A Walk with Jane Austen (8 page)

There are numerous divergences between Jane and me, of course. One of the most significant is that Jane wrote in some way because she was a great conversationalist, full of wit in a day when wit was prized, a sharp observer of society. I write in many ways from weakness rather than strength—because I am at times a poor conversationalist, because there are things I can't sort out when I'm talking to people and have to put in writing to make anyone else see them.

When Jane wrote
Emma
,she told her family that she was creating “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”
¹
I think she was wrong. Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
is the one I have a hard time loving, with all her timidity and fear. She always seems to feel that she really shouldn't be in the room, that she is unworthy of notice, that she is not worth talking to. Perhaps I don't like Fanny because in some ways I share her weaknesses. I have more humor and strength, yet I manage
so often to be queen of the socially awkward moment (a trait that, in some part, I come by honestly, as, at some level at least, it runs in the family, although my brother seems to have entirely escaped it).

I think where I feel closest to Jane is in my singleness—in loving freedom and simultaneously longing for companionship. Jane wanted marriage if she could have a great marriage with real love; she was unwilling to settle for a relationship that was merely a good social move and would give her financial security. She wanted an equal, someone who would be an intellectual rival, who would respect her. She loved her life no doubt. She does not seem to have especially wanted children. But part of her hoped for the unexpectedly, unbelievably good match. Perhaps I am a bit presumptuous, but who could read her books and conclude otherwise?

Jane Austen essentially created the chick-lit genre. We all know the formula—girl meets guy; girl falls in love with guy; guy breaks her heart; girl meets nicer, better-looking guy with more money, and they live happily ever after. Obstacles abound in Austens stories—lack of money on the part of the otherwise lovely heroine, meddling family members who pull lovers apart because they disapprove of the match— but these things are always overcome by the abundant worth of two good people who truly love each other.

The love stories in Austen's own life echo these themes but without the “happily ever after” ending.

Jane's first love, at twenty, was Tom Lefroy. He was a law student from Ireland, the nephew of her dear friend Anne's husband, and Anne may have introduced them. We know little about the relationship really. Much of what we know of Jane's life is from her letters, but her sister, Cassandra, burned many and mutilated more before passing them on to
nieces and nephews late in her life. Perhaps Cassandra cut out the juiciest bits or, as Austen expert Deirdre Le Faye suggests, the parts that could have offended one family member or other.
²
Either way, there are gaps.

Jane and Tom spent some time together during the course of a few weeks, over Christmas and New Year's. He was fairly serious, quiet, and very good—maybe a balance for Jane's energetic humor. They bantered over Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones
,and after a ball, Jane wrote jokingly to Cassandra of “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”
³
She wrote about how the Lefroy household gives Tom a hard time about the attachment, so that when she pays a visit, he manages to hide. But he would pay her another visit, as was the custom, to thank her for partnering him at the ball, and the only fault she could really find with him was that his morning coat was “a great deal too light.”
⁴

There is much debate these days about just how in love Jane was with Tom and how much this relationship influenced her writing. Some say it was just a flirtation—clearly, in Jane's letters, she is being sarcastic, they say. To me she writes as if there is some depth to her feelings in spite of trying to laugh them off. “I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening,” she writes of their last meeting. “I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.”
⁵
She sounds a little bit like my friends and I as well, telling stories of a romance that fell into the middle of a life that was largely without romantic interest, making much of a little thing. Yet it's easy to imagine her being teasing and sharp with Tom.

Tom was from a good family but not wealthy. His father had been in the army. He was the oldest son, but it was a large family, eleven children with five daughters ahead of Tom, and he was made to feel that the
future of the family was on his shoulders.
⁶
He was expected to do well, to do much. Though the attachment seems to have been mutual, Anne and her husband stepped in and quickly sent Tom home. The family history is that Anne Lefroy was forever frustrated with Tom over this, his leading Jane on when he knew there was no chance he could propose.
⁷

Tom eventually married someone with an appropriately large fortune, had seven children, and went on to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.
⁸
He was no Darcy—not heir to great estates or wealth—but clearly his family had expectations Jane did not meet. If Jane wrote about family interference, she'd learned it firsthand. Tom may have adored her and she him, but she hadn't enough money to qualify. Most likely Jane never saw him again.

When it ended, Jane wrote to Cassandra: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over—My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea.”
⁹
She was joking, of course. How deeply she felt the joke we will never really know. But her heart had been engaged for likely the first time.

No doubt this relationship and her repartee with Tom fueled her writing. Mine will be fueled in part by things like climbing quietly back up the stairs when I really just wanted to say goodnight.

