A Jane Austen Education(47)
After the Reverend Austen’s death, four more years of uncertainty followed before Austen’s mother and the girls would find a permanent home. The young woman who had tossed off three novels before the age of twenty-four—early drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey—was virtually silent, artistically speaking, during this entire eight-year stretch. The one piece of work that survives, the beginning of a novel called The Watsons, was abandoned after a few dozen pages. Was Austen discouraged at the fate of her previous work? (Pride and Prejudice was rejected sight unseen; Northanger Abbey was bought for ten pounds but never published.) Did she need stability to do her work?
Both undoubtedly were true, but Anne’s story makes us suspect that the formerly ebullient young writer was also suffering from her own feelings of depression. The Watsons, about a group of poor, unmarried sisters trying to figure out how to save themselves from destitution before the death of their ailing clergyman father—and thus a frighteningly close parallel to Jane and Cassandra’s situation—has been called “grim,” “bleak,” and “pessimistic.” Austen, said one critic, “seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threatens her style.” And that was before her father died—an event itself preceded, by only a couple of months, by the death of Anne Lefroy, the surrogate mother who had been a crucial figure in Austen’s life since childhood. No wonder she couldn’t summon the will to write.
One more circumstance must have contributed to Austen’s portrait of Anne, as well as to the novel’s somber atmosphere as a whole. At around the age of twenty-seven, the same age as the heroine, Austen rejected what she must have known would be her last chance at marriage. The man in question was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother to a trio of old friends and heir to a large estate, but a shy and awkward young man who was five years Austen’s junior. She accepted his proposal one evening, agonized about it the entire night, then rescinded her acceptance the next morning. It was, she surely knew, a decisive step. From there, says Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, she “hurried into middle age,” embracing the role of maiden aunt for once and for all. She was not lonely, but in a profound sense, she would always be alone. Now, in Anne, she created a heroine who was staring over the same cliff.
It was no accident that the novel began in autumn, or that Anne dwelled, like none of Austen’s other heroines, in the past and her own mind. On a walk with Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove and some of the other young people, while the rest of them chattered away, Anne mused wistfully on the declining year. Austen’s language swelled with unaccustomed feeling here, its normally satirical accents drawn, almost against their will, into a slower, more pensive rhythm. Anne’s own pleasure in the walk, we learned, must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,—that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
And when something happened to interrupt her train of thought, a reminder of her own exclusion from the dance of youth, “the sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.”
But by then her memory had had a very different kind of work to do. When Sir Walter had decamped for Bath, he had rented the Elliot manor to a navy man, Admiral Croft, whose wife turned out to be none other than the sister of a certain Captain Wentworth—the very man the heroine had loved and lost those eight long years before. “A few months more,” said Anne when she had heard the news, “and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”
And so indeed it proved to be. And when the dreaded meeting came,a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. . . . Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; . . . the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. . . . The room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.
“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”
Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room.
Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. . . .
Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.
But if the past was instantly revived for Anne, the case was very different for her former fiancé. “Henrietta asked him what he thought of you,” reported Mary in her passive-aggressive way, “and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”
Yet painful as the meeting was, Wentworth’s arrival began to draw Anne away from her awful family and toward a very different group of people. Wentworth’s fellow officer and close friend, Captain Harville, was now living with his wife in the nearby seaside town of Lyme. When the whole group decided to pay them a visit—Henrietta and Louisa, Charles and Mary, Wentworth and Anne—the heroine discovered a kind of togetherness that she had never suspected.