A Walk with Jane Austen (24 page)

I have been tired all day, and now that it is ten minutes after eleven, I don't know that I will be able to sleep. This waiting is a tender kind of torture. This bed is too big and gorgeous to be achingly empty.

From the top of Beechen Cliff, the whole city of Bath is a beautiful crowd of Bath Stone buildings in a neat jumble below, from Camden Place at the top, to the abbey in the middle and all the way down to the river. I hiked the nearly deserted path, covered over by trees, past town houses whose backyard gardens have the most amazing views. The climb was torturous but worth it. Sweet Catherine Morland hikes Beechen Cliff with Henry and Eleanor Tilney in
Northanger Abbey
while Henry lectures her on the picturesque, so that when she gets to the top, no longer trusting her own ideas of beauty, she “voluntarily reject[s] the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”
¹

Northanger Abbey
is so much fun, but I think fewer people read it, which is a shame. Its a satire of the gothic romances of the time, all the skeletons and villains and crazy women wrongfully locked away for years on end. Catherine's trip to Bath is her first entrée into the world, and she is too good-hearted herself to fully understand anyone's real
character, full of seventeen-year-old naive enthusiasm and imagination, so she gets into a few scrapes. When she goes home with her new friends the Tilneys—who are gracious and kind, except for their father—she is enthralled with their home, the old abbey (though it is not nearly dark or dirty enough for her gothic tastes), and imagines herself into all kinds of ridiculous situations. The worst is when she goes to look for their dead mother, whom she thinks may be still alive and kept shut away by the colonel in a bedroom in the old part of the house or perhaps was horribly murdered by him when the children were all away. She is found out there by Henry, and as it turns out, the colonel is actually mean-hearted, not enough to kill his wife, but enough to cruelly send Catherine away alone when he realizes she's not so rich as he was led to believe.

Of course, Catherine eventually marries Henry Tilney. I think this is Jane's most realistic match. Henry doesn't have any violent romantic emotions, though he is “sincerely attached to her” and “truly love[s] her society.” Jane says “his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.”
²
Not a grand love, but a steady one.

I hike back down to the center of town and the Bath Bun Tea Room for cream tea and
Persuasion.
It finishes so beautifully here. Anne gets a glow back in her complexion and her spirit. The Musgroves come to stay at the White Hart (which was a real inn, across a little promenade from the Baths), and Mary is actually thrilled to be in Bath, verging on happiness. Mrs. Russell is there, but Anne is now stronger, able to counter her sometimes mistaken advice. The Admiral and Mrs. Croft are delighted to be in Bath and to see Anne, and you begin to feel
that she actually does have friends in the world. And then Captain Wentworth realizes that he's been proud and a little ridiculous, that he has wasted years by not coming back to Anne sooner, by not asking her to marry him again after he had established himself with more of an income. His pride was hurt, so he determined never to come back. Only he finds that impossible once he has a hint of Anne's feelings from that wonderful conversation with Captain Harville while Captain Wentworth sat nearby writing a letter. “We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us,” Anne says. “It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”
³
And then Wentworth cannot stand it any longer and pours out his heart, and everything is sealed on a quiet walk on the gravel path behind the Circus. I would like to find that gravel path.

I'm afraid my own failures, like Anne's, have been more of personality rather than morality. Not that that's something to entirely brag about. Perhaps I have not been brave enough to sin, and maybe that is not entirely a moral victory.
⁴

I've been consumed with my own failures—fashion and otherwise—over the last few years. I don't know why. Sometimes when I can't sleep, they run over and over through my mind, and there are enough of them to go on and on in that state. Sometimes I just fester on one of them for an hour, so consumed with its immensity that thoughts of any others are just reminders that there are other cavernous pits in my memory. My father says I worry about everything, but he doesn't really know the half of it.

I was born compliant, wanting to make other people happy, like Catherine unsure that my own views of the world were worth expressing. I wasn't always strong enough to go after what I wanted. I made
decisions to please my parents, or because it was what was generally expected of me, or because it was easy. I was too insecure to hear any kind of criticism without it making me hurt and angry, but on the other hand I think there has always been a constant critic in my head. I have generally not been brave. I am now, I think, but I wasn't always. I feel like it took me longer than average to grow up. I think I'm not alone in feeling that way. There were parts of my life that were not fully lived because I was timid and afraid. (And, of course, a bit of a nerd. I will always be a bit of a nerd in the best possible sense.)

But today is not a day for feeling failure. Today I'm brave and full of peace. If anything, at the moment I'm startled by loving life. I'm daring now (at least a little), and I get to live my dream, to be a writer. (People ask me, “What do you do?” And I say, “I'm a writer,” and still it surprises me.) My life is full of possibility, and when I get home, however things work out with Jack doesn't really seem to matter. Not today.