The course of true love never did run smooth and all that. Yet should it be abandoned at that first halting difficulty? At this point in my life I am willing to err on the side of giving it more opportunity to prove itself true. Jack and I wandered through Oxford on an absolutely perfect seventy-something afternoon like tourists, taking pictures. We made our way
slowly through town—first Trinity College, then the Bodleian, and then our real destination of Magdalen College, where Lewis taught, which the guidebook calls “perhaps the most typical and beautiful Oxford college.”
¹⁰

Magdalen is gorgeous and immediately became one of my favorite places. It took us awhile to figure out the lay of the land, and we wandered into one of the fifteenth-century cloisters, with detailed fretwork in the archways, wonderful gargoyles, and a view of the bell tower just beyond where the college choir sings every May Day morning. Jack was taking my picture in one of the arches when a young guy, a tourist, offered to take our picture together and pronounced it “beautiful.” So there it was—the first somewhat awkward record of a friendship.

We wandered out from the cloisters into an expanse of open sun and manicured lawn, the imposing New Building—“new” being relative, as it was new in 1733—directly ahead and on the right, a ways off, a lovely flower garden bordering Holywell Mill Stream and a little bridge over the river leading to Addisons Walk. The walk is about a mile round, often by the river, through a bit of wilderness where they sometimes graze the college flock of deer. It's here where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson walked, talking about faith, just before Lewis converted.

Jack and I hung out on the bridge for a while, looking at the flowers, watching the water birds. Jack took a picture of me on the bridge; I generally hate pictures. They often manage to catch my weak chin at just the wrong angle so it looks like I have no chin at all. But my new theory is that one shouldn't strive to be beautiful. It's something to just be good-looking enough, and if you really smile in pictures and forget to worry about what you look like, they turn out surprisingly well.
And maybe that state of mind worked. This one caught the infectious grin that was becoming my natural state.

We started talking as we walked into town, and for the nearly four hours we were together we just talked. I'm not sure that these kinds of conversations can be accurately re-created (or perhaps that I'm capable of re-creating them). They are about small things that take on great importance because all of a sudden this other person has become the most important person in your life, at least for today, probably for tomorrow, and—if you're both lucky—maybe for a long time after that.

Over Frappuccinos, Jack said somewhat awkwardly, “Since you write about singles stuff, I should tell you, I.…urn.…1 actually just started kind of seeing someone in North Carolina. Not that I'm not enjoying hanging out, but I wasn't expecting to meet someone. You know, this other thing just started, and I.…1 wasn't looking for anything.”

“Oh—well, I really appreciate your telling me,” I said, mustering confidence and calmness, like I had been expecting this. “That means a lot.” I then proceeded to say something awkward, about a friend who had flown up from Atlanta to take me to dinner, as if to prove that I had relationship ties in the South as well. Inside I smarted.
What was I thinking? Argh. And so what if there's a girl in North Carolina? Im here now and you like me, right?

Jack said he and this girl had just started going out; their relationship wasn't really defined yet; he didn't know what was going to happen with it. But he wanted me to know. In some way that seemed very honorable, and somehow strange, and ultimately irrelevant. Serious enough to tell me and not serious enough to actually
be
anything. I was rattled and determined to see this as somehow chivalric.

We moved on to things that can take months to get to in the course of everyday dating—his uncertainty about marriage and kids, my eagerness for them downplayed—trying to display it in the best possible light.

Then we wandered through Christ Church Meadow for a while, all the way down the broad, gravel walking path to the River Isis and back, talking about all the stuff of life we have in common. He asked me what I wanted or enjoyed. I talked about renting a villa in Italy and inviting my friends, wanting to be fluent in Spanish and French and Italian, wanting to learn Greek and Hebrew and understand the cultural and historical setting of Jesus and write about those things, wanting to figure out how to really help the poor.

He understood everything.

In so many places our desires and goals seemed the same, or at least coming from such a similar place.

“There are so many things I want to do. I'm afraid life wont be long enough,” I said.

Jack replied slowly, “Well, you know, you don't have to do everything now.”

I seemed to be perfecting a certain
eau de travel
and realized that the smells on this trip were all wrong. When I first opened my suitcase, I found a printed note saying that the TSA had inspected my bag and everything might not have been put back in the right place. It smelled horrible, like one of the paint compounds from my dad's hobby room where he works on his airplane models. I thought,
Great, they've used
some kind of chemical in my bag to detect traces of bombs, and now all my clothes smell.
But it turned out to be my Professional Firma Nail Extra Strength Base and Top Coat (a manicure kit is a must), which had leaked into its small plastic zippered bag and somehow managed to infect all of my clothes. Ugh.