A Jane Austen Education(46)

Flash forward eight years, and the heroine was more alone than ever now, alone in a way that none of Austen’s other characters were. Even Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, had her cousin Edmund and her brother William and the genuine if lazy affection of her aunt Lady Bertram. But while Anne still had Lady Russell, for what she was worth, that was all she had. Having never gotten over Captain Wentworth, she had refused the hand of a local gentleman a few years later, and she seemed to have no chance of ever being offered someone else’s. Her younger sister, Mary, had gotten married herself (to Charles Musgrove, the same local man whom Anne refused). Her older sister, Elizabeth, was as cold and mean as their father—one of the things that made her Sir Walter’s favorite—and equally awful to Anne. Isolated in her own family, the heroine “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way: she was only Anne.”

Fanny also had Mansfield Park to hold on to, but now Anne was even going to lose her own beloved home. Sir Walter, with a very high opinion as to what so great a man deserved, had run himself into such a morass of debt that he was forced to rent out the family manor and move to Bath. Elizabeth would be coming along, of course, but her chosen companion would be, not the sister whose excellence she could never perceive, but an oily young widow named Mrs. Clay, all flattery and compliance, who had worked her way into Elizabeth’s affections.

Anne would go to stay with the Musgroves and play the role of spinster aunt that Austen knew herself by then so very well. She would take care of her nephews while Mary, a world-class whiner, complained about how put-upon she was; she would play dances for Charles’s lively, lovely younger sisters Henrietta and Louisa (who resembled Austen heroines far more than Anne now did); she would listen to everybody’s grievances about one another; she would make peace between them when she could; and above all, she would stay in the shadows, where a spinster belonged. It was to be a lesson, she mused, “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—not that Anne was much of anything even in her own circle.




My circumstances, needless to say, were very different from Anne’s, but I shared her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. I hadn’t lost a parent or a home, but I had done what I could—what I had to do—to distance myself from both. I had wanted to be on my own, and now I was. I just didn’t realize quite how on my own I was going to be. When you’re young—when you’re in high school and college and even your early twenties—you take your friends for granted. Of course they’ll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden—and it can feel very sudden indeed—everybody’s gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone’s busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you’ve always been surrounded has evaporated.

I still didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. Yet just as it was for Anne, that’s how it was starting to look like it was always going to be for me. I still loved living in my own place and being out from under my father’s shadow, but my Austen chapter wasn’t taking me forever just because it gave me so much work to do. A lot of days, I didn’t even have the strength to face it. I would drag myself out of bed, only to sit around and stare off into space. The air would sag, the clock would point its contemptuous hands, my cat would look at me and seem to wonder why I wasn’t moving. I would feel ugly and worthless. Anne was depressed—that’s what it meant for Austen to say that her spirits were low—and let’s face it, so was I.

Austen herself had lost a home, a circumstance that Anne’s experience undoubtedly reflected. Right around her twentyfifth birthday, Austen’s parents suddenly announced that her father would be retiring—he had been rector of the same parish for forty years—and that they and the girls, Cassandra and Jane, would be picking up and moving, just like Sir Walter, to Bath. The news came as a terrible shock, and there was little time to get used to it. Within a couple of months, the household in which Austen had lived her entire life was going to be broken up.

Friends would have to be taken leave of, a world of familiar feelings left behind. Most of the family’s things were not even transferred to Bath, but sold or given away to Austen’s brother James and his wife, Anna, who were coming to take possession of the house: the piano on which Austen had learned to play; the family pictures and furniture, companions of many years; her father’s library—“my books,” as she called them—whose value to her we can only imagine. Austen was even pressured into surrendering one of her own important possessions, a move she defied with tart indignation. “As I do not choose to have Generosity dictated to me,” she wrote to Cassandra, “I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.” From a life of rural rhythms and settled routines, she was being hustled out of the only home she’d ever known.

Four years later, years of upheaval and adjustment, came another blow that would echo through Anne’s story: Austen’s beloved father died. “The loss of such a Parent must be felt,” she wrote to Frank, “or we should be Brutes.” “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?” Austen’s mother was no Sir Walter, but she was a difficult, hypochondriacal woman whom Austen poked fun at to Cassandra, and there seems little doubt that her father was the author’s favorite, just as Anne’s mother was hers.