"A very strange stranger it must be," she writes, "who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight—these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood."
This was quite an exceptional digression from the thoughts and conversation of Jane Austen's characters. One of those letters which Leslie Stephen and others have thought so "trivial," but which are so characteristic in their spirit, was written from Lyme by Jane to Cassandra, on September 14, 1804—
"I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this morning..... I endeavour, as far as I can, to supply your place, and be useful and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the water decanters, as fast as I can, and keep everything as it was under your administration.... The ball last night was pleasant.... Nobody asked me for the two first dances; the two next I danced with Mr. Crawford, and had I chosen to stay longer might have danced with Mr. Granville ... or with a new odd-looking man who had been eyeing me for some time, and at last, without any introduction, asked me if I meant to dance again."
It is impossible to leave Lyme Regis without recalling how Tennyson, when he was shown the place where the Duke of Monmouth was supposed to have landed, cried: "Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth! Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!"
Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined to Steventon, Godmersham, Chawton, Southampton, Bath, and their neighbourhood. It is not a day's walk or an hour's motoring from Steventon to Chawton, where, after the long interval of comparative inactivity, the later novels were "born." At Chawton, according to one of her later biographers, the "cottage" where she lived and worked has disappeared. This is happily not true. It is true that it is now turned to other uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughters. It has been divided internally, and now forms a couple of labourers' cottages and a village club, where tired toilers who have never read a line of the books that were written under that roof discuss the merits and defects of the tobacco tax and the Old Age Pensions Act. Chawton House itself shows little structural change, and the park is scarcely altered since Jane walked across from the Cottage to take tea with her relations at the great house.
At either of these villages, Steventon the birthplace of Jane herself and of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, and Chawton where Persuasion and Emma came into being, you may find scenes which you will associate with this or that story or incident, but nowhere are you likely to feel the influence of locality more strongly in connection with either author or novels than at Godmersham, the home of her brother Edward, where, until long after her death, her relations dwelt amid their own broad acres. The place, with other property, came to Edward Austen from Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had adopted him, and whose name he ultimately took. There is no more typically English seat in the typically English county of Kent. The small sylvan village, the old church above the Stour river, offer no special attractions for tourists, and Godmersham House itself is one of the plainest even among the country seats of the early Georgian age. Its one external charm is its unpretentiousness. It has not even the huge classic portico on which so many of the country houses of its period depend for "impressiveness." Plain, commodious, well-placed, the house is lovely for us only in that it sheltered for many a week, from year to year, the author of Pride and Prejudice. It is just such a house as Sir John Middleton filled with visitors at all seasons, or Mr. Darcy showed to his future bride and her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner.
If the house itself is without external beauty, the park surrounding it is delightful. The sparkling river flows through the midst of great elms and oaks beneath which mingled herds of deer, sheep, and oxen browse in the peaceful security of the golden age. As you sit on the low wall of the lichen-covered bridge you see nothing that can have changed in character since Jane Austen sat there and thought over the doings of her dear heroines. One can almost hear the rumble of the barouche that brought her mother and herself from the coach at Ashford to the Hall at Godmersham, and if that high-hung carriage were suddenly to turn the corner beside the big elm near the gate one would scarcely be astonished. This park and this house, this river, the old trees, the thatched cottages, the lanes and brooks all speak of the days when Bingley came for Jane Bennet, and Henry Tilney for Catherine Morland. If there is anything in the influence of place, Godmersham was part author of the novels. The spirit of Jane Austen abides in the delicious air of this quiet and unspoilt valley, where, when the wind blows strongly from the south-east, the salt of the sea-breeze mingles with the perfumes of the grass and the wood smoke as pleasantly as the Attic wit of Jane Austen mingles with the sweetness of her heroines and the thousand delights of her dialogue.
These are the chief country scenes of Jane's life. As to the towns, we know more or less of her associations with Bath, Southampton, and Winchester, as well as London. At Bath she used to stay in early youth with her uncle and aunt, and she lived there for four years with her parents. The fruits of her experience there may be enjoyed in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, though her lack of the topographical instinct is suggested by the absence of evident interest in the buildings of Bath. We learn as much about the place from the Pickwick Papers, which merely touch there on their way, or from the allusions of the characters in The Rivals, where the events are of a few days, as we do from chapters that cover long periods of residence in one of the most beautiful, and still, in spite of the disproportionate and architecturally discordant hotel, the least injured cities of England. Souvenirs of the personal association of Jane Austen with Bath are almost as plentiful as those of Johnson with Fleet Street. The house in Sydney Place where the Austens lived during most of the time between Mr. Austen's resignation and his death is the only one that bears a tablet to Jane's memory. But in Queen Square, whence several of her letters are dated, in Gay Street, in the Green Park, in the Paragon, the rooms she occupied with her relations at one time or another remain very much as they were in her day, and externally the buildings are unaltered, one and all being built of the local stone which gives so notable a character to the Georgian architecture of the city. In Camden Place where the Elliots rented "the best house," in Pulteney Street where Catherine stayed with the Allens, in Westgate Buildings where Anne cheered Mrs. Smith's lonely days, there has been little change since Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were written. There is probably no town in the world associated with the work of a famous person of even so near a period which has altered less in appearance than Bath since 1805.
At Southampton the mother and daughters lived, after the father's death, in a house in that secluded part of the town which stands between the High Street and the old walls above the "Water." There is a bit of those walls which abuts on the spot where the Austens' house stood, and it is one of the places where we may feel confident that we are walking where Jane often walked, and gazing out over a scene which was familiar to her in almost all save the funnels of the steam yachts and the distant view of the train on its way to Bournemouth or to London.
In London itself there are many spots that will always recall Jane Austen to her devoted friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street (Covent Garden), in Hans Place, in Cork Street, we know that she herself stayed. Many of the characters in Sense and Sensibility—the only novel in which we hear much of London—are associated with familiar streets. Edward Ferrars stayed in Pall Mall, the Steele girls in Bartlett's Buildings, Mrs. Jennings in Berkeley Street, the John Dashwoods in Harley Street. The Gardiners (Pride and Prejudice) lived in Gracechurch Street.