A Home of Her Own – How Jane Austen Found the Space to Write

One of the most frequent questions I get as a writer is “Where do you find the time to write?” quickly followed by “Do you have a routine or are you able to write anywhere?” I can always tell when a harried writer is asking, someone who is struggling to fit writing into his or her life.

Implicit in the question, I suspect, is a subtext: If you’re really a writer you should be able to write anywhere, at any time, right? And if you’ve discovered some secret pocket of time/space in which writing magically gets done, I want to know about it.

The truth is I have written on the fly— in cafés and restrooms, on trains and planes, sometimes using improvised materials such as the backs of envelopes, theater programs, and once, when I got back to the car from a hike and realized I didn’t have the key or a piece of paper in my pocket, on a leaf. I will hasten to add, though, that while these moments have been fun and piquant, routine is my bread and butter. I like to write in the morning because that’s when my brain cells work best, at my desk with its view of trees and birds, wordless classical music on the radio, in a composition book, with a good fountain pen.  

But do I need all that? Wouldn’t I still manage to write if I didn’t have the nice desk and the morning set aside? Wouldn’t it somehow magically get done? Over the years I’ve had to defend my working time from family, friends and co-workers who will one moment marvel at my productivity and the next look puzzled or hurt when I’m not free in the mornings or available for extra assignments. Isn’t writing something I can “just fit in”? What does a writer really need to write?

Which brings me to Jane Austen. The famous picture of Jane Austen is of her craftily sneaking her writing time, scribbling in the corner of the parlor, hiding her pages when interrupted, and never shirking her housework. After her death, when the secret of her authorship was revealed to the world, her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh wrote in his memoir of his aunt, “She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party.

She wrote upon small sheets of paper that could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming” (Worsley 316).

What a card, that Aunt Jane!  Notice the elaborate explanation for a piece of household duty going undone.  Certainly, she wouldn’t have neglected any other household chore for the sake of getting some writing done, only to keep strangers from knowing she was engaged in such an unladylike pastime.   On her death, her brother James eulogized her with a little poem that ended: “They saw her ready still to share/The labours of domestic care” (Worsley 403).

The picture that emerges is of a woman who wrote in the margins of life, the message being that writing is something that can be fitted into the corners and somehow done while simultaneously cross-stitching a sampler and baking the daily bread.  In fact, the tiny table Jane wrote on is literally in a corner. This is a particularly damaging message for women writers: Surely if Jane Austen could write six masterpieces of English literature while stewing a posset, you can write your novel in between commuting to work and putting your six-year-old to bed.  

But is this really the story of Jane Austen’s writing life? Let’s look a little closer.

Jane grew up in crowded Steventon Rectory, which in addition to her eight siblings also housed boarding students to help stretch the family’s finances.  She never had a room of her own; she shared a room—and sometimes a bed—with her sister Cassandra for her entire life. But she did have a number of advantages that would help in the nurturing of a writer. Her father was an avid reader, often of the “horrid novels” Jane would later satirize in Northanger Abbey, and he allowed Jane a pretty free run of his library (Worsley 56). 

Her siblings loved “theatricals” so she grew up watching and performing in plays.  Her father gave her notebooks, an expensive gift considering the price of paper. For her 19th birthday he gave her a writing desk—a small wooden box that opened into a sloped writing surface and contained compartments that could be locked.

A medium-size wooden box is not exactly Virginia Woolf’s famous “room on one’s own” but it does open up a space in which to write and, perhaps most importantly, represents a vote of confidence from her father—the male head of the household—that her writing is valuable. That gift is followed in 1795 by the addition of a “drawing room” for the “grown up ladies,” a converted bedchamber adjoining Jane and Cassandra’s bedroom (Worsley 133). It contained a bookcase, Jane’s pianoforte, and workboxes for sewing and trimming. Although it was not a space dedicated to writing, it did offer the privacy in which Jane could write.

And write she did. Between 1795 and 1799 Jane wrote the first drafts of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey.  (JASNA)

How valuable that space was to Jane becomes apparent when she loses it.  In 1800, when Jane was 25 years old, her father George Austen decided to retire and cede the “living” at Steventon to his son James.  This meant that Mr. and Mrs. Austen and their two dependent children, Jane and Cassandra, had to leave the Rectory at Steventon. According to her nephew James, Jane “was exceedingly unhappy’ because ‘the loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling” (Worsley 186). But Jane wasn’t just losing her childhood home; she was losing the place where she wrote and all semblance of the routine that had enabled her to write.

Nephew James concedes that Jane’s working life falls into two periods.  “As soon as she was fixed into her second home, she resumed the habits of composition which had been formed in her first” (Worsley 315).  There is some dispute about this statement among literary biographers, but there’s little sign of productive writing during the homeless period.  She abandoned one unfinished novel, The Watsons, ending on the pessimistic note, “She had become of importance to no one”  (Worsley p. 195). She did revise the novel Susan, later to become Northanger Abbey, during her early years in Bath and certainly the experience of living in Bath informed the setting of that novel and, eventually, the setting of her last, Persuasion.

But she also seems to be struggling emotionally.  “I do not know what the matter is with me today,” she wrote from Bath, “but I cannot write … fortunately I have nothing very particular to say.”  (Worsley 234).

