Jane Austen by Andrew Norman

Author:Andrew Norman [Andrew Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2010-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

On 25 March 1802 the Treaty of Amiens brought the war with France to a close. It was probably after this that Henry Austen resigned his commission and moved to London, to Upper Berkeley Street with his family. Here, he set up as a banker with offices in Cleveland Court, St James.

December 1802 found Jane staying with the Bigg-Withers family at Manydown Park, Wootton St Lawrence, Hampshire. When the wealthy young Harris Bigg-Wither (who was six years Jane’s junior and whose sisters were Jane and Cassandra’s childhood friends) made Jane a proposal of marriage, she accepted. However, by the following morning she had had second thoughts and decided to retract, whereupon both she and Cassandra immediately returned to Bath. Catherine Hubback said, ‘It was in a momentary fit of self-delusions that she [Aunt Jane] accepted Mr Withers’ proposal …’13

From a letter which Jane wrote subsequently to Cassandra, it is known that she was in Lyme Regis on the Dorsetshire coast (referred to by Jane simply as ‘Lyme’; it received its Royal Charter in 1284) on 5 November 1803, when she witnessed a large fire which had broken out in the town.14

Lyme Regis is famous for its stone-built cobb which juts out into Lyme Bay to form an artificial harbour. The town became popular with visitors from about 1775 onwards, when coaches ran directly between that town and the city of Bath. Lyme Regis’s Assembly Rooms were built in about 1775, near to which bathing machines (mobile changing rooms) were available. Sea-bathing became even more popular when King George III visited Weymouth, another of Dorset’s seaside towns; the first occasion being in 1789. In Jane Austen’s time, Lyme Regis boasted several hotels; the most fashionable being the ‘Three Cups’.15 Jane was extremely fond of Lyme Regis, and one day it would feature in one of her novels.

Following the resumption of the war between Britain and France on 18 May 1803 after a brief truce, Francis was ordered to command the ‘Sea Fencibles’ – a volunteer force whose duty it was to prevent an enemy landing on the coast of southern England. To this end, he took up residence in Ramsgate, Kent, where Jane duly visited him that autumn. The war would continue for another twelve years.

September 1804 found the Austens once again at Lyme Regis in company with Jane’s brother Henry and his wife Eliza, staying at Pyne House, Broad Street. From here, Henry and Cassandra subsequently went to Weymouth, while Jane and her parents remained in Lyme Regis at a small boarding house in the town. For Jane, the sea always had a strong, romantic attachment and she may have been thinking of Lyme Regis when, in Sanditon, her character Sir Edward Denham describes ‘the terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm, its glassy surface in a calm, its gulls and its samphire …’

And yet Jane was aware of its dangers, for Denham goes on to say:

… and the deep fathoms of its abysses, its quick vicissitudes, its direful

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