During an absence from home on Jane Austen’s part, it was settled,
before she knew, that her father, who at the age of seventy had
resigned his living of Steventon to his son James, should remove with
his wife and daughters to Bath. However much Jane may have felt the
fascination of her girlish visits to Bath, she did not approve of it as
a place of residence in her more mature womanhood. We are reminded of
a sentence in “Persuasion” where the author remarks drily Anne Elliot
did not like Bath; fancied it disagreed with her; would have preferred
any other place; therefore, to Bath, as a matter of course, the family
went. So much for the unpropitiousness of events.
The Austens went to Bath in 1801, when Jane was twenty-six years of
age. The family resided first at No. 4, Sydney Terrace, and later at
Green Park Buildings. An attraction to Bath, suggested by Mr. Austen
Leigh, is that Mrs. Austen’s only brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot,[3] with
his wife, was in the habit of spending his time between Bath and
his place of Scarletts. Like his uncle, the Master of Balliol, Mr.
Leigh Perrot was a witty man, and some of his epigrams and riddles,
in which he must have far outshone Mr. Woodhouse, found their way,
among other morsels, into print. The Austens, with their strong family
proclivities, were much with the Leigh Perrots.
Jane was still young, pretty, and cheerful enough to enter with a
fair proportion of enjoyment into the gaieties of the place. She had
given up writing, in a great measure, since she was three or four and
twenty, whether chilled by her lack of success or distracted by other
engagements and amusements. However, it is thought that it was during
her stay in Bath she wrote several chapters of an unfinished novel
called “The Watsons,” which, unlike the youthful performance, “Lady
Susan,” published along with these chapters in the same volume with the
memoir, bear a strong flavour of Jane Austen in her sagacity and banter.
She may have been inspirited to the effort by the sale, though for so
small a sum, of the MS. of “Northanger Abbey,” which happened two years
after she came to Bath, when she was twenty-eight years of age. We know
the sale proved fruitless, so far as speedy publication was concerned,
but the mortifying conclusion could not have been foreseen, and the
sale of one of her novels for ten pounds was Jane Austen’s first faint
gleam of good fortune in authorship, the only one which visited her
during her father’s lifetime.
The Austens remained at Bath about four years. In their last autumn
there, the autumn of 1804, Jane, with her father and mother, spent
some weeks at the lovely sea-bathing place of Lyme, which she admired
so much, and has immortalised in “Persuasion.” We cannot avoid being
struck by the small number of the opportunities which Jane Austen
had of seeing the world, and by the great use she made of them. Her
journeyings were not so very much more extensive than those of the
Vicar of Wakefield and his wife in the days of their prosperity,
but they were sufficient for her to avail herself of them for the
information and delight of her fellow-creatures. It is not the amount
of what we see, but the eyes with which we see it, that signifies.
In the following spring, that of 1805, the Rev. George Austen died at
Bath. His widow and daughters then removed to Southampton--drawn to its
society very likely by the sailor Austens--and there they stayed for
four more years. Mrs. Austen occupied a large old-fashioned house in a
corner of Castle Square. The house had a pleasant garden, bounded on
one side by the old city wall. A flight of steps led to the top of the
wall, which formed a walk with an extensive view of sea and land.