Austen Jane - Jane Austen at home: a biography

To Mark

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Miss Austens merits have long been
established beyond a question;
she is, emphatically, the novelist of home.

Richard Bentley,
publishing Jane Austens novels in 1833

T HE WORLD OF Jane Austens novels, seen in countless feature films, is domestic, well ordered and snug. Her characters inhabit neat, genteel cottages, gentleman-like country mansions, and elegant townhouses in London or Bath.

And her life is often seen through the same lens.

Its an impression that you cant help but take away from the pretty, flower-filled country cottage at Chawton in Hampshire that finally provided Jane, her sister and their mother with a long-sought home. Jane moved there in 1809, probably expecting to live there happily until the end of her life. As it would turn out, she would not.

For Jane, home was a perennial problem. Where could she afford to live? Amid the many domestic duties of an unmarried daughter and aunt, how could she find the time to write? Where could she keep her manuscripts safe? A home of her own must have seemed to Jane to be always just out of reach. With only a tiny stash of capital hard earned by her writing, the death of her father forced her into a makeshift life in rented lodgings, or else shunted between the relations who used her as cheap childcare.

Its not surprising, then, that the search for a home is an idea thats central to Janes fiction. The majority of her scenes take place indoors, with people talking, always talking, in a room, which is very often a drawing room. And yet, when Janes characters want to talk about what really matters their feelings, the truth they often have to go outdoors. They escape the jaws of the drawing rooms that confine their lives. You were sick of civility, says Lizzy Bennet in a moment of intimacy with Mr Darcy.

Young people reading Jane Austen for the first time think that the stories are about love and romance and finding a partner. But a happy home is equally as much what all of her heroines dont have, and yet desire. All of Janes leading ladies are displaced from either their physical home, or from their family. Jane shows, subtly but devastatingly, how hard it is to find a true home, a place of safety in which one can be understood and loved. She is uniquely sensitive to a particular homes happiness or unhappiness.

This has led people to assume that Jane herself was unhappy at home, flawed or damaged in some way. But the depressing fact is that she was just one among many spinsters of her time and position in society who had to try to feel at home in unusual, meagre or unpleasant places. And it wasnt just spinsters. I cannot help feeling a great desire to be at home, however uncomfortable that home may be, wrote Janes sister-in-law, Fanny. Home to her was a cramped cabin on board her sailor husbands ship.

And so Janes novels are full of homes loved, lost, lusted after. In her first published work, Sense and Sensibility, it is a death in the family that forces Elinor and Marianne out of their childhood home. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters will be expelled from their home at the end of her fathers life. Fanny Price is sent away from her home, like one of Janes own brothers, to live with richer relations at Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot misses her country life at Kellynch Hall when packed off in Persuasion to Bath. Even Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey and Emma Woodhouse of Emma, young, relatively well-off and in no immediate danger of homelessness, have to choose their future domestic set-ups wisely.

In real life, perhaps contrary to expectation, Jane did not have to enter the years of danger without a home of her own, for she was a spinster by choice. Far from lacking romance, as people often think, in her life she turned down at least one suitor for absolute certain, and in her story well encounter no fewer than five potential life-partners. I believe that Jane deliberately kept herself free of all that because she believed that marriage and property and a substantial home could be a prison.

I also hope to introduce you to Janes everyday life at home, good days, bad days, domestic pleasures and domestic chores, the little matters on which the daily happiness of private life depends, as Jane put it herself in Emma. The idea that women of the gentry didnt work is long since debunked: they either performed work that society deemed virtuous, like playing the piano or reading improving books, or else they discreetly carried out and this was the case in the Austen family much of the actual labour needed to keep the food on the table and the clothes clean. Sometimes this meant actively supervising contract labour, sometimes rolling up their sleeves to do the domestic work themselves.

We know so much about Janes life from day to day, even hour to hour, because she was a prolific letter writer. Despite vigorous excisions by the Austen family, Jane has left us hundreds of thousands of words, chiefly written to her sister Cassandra.

These letters, full of the mundane detail of everyday life, have often disappointed readers. The trouble has been that they do not directly comment on the French Revolution, or the great affairs of state. One of Janes fussy relatives claimed that they could be no transcript of her mind, and that a reader would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The affairs of state are there, all right, for those who know how to read the tiny details of the changing social life of Janes age. And her personality is there, bold as brass, bursting with life, buoyant or recalcitrant as each day required. These letters are a treasure trove hiding in plain sight.

They are also a resource that can be read in many different ways, to paint a picture of the Jane that the reader wishes to find. I am interested in them as a record of the little evasions of feminine duty that Jane must have made in order to win herself the time to write. I often wonder, Jane wrote to her sister, how you can find the time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House. Well, I wonder the same thing. Jane had to fight against domestic duties to find the time in a way that did not offend her family or their notions of what a spinster aunt should do. This was her battle, a grimy, unexciting, quotidian domestic battle, about who should do which chores. Its a battle that still holds women back. Its a battle that continues to this day.

Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer, wrote Janes brother Henry after her death. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event. Big mistake! Janes life contained bitterness and regret, financial deprivation and anxiety. But she and her family kept much of this from us. Above all other authors, Jane is attractive but elusive to her readers: she tantalises, hints, retracts. Seldom, very seldom, she herself warns us, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.