It is easy enough, after reading the novels, to imagine fierce sibling rivalry in the Austen clan or even the petty irritations that accumulate when numbers of adults and children are confined during the course of a few rainy days. But to employ the word “dysfunctional” when describing the Austens points to a parallel difficulty in which contemporary ideas and terms are perceived as being timeless. They are not. The late-eighteenth-century mind did not work along the same track as ours today, and I have attempted in this short life of Jane Austen to read into my own resistance, instead of seeking a confirmation or denial embedded in the fiction.

Jane Austen was born in the remote Hampshire village of Steventon, with its fewer than thirty families, on the sixteenth of December 1775. Her parents, George Austen, Rector of Steventon, and his wife, Cassandra Leigh Austen, belonged to what was then called the lesser gentry. The couple was not, in their early years, or perhaps ever, economically secure, but their level of education and family connections meant that they were not at a disadvantage when set beside their wealthier neighbors.

The continuance of the Austen family line was a concern, but it is unlikely that the Austens, George and Cassandra, were disappointed that their seventh child should be a girl. The rectory was full of little boys, all born in quick succession, and Jane was welcomed as a playmate for the Austens’ only other daughter, two-year-old Cassandra.

No doctor was required for the birth—in fact, there was no doctor in the village—but Mrs. Austen was undoubtedly attended by her sister-in-law Philadelphia, who was visiting at the time, along with Aunt Philadelphia’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Eliza. The winter that followed was exceptionally long and bitter according to surviving records, and probably it was this hardship that postponed young Jane’s formal christening until the spring of 1776.

Her first months were spent indoors, snug at the breast of her mother. Mrs. Austen’s parenting ideas were unorthodox, for unlike many contemporaries of her class, she believed in breast-feeding her babies for a few months in order to give them a good start. After weaning, though, the children were placed in the hands of a local family, probably the Littleworth family at nearby Cheesedown Farm, until they reached what Mrs. Austen considered to be the age of reason, that is until they could walk and talk and demonstrate a measure of sturdy independence.

The length of time during which Jane would have been fostered out is not known, but it can be imagined that the abrupt shift from mother’s breast to alien household made a profound emotional impact on the child. This early expulsion from home was the first of many, and it is doubtful whether she had much to say about such later separations, just as she had little power over her other domestic arrangements. Sharing a bedroom all her life, she was denied the “heaven” that Emily Dickinson found in her solitary upstairs space. Her fictional expression can be imagined as a smooth flow of narrative deriving from her confined reality, but a flow that is interrupted by jets of alternate possibility, the moment observed and then repositioned and recharged.

More and more, to the contemporary sensibility, it seems that the true subject of serious fiction is not “current events,” ongoing wars or political issues, but the search of an individual for his or her true home. Men and women, in fiction and in life, become separated from their home; in the novels of Jane Austen they are misdirected or misassigned, so that home, both in its true and metaphorical sense, becomes a desired but denied destination. At the same time Jane Austen herself must often have felt almost more homeless when she was restricted to home than when she was banished from it.

The sensitive (some would say pious) Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is born, it would appear, into a family of aliens—a drinking father, an indifferent mother—and must do with this situation what she can. Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice is, though she doesn’t put it quite so plainly, ashamed of her parents, possessing a sensibility that seeks its fulfillment in the creation of a new home with Darcy. Emma Woodhouse can be thought of as a half orphan, unable to grow up until she finds a path to making a home of her own. And Jane Austen herself, laboring over her brilliant fictions, creates again and again a vision of refuge furnished with love, acceptance, and security, an image she herself would be able to call a home of her own.

2

JANE AUSTEN CHOSE to focus her writing on daughters rather than mothers (with the exception of her short and curious novel Lady Susan), but nevertheless mothers are essential in her fiction. They are the engines that push the action forward, even when they fail to establish much in the way of maternal warmth. Daughters achieve their independence by working against the family constraints, their young spirits struck from the passive, lumpish postures of their ineffectual or distanced mothers. Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), the most transparent example, is everything that her foolish mother is not. The feeble Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility leans on her three daughters rather than supporting them; the good woman is respected, but we know, and Jane Austen knows, that she is powerless. Emma’s mother is an absence, a vague memory, as one would expect the enfeebled spouse of Mr. Woodhouse to be, and Emma’s mothering has been handed over to a hired surrogate, Mrs. Weston, who not surprisingly wants to have a life and a child of her own—even though this leaves the hapless, ill-equipped Emma attempting to mother the whole village of Highbury with her plots and dramas. Northanger Abbey, which can be read as a coming-of-age novel, shows Mrs.