She was snatched from the good novel she had imagined herself into and placed into an alternate narrative of class bitterness. The real world that her heroine Elinor had recognized had intervened, the world of money and practical considerations, and the hero, it turned out, was part of a pragmatic design. For Jane Austen’s Tom Lefroy was gone, swiftly removed by the Lefroy family, who had greater plans for this young man than marriage to an un-moneyed clergyman’s daughter who would not be allowed, after all, to utter a lighthearted acceptance of marriage, undercut only by the condition of the white coat.

She never saw him again, although it is clear she thought of him. It is also apparent that the episode multiplied itself again and again in her novels, embedded in the theme of thwarted love and loss of nerve. In the novels, happily, there is often a second or third chance, a triumphant overriding of class difference, but between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy there is only silence. He returned to Ireland after his studies, married an heiress, produced a large family, became something of a pious bore, and eventually rose to become chief justice of Ireland.

She responded to her heartbreak with typical self-mockery, turning herself for a brief time into the role of abandoned lover, overflowing tears and all. Friends rushed to comfort her, but the experience must have been genuinely humiliating, especially since she had broadcast her hopes to Cassandra. Had she foolishly magnified a relationship that was barely in its infancy—three or four balls and one visit to Steventon, some shared laughter and literary exchanges, and perhaps a kiss or two? Certainly she had misjudged the threat she posed to the Lefroy family.

The romantic impulse that had accompanied her since her early youth fell at least partly away. She was no longer a child passionate about the certainty of love overcoming all obstacles. She was an unmarried woman of twenty who, because of her lack of fortune, was going to have fewer and fewer choices. Like Elinor, like Marianne, her two new heroines, she was vulnerable to a society she was just beginning to understand.

She buried herself in gossip, in family doings, in a prolonged visit to her brother Edward’s family in Kent, but her greatest comfort may have come from her ebullient London cousin, Eliza. The two of them carried on a lively correspondence and saw each other as frequently as possible. Eliza, two years a widow, was a vivid presence, a woman of affairs who managed to keep the romantic flame alive in a pragmatic world. Already she was looking around and assessing her chances of forming new attachments, but she was in no hurry. Marriage could be a form of subjugation, she believed. There might be other possibilities for women of wit and intelligence.

6

TOM FOWLE WAS DEAD. The shocking news arrived at Steventon from the West Indies in the spring of 1797. Cassandra’s beloved fiancé had perished of yellow fever and been buried at sea. An Easter wedding had been planned and then postponed when Tom failed to return. The Austen family was in deep mourning. From all reports, Cassandra Austen’s behavior took the form of dignified stoicism, and even though she was in her early twenties she seems to have withdrawn almost at once into a life of quiet spinsterhood, or even a sort of symbolic widowhood. Prudent young Tom Fowle had taken the precaution of making a will before he set out, leaving Cassandra with a sum of £1,000. Close to being a widow’s inheritance, it was not enough to live on but enough to make her, for the rest of her life, somewhat less dependent on family funds. A young woman of vigor and humor—her sister Jane once called her “the finest comic writer of the present age”—she entered at age twenty-four a premature middle age, assuming some of her mother’s domestic burdens and transforming herself into a devoted maiden aunt. The two sisters clung together in their numb sorrow, or so it seemed to their friends, their lives more closely entwined than ever before. “They alone fully understood what each had suffered and felt and thought,” one family member recounted.

And yet, all around them life was going on. Cousin Eliza stepped into the inner circle of the Austen family with a dramatic double flourish. First she refused James Austen’s offer of marriage ( James’s wife, Anne, had died early in his marriage), and then, in 1797, she and Henry Austen, ten years her junior, were married. It was a marriage useful to both in practical terms and also, it appears, an affair of passion that lasted until Eliza’s death in 1813.

Inevitably Jane Austen was spun into her own family chronicle of grief and consolation. At the same time she was hard at work on a new novel she titled, provisionally, First Impressions, which was really about the faultiness of first impressions, or how an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Bennet forms an entrenched negative opinion of an arrogant young man, Darcy, whom she believes has insulted herself and her family.

Jane Austen, unlike her sister, had not given up her own delight in balls and flirtations, though her hopes at this time seem to have been growing dimmer.