So, like Catherine, I have nothing to do but “forgive [myself] and be happier than ever.”
⁵

I've made a mess with my tea and I am wet, but I couldn't care less. I'm back at the Bath Bun, this time with cream tea and
Emma
,sitting outside under a big blue umbrella. It's so quiet and nice here in the soft rain. This is my favorite spot in Bath.

I worked up the strength to walk uptown to St. Swithin's, the small church where Mr. and Mrs. Austen were married and where Mr. Austen is buried, as well as Jane's grandfather, her mother's father. It was locked, so I couldn't get in, but peering through the iron gate in
the cold rain, I could see Mr. Austens memorial stone in the churchyard. Fanny Burneys memorial is there too, author of
Camilla
and
Cecilia
and
Evelina
,books Jane loved.

If Jane didn't love Bath already, her father's death gave her less reason still to like it. He died on January 21, 1805, at the age of seventy-three.
⁶
(Her dear friend Anne Lefroy had died just a month earlier in a riding accident.
⁷
) Jane wrote to her brother Frank on the HMS
Leopard
to let him know about their father's death and unfortunately had to write to break the news to him two separate times because she had some misinformation about the ship's location. George Austen fell ill on Saturday, with “an oppression in the head with fever, violent tremu-lousness, & the greatest degree of Feebleness.” Sunday he seemed much recovered, but that afternoon he took a turn for the worse, and by Monday, Dr. Gibbs was declaring that “nothing but a Miracle could save him.”
⁸
That morning her father passed away.

Jane writes of “this virtuous & happy life,” and says, “The loss of such a Parent must be felt, or we should be Brutes—”
⁹
And then in her next letter: “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?”
¹⁰

George Austen was faithful and full of good humor and an excellent father. He loved his family, cared for his children, worked hard at being rector of a country parish. He seems to have had a genuine faith and no doubt worked to instill this in all of his children. We know that Jane copied out sermons for him from time to time.
¹¹
I think she was not the type to simply write things out without commenting on them, particularly if she disagreed, so you can imagine that they may have discussed theological issues as well. And while it wasn't the style then to educate daughters much, the girls had access to their father's extensive library, and the family was always reading to one another in the evening.
The man who spent years teaching ancient Greek and Latin was not above loving lowbrow novels. He was the kind of father who worked to get his sons’ advancement in the navy and reminded Frank when he left home at fourteen of the importance not only of prayer but of cleaning one's teeth in a letter Frank cherished all his life, which was found “water-stained…and frayed by constant reading” after Franks death at ninety-one.
¹²
And her father was the first to attempt to publish one of Jane's books, convinced that
First Impressions
was good enough for a wider audience than just the family.

No doubt Jane got many of her ideas about being a country clergyman from her father. It was a time in which church positions were traded almost like stock in a business. They often went to the highest bidder, who would hire someone for as little as possible to actually show up and do the church services. Mr. Austen believed contrarily that a country rector was really no good unless he lived among his people, that there was much good to be done just living out love on a day-to-day basis, setting an example of faithfulness. Edmund gives voice to all of these opinions in
Mansfield Park
,concluding that “as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.”
¹³

The faith of the Austens was in many ways unusual, for it was an age in which being English meant being Christian, and being Christian often meant no more than being English. At the other extreme, there was the new Methodist movement, sincere in their faith and sometimes very severe. Had Jane been at either end of this spectrum, her writing would not be what it is. Had she been in a Methodist family, she may have been too serious to enjoy the frivolity of plays and novels. She ended up being very faithful, with a great deal of common sense (not to impugn the Methodists, of course) and an appreciation
for humor and joy. I think in many ways she owed that to her father.

Necessarily, as children and parents, our perspectives on each other are slightly skewed. In some ways we see each other better than anyone else because we have the closeness of everyday life in which to observe every fault and every goodness, but the faults are more apparent somehow. In some ways, we get into patterns of thinking about each other, and it's hard to get out of those ruts and see each other as we really are. There is always an undercurrent, which we try to read and interpret and sometimes ignore—all these exhausting perceptions.

I've always been thankful for my particular parents, though I feel like now that they are in their early sixties I'm only beginning to understand their worth.

My father is a country rector of sorts. After retiring from the air force, he went to work full time for our church, an independent Bible church in the D.C. suburbs. And he has just retired from that to actually retire. He is wise and incredibly kind, and the years have brought out a great gentleness in him, or maybe it was there and I never saw it before.

My mom and I have always connected—for good or bad, but mostly for good—on an emotional level, easily and naturally. My father and I are so different that it took me longer to understand his perfections. Getting to have a closer relationship with him now is one of the joys of my life.