A roof of one’s own
Jane Austen ‘broke barriers so other women could follow in her footsteps’
Jane Austen may have written about country houses and ballrooms, but her life was not all finery.
The great 18th-century British novelist, whose classics include Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, faced hardships, poked fun at social conventions and carved out a life for herself as an unmarried woman. And in doing so she was a feminist, says historian Lucy Worsley.
“She broke barriers so other women could follow in her footsteps,” Worsley, author of Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, said this summer at the U.K.’s largest literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.
Worsley was among a group of experts and authors speaking about Austen in celebration of the bicentenary of her death — July 18, 1817 — at the annual festival in what’s known as the Town of Books (due to its many book stores).
“Although her books are brilliant and world-changing, it’s almost as interesting the way she took risks and made some unusual decisions in order to write them in the first place,” she said.
Worsley spent the past few years working on her book. As the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which manages six of the U.K.’s major unoccupied royal palaces including the Tower of London and Hampton Court, she turned her attention to Austen’s residences to learn more about the author.
Austen at Home describes the novelist as someone who fought for her freedom and, despite marriage prospects, refused to settle for anything less than her own Mr. Darcy.
“Did spinster Jane Austen ever have sex with a man?” Worsley asked. “The answer is almost certainly not, in my belief.
“Women lower down the social scale than Jane might very often have sex before marriage … and if you were in the aristocracy then they took affairs pretty lightly, but as Jane was so economically and emotionally dependent on her family, if she had had pregnancy outside of marriage it would have been world-shattering.”
Austen was rumoured to have had a romance with a young law student named Tom Lefroy when she was living in the Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, where she spent the first 25 years of her life. But he disappeared from the scene and Worsley said Austen may have been too proud to make inquiries about him.
When she was 25, her father George Austen moved the family to Bath in the hopes that Jane and her sister Cassandra might find husbands. Worsley said the house the family rented in Sydney Place is now a holiday house where visitors can stay.
Jane Austen would have had less housework but more social work here, and when she was 28, she did receive a good proposal — but she turned down Harris Bigg-Wither.
In 1805 her father died, after which the family moved to furnished lodgings and she made a fresh start as a novelist.
Her most productive writing years came later when her brother Edward moved the family to Chawton Cottage, near Alton in Hampshire. That home is now a museum.
When she was 40, Austen became quite ill and she moved to Winchester to be closer to the hospital.
The now-world-renowned author published four novels anonymously during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1816.
But she earned little income from her books while she was alive, Worsely said.