A writer needs regularity, the same books around her, the same walls. A writer needs self-ordered patterns of time, her own desk, and day after profitable day in order to do her best work.

Jane Austen and her family moved house several times during their Bath years, and from what we know these rooms grew progressively smaller and less comfortable. She also suffered a number of deaths during the period: the gradual collapse and death of her cousin Eliza’s fifteen-year-old son; the accidental death of her great friend Mrs. Lefroy; and, above all, the demise of her father in 1805. Austen has a reputation for being philosophical about death and for dry detachment and acceptance of its reality. The letter she writes to her brother Francis informing him of their father’s death seems exceptionally cool, and a reader of Jane Austen is soon aware of how seldom tragic death intrudes on the pages of her fiction. But death, and particularly the death of her father, must have affected her deeply. He had fostered her talent, providing her with a careful critical eye and with the more practical gifts of writing paper and a writing desk.

His death also placed his wife and daughters in a precarious economic state. There were no pensions for the widows and children of clergymen. Mrs. Austen and Cassandra were each left with a small income, but Jane Austen had nothing. Early on she must have perceived the way in which reality rebukes fiction since her heroines, with their intelligence and vigor, are always able to grasp some means of self-preservation while she, their creator, is left helpless—with no income and no choices.

Her brothers Frank, James, and Henry all offered what they could to the three women, which was not a great deal. But Edward, the wealthy owner of Godmersham, and of huge landholdings in Kent and Hampshire, seems to have taken a rather nonchalant part in providing for his mother and sisters. It was only years later that he wakened to their circumstances, pushed a button, and provided them with a permanent home at Chawton—where Jane Austen, once again, became a functioning writer.

13

THE CREATIVE SILENCE of Jane Austen’s middle years gestures toward other silences. Of George, her handicapped brother placed in foster care when he was a child, there is not one word, though he lived into old age.

Of her mother’s uncertain health and difficult disposition there are only covert suggestions. With the Reverend George Austen’s death, the relationships in the little family must have shifted, the newly impoverished mother and two daughters rubbing up against each other in new, more immediate ways, and probably with greater distress.

What other events intrude on this long midlife silence? A sort of half story exists about Jane visiting a Devon resort and becoming friendly with a young man who showed an interest in continuing the friendship, and then died. This small chip of an incident, if it did occur, was related by Cassandra to her niece Caroline years later and is, sadly, unreliable in its turnings, being too much a mirror image of Cassandra’s tragic engagement and too much the traditional material of opaque family legends, which represent, perhaps, the wish to sprinkle a little fairy dust on a life that was sadly lacking in romance.

Rumors and legends also attend a marriage proposal that Jane Austen received—and accepted—in early December of 1802. She and Cassandra were away from Bath, visiting at a large country house near Steventon. The Bigg-Wither family of Manydown Park were very old friends, and their two sons and seven daughters had intermingled freely with the Austen children as they grew to adulthood. Catherine and Alethea Bigg, in particular, were close to Cassandra and Jane, and possessed the same high spirits.

Harris Bigg-Wither, since the death of his older brother, was the heir to Manydown Park, a rather shy and shambling young man of twenty-one, with a serious stutter and an oddly blunted intelligence. To everyone’s astonishment, he approached Jane Austen during her December visit and asked her to be his wife. She accepted, then almost immediately regretted her decision.

The age difference between them was only six years, not a serious point of consideration, though it is quite clear that she did not love him. The heroes of all her novels are bookish men—Henry Tilney, Darcy, Mr. Knightley—and Harris Bigg-Wither was an overgrown country schoolboy with very little inclination for learning. She did, to be sure, long to marry. She was just days away from her twenty-seventh birthday and facing the reality of what that might mean. Age twenty-seven had a meaningful ring to it. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility proclaims, “A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.” Austen’s own words written a few years earlier must have rattled in her head, and she would already have been unsettled by a surprise offer from an old family friend and one she had never thought of in a romantic light.

It is certain that being the mistress of the great estate of Manydown would have been a temptation to Jane Austen, growing older and living in rented rooms with her parents in Bath. Undoubtedly, she was fond of the boyish, awkward Harris, whom she had known all her life, but the intimacy of marriage was a different matter.

She had expressed her thoughts about marriage as a “compact of convenience,” in which each partner benefits in some way. Charlotte Lucas, accepting the egregious Mr.