We know she was given to careful distinctions of behavior, writing about Mrs. Armstrong, the mother of an acquaintance in Lyme Regis, who “sat darning a pr of Stockings the whole of my visit . . .” This breach of etiquette, similar perhaps to pulling out one’s knitting at a contemporary dinner party, showed a hostess’s unwillingness to devote complete attention to a guest, preferring to get on with more immediate and practical tasks.

Aunt Jane once wrote that she considered the young Fanny to be “almost another sister” and “quite after one’s own heart,” which makes the “Yes my love” letter particularly bitter. Fanny’s word “mediocre” is especially cruel, and more so because we know that Fanny appreciated her aunt’s genius. And yet, Jane Austen was eccentric to her time. Another niece, Marianne Knight, remembers how her aunt, working quietly by the fire at Godmersham, would mysteriously burst into laughter and hurry across the room to write something down, then return to her place. Unexplained laughter, erratic movement—these would have been enough in an age of highly codified behavior to raise concern about Aunt Jane’s lack of refinement.

Undoubtedly Jane Austen benefited from her visits to Kent, a place, she once wrote with sweeping exaggeration, where everyone is rich. A social window was opened to her, and it was one she could make ready use of in her writing. Nonetheless, there are those who believe that her poor-relative status and the suffering this caused her may have injured her self-regard and contributed to a gathering sense of bitterness. Without a doubt she was condescended to. The hairdresser who came to prepare the Godmersham ladies for an evening party offered the visiting Jane Austen a discount, recognizing her at once as a poor relation, someone to be pitied and accommodated. We know that during one prolonged stay at Godmersham, she expressed in the most piercing tones a longing for home, for the simplicity of Steventon (and later Chawton), with its opportunity for open conversation and simple routines, and for the dependable, satisfying companionship of her sister and mother and a few agreeable neighbors.

Probably she came to believe that the two worlds—wealthy Kent and familiar, humble Hampshire—were irreconcilable. She belonged to one and not to the other. There may well have been pain in exclusion and humiliation, but there was always the pleasure of going home, to the place where she knew she would be welcomed.

8

WE THINK OF Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen’s sunniest novel, and yet it was written during a period of unhappiness. No letters survive from the year 1797, and this is a clue, though an unreliable one. Cassandra, we know, was recovering from the death of her fiancé, and Jane from her disappointment over Tom Lefroy. The household at Steventon had shrunk. Visitors continued to arrive, but the ongoing bustle of life in the country rectory had faded. Probably there was less noise, less laughter. Theatricals in the barn were a thing of the past. The Austen parents were growing older, and finances, too, were thinner.

Yet from this difficult time sprang a fast-paced, exuberant, much loved novel with a new kind of heroine, a young woman of warmth and intelligence who, by the flex of her own mind, remakes her future and makes it spectacularly. The detachment of Jane Austen’s imaginative flight from her personal concerns is extraordinary, even given the fiction writer’s license. Pride and Prejudice can be seen as a palimpsest, with Jane Austen’s real life engraved roughly, enigmatically, beneath its surface. Elizabeth Bennet, like Jane Austen, is in her early twenties and has an older sister, Jane, whom she adores. Jane and Elizabeth’s parents share a problem with the Austen parents: how to find husbands for daughters of small fortune. Elizabeth also has Jane Austen’s quickness of mind, but she is not Jane Austen. The Bennet household is more comfortable, less isolated, and employs a larger number of servants. Elizabeth’s Longbourn is not Steventon, and agriculture is not a felt presence. Mr.