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.
V.
In 1809 the Austens made their last removal. It was back to the country—of which Jane always makes her heroines fond—back to the old neighbourhood of Steventon, her birth-place. Edward Knight offered his mother a choice of two houses—the one on his estate in Kent, the other on his estate in Hampshire. She selected the house in Hampshire, Chawton Cottage, near the squire’s occasional home, Chawton House.
Chawton Cottage, in the village of the same name, was not originally a farm house, like Upper Cross Cottage, in “Persuasion;” it had been intended for an inn. Indeed, it stood so close to the high road on which the front door opened, that a very narrow enclosure “paled” in on each side had been necessary to protect the building from the danger of collision with runaway vehicles. In addition to the Gosport Road in front, the Winchester Road skirted the house on one side, so that it could not be regarded as a secluded habitation, but in those days cheerfulness was more prized than seclusion. There was a large pond close to Chawton Cottage, at the junction of the two public roads. Happily the theory which connects insalubrity with such ponds had not yet been aired, so that to the Austens, no doubt, Chawton pond was a very desirable sheet of water, tending still more to enhance the attractions of the scene. They would not much mind the duckweed and other slimy vegetation. Horses and donkeys, ducks and geese, would disport themselves there in summer. In winter village sliders would bestow animation on the ice.
The squire added to the house, and contrived some judicious planting and screening. A good-sized entrance and two sitting-rooms were managed. In the drawing-room a window which looked to the Gosport Road was blocked up and turned into a bookcase, and another window was opened out and made to command only turf and trees, for a high wooden fence and a hornbeam hedge shut out the Winchester Road. Here was a little bit of genteel privacy. A shrubbery was carried round the enclosure, which Mr. Austen Leigh tells us gave a sufficient space for “ladies’ exercise,” though we cannot help thinking the exercise-ground must have been rather limited for the middle-aged women.
However, there was a pleasant irregular mixture of hedgerow, gravel-walk, and orchard, with grass for mowing, made by two or three little enclosures having been thrown together. As it happened, walking had to be relinquished before many years by the younger sister, and Jane Austen, as well as her mother, had to resort to a donkey-carriage for exercise.
Altogether Chawton Cottage was “quite as good as the generality of parsonages, and nearly in the same style.” It was capable of receiving other members of the family as frequent visitors. In this respect it must have contrasted favourably in Jane’s mind with the cottage in which she had established Ellinor and Marianne Dashwood with their mother, in “Sense and Sensibility.” Chawton Cottage was sufficiently well furnished.[4] Altogether it formed a comfortable and “lady-like” establishment for a family of ladies whose means were not large. To Jane Austen it was her own house, among her own people, points which meant a great deal to her. Besides, she was a woman possessed at once of too much self-respect and self-resource, and of too serene a spirit and lively a temper to care much either for outward show or interior luxury.
Jane Austen was thirty-four years of age when she settled down at Chawton, her sister Cassandra was thirty-seven, their mother seventy. They were a household of old and middle-aged women, increased either then or a little later by a family connection—a Miss Lloyd—who lived with the Austens. Their prospects were as clearly defined as earthly prospects could well be, and they accepted the definition. Jane Austen was never seen without a cap, either in the morning or the evening, after she went to Chawton. The Austen sisters assumed early the caps which were then the mark of matronhood or confirmed spinsterhood. Possibly Cassandra Austen first adopted the badge as a quiet sign that she wished to have nothing more to do with love and marriage, and Jane bore her faithful company in this as in everything else. Mr. Austen Leigh mentions also—and every trifle is welcome which bears on the novelist’s character and habits—it was held that his aunts, though remarkably neat in their dress, as in all their ways, were not sufficiently attentive to the fashionable or the becoming. In short, Jane and Cassandra Austen, though they had been the young beauties of Steventon in their time, entertained no fear of being styled dowdies or frights in their middle age, whether by their young relatives or the “dressy” among their contemporaries.
The Austens dwelt in the centre of family interests, several members of the old Steventon household living near, while a younger generation was growing up, with fresh claims on the affectionate sympathies of their grandmother and aunts. In her family and among her old friends Jane Austen was unsurpassed as a tender sick-nurse, an untiring confidante, and a wise counsellor.
In these congenial circumstances it seemed as if a fresh spring of courage and hopefulness, and with them renewed inspiration in her art, came to the author. She began the very year of her arrival at Chawton to revise and prepare her old MSS. for publication. She had found a publisher in a Mr. Egerton, and she brought out in succession two novels—the first, “Sense and Sensibility,” when she was thirty-six years of age, in 1811, fourteen or fifteen years after it was re-written at Steventon. She got for it, though after how short or long an interval, or by what arrangement, we are not told, a hundred and fifty pounds. In her gay way she exclaimed at so large a reward for what had cost her nothing—nothing save genius, ungrudging trouble, and long patience. “Pride and Prejudice” was published two years later, in 1813.