Even selling “Susan” in 1803 didn’t lead to an outburst of productivity, perhaps because the book never came out.  The publisher Crosby & Co. purchased the copyright for ten pounds and then sat on it (Kelly 6). I can imagine how frustrating and anticlimactic this would have been for Jane and that as her financial future became less certain after her father’s death, and the women moved into shabbier lodgings, it would have been hard to find the will and the time and place to write.

Clearly, though, she never gave up. The hardships she faced in this period shape and inform her later writing.  The loss of home, financial uncertainty for women, and the marginalization of spinsters, will all resonate through her later works.  Perhaps, too, these discouraging years forced her to make a conscious decision about how important it was to her to continue writing—and to look to writing as a means of bettering her financial situation.

In 1809 her brother Edward finally made arrangements to give his mother and two sisters a permanent home—a cottage near one of his properties in Chawton. On the eve of leaving Southampton for this new home, Jane writes a letter to her truant publisher demanding that they either publish the book or give it back to her.  She wrote under the pseudonym Mrs. Ashton Dennis and signed with the initials MAD, no doubt to describe her emotional state at the time. Jane was indeed angry—at the publisher who declined to publish her book or let it be published elsewhere (he wrote back to say she could have her book back if she paid him ten pounds—an amount Jane didn’t have) but also, I imagine, at a world that was no longer nurturing her creative potential.

Maybe she was a little mad at herself, as well, for having produced nothing in the last nine years. Declaring herself MAD in this letter seems to have been a wake-up call to the world and herself that she was no longer content to hide her light under a bushel (Kelly 9).

Within a year of living in Chawton she had revised Sense and Sensibility and found a new publisher.  In the next seven years she revised Pride and Prejudice and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, and began a new novel left unfinished at her death in 1817. Having a fixed abode—a house of her own—was certainly conducive to her writing.

But where and when did she manage to do this writing—in a corner at a tiny table in between household chores as her nephew has claimed? As Claire Tomalin has pointed out, it would have been difficult for Jane to have physically managed the revision of an entire manuscript at such a little table (Tomalin 218-9). Nor would such acrobatic maneuverings have been necessary. At Chawton, Jane’s household chores were restricted to making the morning tea and toast and keeping the key to the wine cupboard, certainly not onerous chores and ones—with their access to caffeine and alcohol—any writer might choose.

It was also part of Jane’s routine to rise early and go downstairs to practice her piano. Perhaps like many a writer with a 9 to 5 job, she used those morning hours before the house had risen to write. Claire Tomalin writes that Jane was “privileged with a general exemption from domestic chores … almost as a man was privileged” (Tomalin 213).  Or as a writer is privileged. Surely Jane would have been sensible of the encouragement and confidence that such privilege implied.

So what does one need to write?

A stable environment with space and time allotted to the task, freedom from onerous responsibilities and financial worries, and a few people who believe in and encourage you.

Perhaps most importantly, the writer herself needs to believe that her writing deserves a place in the world outside the corners and margins of the drawing room. When I was writing my second (unpublished) novel in my daughter’s first year of life I took the rather audacious step of hiring a mother’s helper for four hours a week so I could write. Spending that money represented a commitment to my writing; it also taught me to get down to work quickly.

Although I still had to balance writing with raising a child and, later, outside work, I knew what I needed to get that work done. As you can probably tell, I’ve had some guilty moments along the way. It helps to have a model to look at, other women authors who have gotten mad enough to demand the time and space to write. We won’t have those models, though, if we pretend that women can write in the corners in between household chores as if we’re like those hanging ferns that need neither soil nor water to thrive. Writing requires space and time and encouragement—not just a room, but a home of one’s own.

Works Cited

“Jane Austen’s Works.”  Jane Austen Society of North America, http://jasna.org/austen/works/

         Accessed 20 Feb. 2019

Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.  New York: Knopf, 2017.

Worsley, Lucy.  Jane Austen at Home.  London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017.  

Tomalin, Claire.  Jane Austen: A Life.  New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

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CAROL GOODMAN graduated from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin. After teaching Latin for several years, she studied for an MFA in Fiction. She is the author of twenty novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize. Her 2017 thriller The Widow’s House won the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and teaches writing and literature at The New School and SUNY New Paltz.

Find out more about her on her website https://carolgoodman.com/

About THE NIGHT VISITORS

The latest thriller from the internationally bestselling author of The Lake of Dead Languages and The Other Mother, a story of mistaken identities and missed chances, forgiveness, and vengeance.

“Carol Goodman is, simply put, a stellar writer.”—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of The Red Hunter

ALICE gets off a bus in the middle of a snowstorm in Delphi, NY. She is fleeing an abusive relationship and desperate to protect…

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MATTIE, a social worker in her fifties who lives in an enormous run-down house in the middle of the woods. Mattie lives alone and is always available, and so she is the person the hotline always calls when they need a late-night pickup. And although according to protocol Mattie should take Alice and Oren to a local shelter, instead she brings them home for the night. She has plenty of room, she says. What she doesn’t say is that Oren reminds her of her little brother, who died thirty years ago at the age of ten.

But Mattie isn’t the only one withholding elements of the truth. Alice is keeping her own secrets. And as the snowstorm worsens around them, each woman’s past will prove itself unburied, stirring up threats both within and without.

 

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