‘The young people were all wild to see Lyme.’ When they arrive, in chapter eleven of Persuasion, Jane Austen describes the little seaside resort in the style of a tour guide: the pleasant bay, the new-fangled bathing machines, the famous Cobb, the beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, the charms of ‘the immediate environs’ – the high sweep of countryside around Charmouth, ‘the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks … a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight’.2
‘These places must be visited, and visited again to make the worth of Lyme understood,’ Jane Austen tells her readers. She had visited Lyme at least twice, on one occasion witnessing a fire that destroyed a number of houses. When she describes the place in her novel, she is visiting it yet again, this time in her imagination. Her description is the literary equivalent of the engravings of popular tourist sites that were readily obtainable in the burgeoning print market of the age – the Regency version of the picture postcard.
Jane Austen cared a great deal about accuracy. She wanted her novels to be true to life. When reading a draft of a novel by her niece Anna, she pointed out that it was an error to portray people in Dawlish gossiping about the news from Lyme: ‘Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles distance from Dawlish and would not be talked of there.’3 Her novels were grounded in the real world. In order to create them, she drew upon the reality that she knew: the people, the places, the events. The celebrated fictional scene in which Louisa Musgrove nearly dies when being ‘jumped’ off the narrow steps of the Cobb is not based on a real incident, but it could not have been written if Jane Austen had not visited the real Lyme and memorized its topography.
The picturesque description of the romantic rocks of Lyme is not, however, her most common style. And in this case her passion for the sea perhaps led her to idealize the reality of the place. ‘I was disappointed in Lime,’ wrote her sister-in-law Mary to that niece Anna, ‘as from your Aunt Janes Novel I had expected it a clean pretty place, whereas it was dirty and ugly.’4
The fall on the Cobb, the bad-tempered exchange at Box Hill, the escape across the ha-ha from the grounds of Sotherton, the road-traffic accident with which her final unfinished novel begins: outdoor scenes in Austen’s novels are often dramatic excursions – involving misadventures, transgressions, arguments, misunderstandings, proposals – whereas her habitual location is indoors, within the world of polite, if barbed, conversation in drawing rooms and over dinner tables. Chapter eleven of Persuasion does not dwell for long on the seaside panorama. The narrative swiftly follows the visitors inside.
Not, however, into a great house of the kind that has become familiar in television and film adaptations of Austen’s novels (in which the houses are nearly always bigger than they should be). ‘Near the foot of an old pier of uncertain date’5 on the seafront at Lyme there is a row of cottages. We enter a cramped but welcoming parlour. It is the home of Captain Harville, who has retired in poor health as the result of a severe wound incurred on naval service during the war that lasted for almost the whole of Jane Austen’s adult life. This snug little dwelling-place will be revisited later, but for a first glimpse of Austen’s art of minute observation consider a single detail:
Captain Harville was no reader; but he had contrived excellent accommodations, and fashioned very pretty shelves, for a tolerable collection of well-bound volumes, the property of Captain Benwick. His lameness prevented him from taking much exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him with constant employment within. He drew, he varnished, he carpentered, he glued; he made toys for the children, he fashioned new netting-needles and pins with improvements; and if every thing else was done, sat down with his large fishing-net at one corner of the room.
Anne Elliot will soon engage Captain Benwick in conversation about books, debating the relative merits of the two most fashionable poets of the day, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. She gently suggests that romantic poetry might not be the most healthy reading for a man with a broken heart such as Benwick – though she sees the irony of her admonitions to ‘patience and resignation’ in the light of her own broken heart.
But it is Captain Harville’s carpentry that sticks in the mind: the prettily fashioned shelves, the varnish, the glue, the toys for the children. Jane Austen grew up in a house of books and reading, but she also came from a family that valued handiwork, the craft of making things, whether with needle or wood.
Captain Benwick reading poetry aloud while Captain Harville mends his net is a little image of how she imagined a secure home and a sense of belonging. Her family circle was a place of quick tongues, laughter and moving fingers, with a novel being read aloud and everyone busy at their needlework. Both her world and her novels can be brought alive through the texture of things, the life of objects.
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Sketch of a Royal Navy ship by Jane Austen’s nephew, Captain Herbert Austen
In January 1852 Admiral Francis Austen received a letter from the daughter of the President of Harvard University. ‘Since high critical authority has pronounced the delineations of character in the works of Jane Austen second only to those of Shakespeare,’ Miss Quincy began, ‘transatlantic admiration appears superfluous; yet it may not be uninteresting to her family to receive an assurance that the influence of her genius is extensively recognised in the American Republic.’6 She was writing because she wanted an autograph of the great novelist.
The Admiral was more than obliging. He was delighted to hear that the ‘celebrity’ of his late sister’s works had reached across the Atlantic. He sent not merely a signature but a whole Jane Austen letter. And he was happy to provide a character sketch of her. She was cheerful, not easily irritated, a little shy with strangers. Her natural reserve was sometimes misinterpreted as haughtiness. She was kind and funny, never failing to excite ‘the mirth and hilarity of the party’. She loved children and they loved her: ‘Her Nephews and Nieces of whom there were many could not have a greater treat than crouding around and listening to Aunt Jane’s stories.’
Miss Susan Quincy shared the contents of the Jane Austen letter with her sister, who was ‘quite carried off her feet’ with excitement. The conclusion, they agreed, could only be that Admiral Austen was so charming that ‘he must have been like Captain Wentworth when he was young’. Was Jane Austen’s brother really the inspiration for the hero of Persuasion? Miss Quincy communicated her sister’s response to the elderly Admiral. He replied that he was very flattered, but:
I do not know whether in the character of Captain Wentworth the authoress meant in any degree to delineate that of her Brother. Perhaps she might, but I rather think parts of Captain Harville’s were drawn from myself; at least the description of his domestic habits, tastes and occupations bear a considerable resemblance to mine.
Admiral Austen does not deny the possibility that there might be some element of himself – or of Jane’s other naval brother, Charles – in the character of Captain Wentworth. But he positively celebrates the fact that Captain Harville’s handiwork is his own.
When Francis Austen’s baby was born in 1807, he cut out the patterns for the infant’s night-clothes himself. On another occasion, according to his sister Jane, ‘he made a very nice fringe for the drawing room curtains’. Like Harville, he ‘turned silver’ to make needles for fishing nets. When Jane Austen watched her young nephews passing the evenings by making nets in which to catch rabbits, she described them as sitting ‘side by side, as any two Uncle Franks could do’.7 Jane also remembered her brother Frank, as she always called him, making ‘a very nice little butter-churn’.