By this time Jane Austen had been dead for years, but it is almost certain that she would have blessed the new arrangement and welcomed her old friend as a true Austen sister.

16

“SEVEN YEARS I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin and every feeling of one’s mind.” Jane Austen wrote these words to Cassandra in 1805, when she was thirty years old. She is speaking about the shift from country pleasures to the more elevated world of Bath society, but she might just as easily be addressing other major shifts in her life, periods in which she evolved from one being into another. Between the ages of eleven and eighteen she educated herself and began the long process of learning to write. And between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five she wrote three exuberant, confident novels. Seven or eight years of discouragement followed: the large family upheaval, the death of her father, pinched financial circumstances, and the realization that she was unlikely to marry and establish a home of her own. These were her difficult days, when she felt most keenly her lack of power over her own arrangements. She was not writing, and she had not yet convinced a publisher that she was a writer; in fact, she had scarcely tried.

The writing of three more great novels would follow, but she could not have known this at the age of thirty. What she may have felt, though, is that she was steadily humanizing herself, just as she had persisted in her course of self-education at Steventon Rectory. There was time, endless hours, in which to study the ways of society, at least that generous social slice that was offered to her. At an earlier age she had examined specimens through the lens of her father’s microscope. Now she listened and observed the social noise that went on around her, all the time widening her range of human understanding. We don’t know, step by step, the dimensions of her growing awareness, only that when the time came for her to pick up her pen once again at Chawton, she was ready. Her dramatic powers were fully in place and her moral vision of society was steady and focused.

Before the final move to Chawton, however, she was to endure a period of serious displacement. The lodgings in Bath were left behind in 1806, when Mrs. Austen took her daughters off on a long round of family visits before they settled in Southampton, where Francis and his wife Mary were living. A large, pleasant house was rented, but the Austen women found difficulty in establishing new friendships. Their residence was never more than tentative, and one or the other of the Austen sisters was always being called back to Steventon or to Godmersham to help out when a new baby arrived.

Finally, in 1808, when Jane was well into her thirties, her wealthy brother Edward stepped in at last to offer his mother and sisters a comfortable home. Why had he taken so long to attend to this responsibility? He may have been preoccupied with his enormous family and his business dealings. Or perhaps it was his wife, Elizabeth, who stood in his way— Elizabeth had never been fond of Jane, finding her too clever to be good company. But Elizabeth was now dead, a collapse following the birth of her eleventh child. She was only thirty-five years old, the mother of an enormous family, much loved by her children, though viewed with some skepticism by her sister-in-law Jane.

Edward was a wealthy man, with many possibilities at his disposal. He gave his mother and sisters a choice. They might settle either in the attractive Kentish village of Wye, not far from Godmersham, or in a cottage in the Hampshire village of Chawton. Chawton, a village of about sixty families, was immediately selected; it stood in the beloved and familiar Hampshire landscape, and the cottage, at the juncture of three roads, could quickly be made ready for them. They would be only twelve miles from James and Mary at Steventon—this was very important to Mrs. Austen—and within easy walking distance from the town of Alton, where Henry often came on business.

Thousands of Jane Austen readers have by now visited Chawton Cottage, which is open to the public. Visitors divide their response down the middle; there are those who find the house surprisingly modest and located uncomfortably close to the busy road; others are astonished to find a “cottage” with six bedrooms, a garden, and some outbuildings. Architecturally it is a modest L-shaped affair, a twostoried house of red brick with sash windows and a tiled roof, which was already at least a hundred years old when the Austen party moved in. It may have been built as a small inn, but in the early nineteenth century it served as a home for Edward’s bailiff, who had recently—conveniently—died.

A few improvements were made before the ladies arrived, mostly cleaning and decorating. Today’s visitors are surprised to find that the front door opens directly into the dining room.