Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.

Jane Austen, who wrote intensely social novels, was an intensely social being. “We did not walk long in the Crescent yesterday,” she wrote Cassandra; “it was hot and not crouded [sic] enough.” Moments of solitary meditation are relatively rare in her work. Changes of mood or intention are most often framed within conversations—during supper parties, while taking long walks, or mending linen in the sitting room. Two, three, four people are present; their participation is the mechanism that moves the action forward. Whatever is proposed or considered finds a response, either a concert of agreement or a choir of dissonance. There may be a knock on the door at any moment or a carriage passing on the roadway, and these developments must be registered. Individual actions have social consequences in Jane Austen’s fiction, and the same can be assumed for her life. She admired—as Mr. Knightley in Emma admired—an open temper, but recognized that what was deeply private was likely to remain unspoken and unwritten, except in the form of gesture; and for this she possessed an unequivocal skill. Her novels can be read through their moments of confrontation and also through the light that glances and gathers around the many silences.

For most of her life Jane Austen had little opportunity to indulge in solitude. She herself was almost never beyond the reach of family, or out of touch with friends. An empty room in the early years at Steventon would have been a rarity; the various small rented quarters in Bath must also have prohibited the privacy a writer cherishes. Later, life at Chawton presented similar problems: four women (for Martha Lloyd had joined the family by then) inhabiting a few crowded rooms, together with the comings and goings of servants and the arrival, most often unannounced, of visitors.

To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer’s own voice, or more exaggerated or effaced. This gap between consciousness and text is always ready to freeze the movement of the pen, particularly when the act of writing is done in the presence of others. Austen had no study of her own, no cozy refuge arranged for her quiet convenience. The encouragement of her imagination did not arise from conditions offered her by others. Composing—and this is the term she generally used—was done in the family sitting room, and it is said, famously, that she quickly covered over the manuscript page when someone else entered unexpectedly, or slipped the pages inside her small mahogany desk.

As a woman of her class, it was expected that she would be accompanied on outings. Leaving her childhood friends behind, she managed to find new companions at Bath who were willing to share her long walks. They may not always have been agreeable company, but they were convenient for her purpose. Her travels in England—and she never visited more than a handful of counties—were undertaken with a family member by her side: her mother, her sister, one of her many brothers, or else a trusted family servant.

She may have chafed at her lack of solitude, but a life of social engagement was what she knew and what in the end nourished her fiction. Friendship was one of the values of the eighteenth century into which she was born. It was sometimes spoken of as though it were a new invention. Her own family depended on their neighbors’ warm hospitality, and many of these friendships endured throughout her life.

There is even a sense that she was able to extract more pleasure from her social encounters than others did and that she prided herself on that ability. A last-minute invitation to dine at Ashe Park was immediately accepted. “We had a very quiet evening,” she wrote Cassandra. “I believe Mary [her sister-in-law] found it dull, but I thought it very pleasant. To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room is a luxurious sensation.—Sometimes we talked & sometimes we were silent; I said two or three amusing things, & Mr. Holder made a few infamous puns.” It is clear that on this occasion she experienced several overlapping sensations: that there is human comfort in such evenings and also the possibility for drama, even if it were not in the end fulfilled; that her own appreciation of such moments outdistanced Mary’s, which was a credit to her imaginative powers; and that Ashe Park glowed like a stage setting in which she possessed sufficient self-consciousness to see herself as a player, a clever woman, unmarried but capable of responding to such spontaneous gatherings and sparking the evening by making clever remarks—all carefully counted and afterward relished.

Despite these rescued and dramatized social events, she must often have been impatient with the idle chatter of her country friends. We can easily imagine that a woman with such a well-stocked intelligence would have longed for more cerebral discourse than the price of ham and the newest fashion in bonnets, and probably she did.