A Walk with Jane Austen (2 page)

Many friends and acquaintances who first read portions of this book on my blog were under the impression that perhaps the story was fictional or were at least confused enough to have to ask. So since the veracity of memoir is generally questioned these days, I feel compelled to say that this is a work of nonfiction. Everything I report about my life in the following pages actually did happen.

I am indebted to several Austen scholars—particularly Deirdre Le Faye, whose painstaking research has been invaluable in sifting out rumor versus fact in Jane's life. Biographers agree that there are gaps in our knowledge of Austen. I've tried to note wherever I am assuming or imagining what her life may have been like. Any errors are entirely my own.

There is only one aspect of the text that is semifictional, and that is that I did not write it in its entirety on the trip. I kept a detailed journal but didn't have the luxury of being able to write out all of my thoughts at the time.

Memoir is a subjective art in that it always comes back to your perspective—not only your worldview per se, but also your emotional stance toward the world. If you simply related facts as they happened,
and related every available fact, you would have an incredibly unreadable and uninteresting book. We don't choose what happens to us, but I suppose we choose (even subconsciously) how we remember it and what stories we tell.

Admittedly this is my interpretation of what happened—filtered through a lens of humor and grace, always with an eye for getting as close to truth as possible—along with my favorite stories from Jane's life. She would never have written a book like this herself—she didn't even keep a journal that we know of—and I think she would have been horrified to be the subject of one. But she might have found inspiration here for one of her own intelligent romances. No doubt she would have had enough material.

I've always loved Jane Austen. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that I, like so many women, think Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy is the ideal man.

I didn't start reading Austen until I was in college and picked up a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
at a used-book sale somewhere. I still have the copy, the bluish-green cover with two desolate watercolor women on the front who look like they belong more to Brontë than Austen. I read it over Christmas break at my grandparents’ house in Sacramento. I was there alone, waiting for the rest of the family to get in, when we would all drive down to L.A. for my brother's college graduation.

But before that, I was there with Grammy and Bob, my step-grandfather, in the simple house his uncle had built in the fifties for eight thousand dollars. It still had the green shag carpet then, the green sofas, the lovely yellow kitchen with gold-patterned sheet-vinyl floor with brown spots in the crevices that wouldn't come out. In later years,
Grammy would turn up the heat at night until it was stifling, and Bob would end up in a wheelchair, unable to maneuver. Grammy and I would come back to the house to horrible excretory smells because Bob had trouble making it to the bathroom alone. The laundry sat dirty in the bathtub, and Grammy sometimes forgot to change clothes. I couldn't stay with them then, but on this trip they were still young-old, and I was sleeping on the Murphy bed in the guest room. I stayed up late after they went to bed, smelling comforting old-house smells and reading
Pride and Prejudice
, greedily turning pages, awash in the glory of unexpected love.

I was in full-on crush mode at the time, the kind of simple crush perhaps that can strike only an evangelical college girl at twenty when she has yet to be kissed. This particular crush had Austenian themes in that, like Elizabeth with Darcy, I wasn't attracted to the guy at first, until I got to know his character and figured out what a great guy he was, and suddenly he became terribly attractive to me.

So I followed Elizabeth and Darcy, dreamed of my own unlikely romance, and fell in love with Austen.

What's not to love? Jane Austen was born into a house full of love and activity on December 16, 1775,
¹
in the village of Steventon, to a father who would soon be leading prayer services against the American rebels.
²
George Austen was rector at St. Nicholas, a small stone church built in the 1200s
³
; he hid the church key in the trunk of the old yew that still guards the churchyard.

Jane had six brothers and one dear sister, Cassandra, who was
Loving Austenalways her closest companion. Her parents ran a small farm, along with a boys’ boarding school in their home. Her mother loved to write sharp, merry poems, and her Oxford-educated father could teach all of his children (but especially the boys) whatever they needed to know of Greek and Latin. There were family theatricals in the barn, with lengthy prologues written by the eldest brother, James, and a strong network of family and friends who visited often and might stay for months at a time
.

The Austen home seems to have had a sense of abundance, though the family's finances were not certain, at least when the children were small. George regularly borrowed money and then borrowed from a different source to pay back that debt, so there was a constant juggling and never catching up, though not for lack of very hard work.
⁴

The world at large was chaotic, ships firing on each other broadside in the name of war, and plenty of war to be had for England—with the colonies, with Napoleon, throughout Europe, North America, India, and the West Indies. George III was on the throne going mad, to be replaced by his obnoxious, licentious son, George IV, as regent, laughingly known as “Prince of Whales.”

It was in the noisy house, in the quiet village guarded somewhat from the chaos of the age, that Jane began to write.

To me, Jane Austen's books (and the movies based on them) have become the entertainment equivalent of comfort food, what I return to over and over again when I need a break from the real world, when I need to retreat. I've watched and read them so many times. Once, flat on my
back with a four-month-long exhaustion that my doctors could only describe as “a mono-like virus,” I pulled out my VHS copy of the BBC version of
Pride and Prejudice
,only to find that I had worn out the pictures and was left only with sound. I watched five hours of gray static that time, listening to the voices and music, imagining the scenes in my head.

But after years of reading and rereading, I began to feel like I had nowhere left to go. I knew the plot lines of Austen's books and was familiar with the corners of her fictional world. But I knew little about her life. I wanted to know the stories that made her who she was, the things she never wrote about, the characters of her family and friends, her navy brothers.

I read Carol Shields's biography and Claire Tomalin's
Jane Austen: A Life.
I was thrilled to find Austen's own witty and at times caustic voice in Deirdre Le Faye's collection of her letters. I read her brother Henry's biographical sketch about the sister from whose pen “every thing came finished”
⁵
and her nephew's glowing memoir about the aunt who, in his mind, conjured her romantic stories solely from “the intuitive perceptions of genius, not from personal experience.”
⁶
I wanted to see the Hampshire countryside, the old Norman-era church where her father had been rector, the site of the rectory with the hill Jane rolled down as a child, like Catherine in
Northanger Abbey.
Lovely Bath, where Jane stopped writing for so many years, taunted my curiosity, as did the Cobb at Lyme, the houses in Derbyshire on which she may have based Pemberley, her brother's huge estates, the small cottage in Chawton where she sat to write in the room with the squeaky door so she could put her work away quickly if anyone disturbed her.

And that is how I found myself in the middle of a Hampshire wheat field, alone and nearly lost, on a sunny day in mid-July.

do not want People to be very agréable [sic], as it
saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

—J
ANE
A
USTEN IN A LETTER TO
C
ASSANDRA