Would Mr. Knightley, that inveterate reader of agricultural reports, pull up stakes and take Emma off to live in London? Or in Bath? Never. It would be unthinkable.

 

There can be little question that Jane Austen’s rather fragile frame of creativity was disturbed following the move to Bath. Since returning from school at the age of eleven, she had found her place in her family, amusing those around her with her writing, winning their approval, and then growing to maturity and learning to divert herself with her carefully crafted novels, novels in which young women—Elizabeth, Catherine, Elinor and Marianne—find ways to liberate themselves from their circumstances. Her own existence as the younger daughter in a large family had reached a point of stasis, but her creative life soared within her particular set of circumstances, in which she was protected, encouraged, and—it must be said—left largely alone. She had, after two or perhaps three enforced separations, to a foster home during infancy and then to school, mastered the delicate trick of living within her family and, through her imaginative work, leaving them behind. Readers are sure to be puzzled by Jane Austen’s silence in the ensuing years unless they understand how unarmored she was against change, against a new and superficial society, against those who had not known her from childhood and who were unfamiliar with her history and the direction of her thoughts. Bath was a showcase city; everyone, and everything, was up for display. Display was why people went to Bath: to see and be seen, to judge and be judged.

Austen had also witnessed the phenomenon faced by the younger children of large families who watch their older brothers and sisters drift off into the world, leaving them behind in a diminished family nest, often with aging parents who are unwilling or unable to renegotiate the parental role and who are more and more focused on the remaining “children.” This not-at-all-uncommon situation requires immense tolerance on all sides and subtle readjustments that call for an openness of expression. It is difficult to imagine such a psychological rearrangement taking place at Steventon, and even harder to envision a free exchange of ideas. The uneasiness of the situation might be recognized on all sides, but be too awkward to be brought to the surface. In Jane Austen’s novels daughters grow up and very often become their parents’ advisers. In her own family it seems this did not happen; her parents continued to act, as they had always done, without her counsel in decisions that radically affected her life.

Jane Austen was particularly adrift at the time her parents announced the move to Bath. Cassandra, her only real confidante, was, during those months, visiting in Kent where the shock of impending change must have been muffled by distance and by distraction. Jane’s letters to her in 1800 and the first part of 1801 are particularly sour. We can read her loss and confusion through the satiric bite of her observations, and there is, as well, a sad sense of lowered consequence. She ordered two brown dresses in January of 1801, one for herself and one for her mother, and insisted that the shades of brown must vary slightly so that the difference between them would provide a topic of conversation. There was much going on in the world at the time, including the immensely popular heroics of Admiral Nelson and the naval successes of Austen’s own brother Captain Frank Austen, but Jane Austen, twenty-five years old, felt herself reduced to discussing shades of brown and sniping at neighbors: “Mr Dyson as usual looked wild, & Mrs. Dyson as usual looked big.” There is in the letters of this period very little of the buoyancy that had formerly compensated for her verbal thrusts, no little darts of joy or the hope of intervening circumstances. She was a spinster daughter, living with elderly parents, exchanging her family home for rented rooms in a city where she would have no real intellectual companions other than her sister, Cassandra. Her self-mockery stops well short of humor.

She never announced herself to be in a state of depression, but certainly she understood the condition. Both Fanny Price and Marianne Dashwood (Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility) are immobilized by sadness and powerlessness, and even Emma is paralyzed, momentarily, when brought face to face with her own imperfections. Jane Austen was too private and too wary of self-pity to declare her state. We apprehend it, today, through the bitterness of her correspondence, but mostly through the abrupt cessation of her novels, a flow of words that had poured from her pen since late childhood. Now it dried up. As a writer she was disabled and profoundly discouraged.

It would be almost ten years, when she was approaching her thirty-fifth birthday, before she returned to the productive working habits of her young womanhood. It is impossible to say whether she suffered from depression or distraction. She had been dislocated in both time and space, taken abruptly to a new and fashionable world, and it was not one she would have chosen.

It might be thought that a move would stimulate a young writer. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, setting down the Austen memoir years later, seems to have been no more than mildly perplexed by his aunt’s midlife silence, saying only that it “might rather have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have called forth her powers.” Virginia Woolf has written insightfully on this very topic. A writer, she maintains, does not need stimulation, but the opposite of stimulation.