, only about 160 remain, many of them in censored form by her sister. Cassandra destroyed the vast majority of the letters addressed to her altogether.
As adults, the two sisters were often separated for longer periods; for when one traveled—usually to visit relatives—the stay tended to be longer, but they kept writing home constantly.
From the letters that survive, it is at least evident that Jane Austen, in her twenties, fell in love with a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy and entertained serious hopes of a marriage proposal. The proposal, however, did not come. The match would not have been proper enough (and the bride too poor) for the Lefroys to approve.
Engagement Dissolved After One Night
How Jane felt after the amiable young man was taken from her vicinity is not recorded anywhere. A few years later another suitor actually proposed to her, which she initially accepted and then, after a night of contemplation, rejected.
There is no direct testimony from Jane Austen about this either, and Cassandra’s role in the decision—the sisters spent the relevant night in the same room—can only be speculated about. Being unmarried, after all, was not Jane Austen’s life dream; but, as she once wrote: “I would rather be a schoolteacher (and something worse I can hardly imagine) than marry a man I do not love.”
That the question of marriage was, however, of fundamental importance for a woman’s social and economic position is abundantly clear from Austen’s novels. Women were still, at least, in a legally precarious position, owned by their father until they married and had no share in inheritance.
Women’s Rights Are Not the Theme in the Novels
In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft’s tract “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” appeared; yet what Jane Austen thought of it is unknown, and her fictional characters do not appear to be troubled by the issue of women’s rights either. What stands out is that in her novels, women and men stand as equals.
At nineteen, the young Jane had written an early draft of Sense and Sensibility, and her father approached a publisher to offer the manuscript, but unsuccessfully. The earlier version that would later become Pride and Prejudice remained shelved. Her brother Henry did manage to sell the manuscript of a novel that would later become Northanger Abbey, but the publisher did not publish it.
If Jane Austen kept writing despite these failures, it was certainly also because she found no shortage of resonance in her immediate circle. Siblings, relatives and acquaintances were a faithful reading public to her; and many years later a niece remembered, with envy, how as a child she heard the roaring laughter emanating from the room where Aunt Jane read her stories aloud for the adults.
A Long Creative Pause
However, there seems to have been a pause of several years in her writing; after the Austen family—in Jane’s initial alarm—moved in 1801 from the rural Steventon to the fashionable Bath, no major work emerged for a very long time—likely due to the father’s precarious health, who died in 1805.
Three years in Southampton followed, until the Austen women’s household, which now included the mother and the two unmarried daughters plus a family friend, finally settled in Chawton. The house where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life belonged to the estate of her wealthy brother Edward.
There, she finally seems to have found the inner and outer calm she needed to become productive again. At the round table in the dining room she began a new novel and revised her old manuscripts. And indeed, from 1811 within a few years Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and in 1814 also Emma were published. Finally she earned money from her writing!
Her brother Henry meanwhile managed to buy back Northanger Abbey from the original publisher, without revealing that the manuscript came from the same anonymous author who had since gained so much public recognition for the novels mentioned above. “By a lady” had been the terse author’s note in the first novel, and in the second it read “by the author of …”
Henry Revealed the Authorship Secret
However, Henry apparently took such pride in being related to the author that he disclosed her identity in 1813. This earned Jane Austen, among other things, the attention of the Prince Regent and future King George IV, who kept copies of her books at every one of his residences and told Austen that he would appreciate it if she dedicated her next work to him. Since she could hardly refuse this request, the first edition of Emma indeed contains a corresponding dedication.
From 1816 Jane Austen’s condition progressively worsened. It was not possible to determine what she lacked, and nothing helped. (Today it is thought she suffered from Addison’s disease, which involves adrenal gland failure.) Eventually the dying woman, accompanied by Cassandra, moved to nearby Winchester because there was a doctor’s there who could treat her, but that was of no use anymore. She hardly felt pain, but grew constantly weaker and died on July 18, 1817 at the age of 41. Posthumously, in the same year, her novels Northanger Abbey and Anne Elliott (Persuasion) were published.
Jane Austen was buried in Winchester Cathedral. In the inscription on the impressive tomb slab, there is mention of her lovable nature and her extraordinary mental gifts, but that the person laid to rest here is “the author of …” is not stated.
Cassandra Austen did not attend the funeral of her beloved sister, for that was not proper for women. She could only stand at the window and watch the funeral procession pass by with the coffin.
