IV.
During an absence from home on Jane Austen’s part, it was settled, before she knew, that her father, who at the age of seventy had resigned his living of Steventon to his son James, should remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. However much Jane may have felt the fascination of her girlish visits to Bath, she did not approve of it as a place of residence in her more mature womanhood. We are reminded of a sentence in “Persuasion” where the author remarks drily Anne Elliot did not like Bath; fancied it disagreed with her; would have preferred any other place; therefore, to Bath, as a matter of course, the family went. So much for the unpropitiousness of events.
The Austens went to Bath in 1801, when Jane was twenty-six years of age. The family resided first at No. 4, Sydney Terrace, and later at Green Park Buildings. An attraction to Bath, suggested by Mr. Austen Leigh, is that Mrs. Austen’s only brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot,[3] with his wife, was in the habit of spending his time between Bath and his place of Scarletts. Like his uncle, the Master of Balliol, Mr. Leigh Perrot was a witty man, and some of his epigrams and riddles, in which he must have far outshone Mr. Woodhouse, found their way, among other morsels, into print. The Austens, with their strong family proclivities, were much with the Leigh Perrots.
Jane was still young, pretty, and cheerful enough to enter with a fair proportion of enjoyment into the gaieties of the place. She had given up writing, in a great measure, since she was three or four and twenty, whether chilled by her lack of success or distracted by other engagements and amusements. However, it is thought that it was during her stay in Bath she wrote several chapters of an unfinished novel called “The Watsons,” which, unlike the youthful performance, “Lady Susan,” published along with these chapters in the same volume with the memoir, bear a strong flavour of Jane Austen in her sagacity and banter.
She may have been inspirited to the effort by the sale, though for so small a sum, of the MS. of “Northanger Abbey,” which happened two years after she came to Bath, when she was twenty-eight years of age. We know the sale proved fruitless, so far as speedy publication was concerned, but the mortifying conclusion could not have been foreseen, and the sale of one of her novels for ten pounds was Jane Austen’s first faint gleam of good fortune in authorship, the only one which visited her during her father’s lifetime.
The Austens remained at Bath about four years. In their last autumn there, the autumn of 1804, Jane, with her father and mother, spent some weeks at the lovely sea-bathing place of Lyme, which she admired so much, and has immortalised in “Persuasion.” We cannot avoid being struck by the small number of the opportunities which Jane Austen had of seeing the world, and by the great use she made of them. Her journeyings were not so very much more extensive than those of the Vicar of Wakefield and his wife in the days of their prosperity, but they were sufficient for her to avail herself of them for the information and delight of her fellow-creatures. It is not the amount of what we see, but the eyes with which we see it, that signifies.
In the following spring, that of 1805, the Rev. George Austen died at Bath. His widow and daughters then removed to Southampton—drawn to its society very likely by the sailor Austens—and there they stayed for four more years. Mrs. Austen occupied a large old-fashioned house in a corner of Castle Square. The house had a pleasant garden, bounded on one side by the old city wall. A flight of steps led to the top of the wall, which formed a walk with an extensive view of sea and land.