Learning How to Live--and Die--with Jane--Stephanie Barron

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Here on the blog we have recently touched on the endings of much-loved series. Today we will celebrate--and mourn--the not-unexpected ending of a series that has been a personal favorite of mine from the very first book. Stephanie Barron (whom you also know as Francine Mathews) shares with us her journey with her beloved Jane Austen.

LEARNING HOW TO LIVE—AND DIE—WITH JANE

By Stephanie Barron

 

            I have spent nearly thirty years adrift on the sea of Jane Austen’s mind: reading her letters, absorbing her novels, studying her encounters with people she loved and the strangers who darkly amused her. In 1994, plagued with a peculiar but engaging voice in my head, I wrote Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. Pregnant with my first child, I had been rereading Austen’s novels that winter, as I generally do during the bleaker seasons. For whatever reason, Jane became the internal voice-over of my life. Simply to silence her, I sat down and transcribed what she told me. That she was a detective seemed obvious—her great gift as a writer was a profound understanding of the human heart, and no skill is more vital to exposing truth, deceit, and motivation.

I picked up Jane’s narrative in 1802, when she was twenty-six and had just accepted, then rejected, an offer of marriage from the heir to a considerable property in her Hampshire neighborhood, Manydown Park. The proposal came from the younger brother of her great friends, the Bigg sisters—Elizabeth, Kitty and Althea--which made it as attractive as the financial security marriage offered; but the brother in question, Harris Bigg-Wither, was six years younger than Jane and suffered from an acute stutter that rendered him socially awkward and painfully shy. In short, she did not love him.

Deciding against marriage was a crossroads in Jane’s life that intrigued me, a moment when she turned aside from a broad and well-tended path for women of her era into a narrow track that led to unmapped territory. Stripped of the financial security of a safe marriage and hating her dependency on her brothers, she turned instead to writing and actively publishing her novels. If she had accepted Harris’s proposal, we might never have known her name.

I followed her over the next fifteen years, and fifteen mystery novels, from Steventon to Bath, Southampton to Canterbury, Derbyshire to London, and a few places in between. I introduced her to Byron, Wellington, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Carlton House. Rather than a retiring spinster in a limited rural sphere, Jane proved to be a woman of the world: hobnobbing with spies and dangerous politicians, equally engrossed by global politics and trends in high culture. As she moved through my pages, Jane grew older. So did I. She suffered heartache; I had my second child. She settled down in her beloved cottage at Chawton and published Sense and Sensibility; I watched my sons grow up and leave for college.

Now, with this last book, we have reached the year 1817 when Jane Austen died on July 18, at the age of forty-one and a half. She had gone to Winchester with her sister Cassandra that May for specialized treatment at the hands of a notable local surgeon, Mr. Giles-King Lyford, a scion of a prominent Hampshire medical family who was Surgeon-in-Ordinary at the Winchester hospital. Suffering possibly from Addison’s Disease, possibly pancreatic cancer, she moved into lodgings at No. 8 College Street, a place found by her old friend Elizabeth Bigg, now the widowed Mrs. Heathcote, who was an occasional patient of Lyford’s and lived in the nearby Winchester Cathedral Close.

I knew that bringing Jane full circle from Harris Bigg-Wither’s dashed romantic hopes to Elizabeth Heathcote’s care in her final days was an important series arc, offering a look back at the first novel, Scargrave Manor, as we followed Jane into this Final Mystery. The ancient royal and ecclesiastical city of Winchester, replete with history and shadowed by its famous cathedral, was too rich a setting to miss, but I had no desire to write a book about a wasting Jane Austen, confined to her deathbed in a cramped and rented room. I was aware, as well, that no fewer than eight of Jane’s nephews had matriculated at Winchester College, the oldest boys’ public school in Britain, founded in the thirteenth century. This, too, was a rich vein to mine for a detective plot. Jane and the Final Mystery takes place, therefore, in late March of 1817, when I have Jane and her nephew Edward, a recent College grad, visit her old friend Elizabeth Heathcote at her home in the Cathedral Close. Elizabeth’s son William, one of nephew Edward’s closest friends, is still a student at Winchester College—and someone is determined to make his life a misery. Another boy has just been found dead. And Jane, at Elizabeth’s request, undertakes one final investigation.

 

I have brought my beloved sleuth within weeks of her death, but chose to part from her on a note of hope, because that is what Jane herself seemed determined to feel. On Tuesday, 27 May 1817, she wrote a letter to her nephew Edward from “Mrs. Davids (sic), College St Winton.”

     Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, & if he fails I shall draw up a Memorial & lay it before the Dean & Chapter, & have no doubt of redress from that Pious, Learned & disinterested Body. –Our Lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little Drawing-room with a Bow-window overlooking Dr. Gabell’s Garden....We see Mrs. Heathcote every day, & William is to call upon us soon.

     She wrote to her London friend Frances Tilson a few days later that: My attendant is encouraging, and talks of making me quite well. I live chiefly on the sofa, but am allowed to walk from one room to the other. I have been out once in a sedan-chair, and am to repeat it, and be promoted to a wheel-chair as the weather serves.

     This appears, however, to have been the final letter she was able to write. Her condition varied but continuously declined over the next month and a half, and early in the morning on Friday, 18 July 1817, Jane Austen died. The following Thursday she was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral, with her nephew Edward and her brothers Henry, Edward, and Frank as mourners.

     She was unable to finish the novel she called The Brothers, which has come down to us as Sanditon, but her brother Henry ensured that The Elliots, renamed Persuasion, was posthumously published in 1818 along with Northanger Abbey--a book she had written decades before, sold for ten pounds, and been forced to buy back from the publisher when he refused to print it.

    

     When readers ask why Austen’s novels have endured for more than two centuries, I say it is because she teaches us how to live. That’s the fundamental reason we humans turn to any story, oral or written, visual or graphic; because we learn from it how to survive. Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliott, Elinor Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse, remind us of ourselves in their intelligent and perceptive pursuit of happiness; but as I’ve grappled with ending this series, I’ve come to understand that they also teach us how to endure the terrible costs of existence. Austen’s work is about surviving the end of things as much as, with each triumphal wedding, she celebrates their beginning.

In her novels there lurks always the long shadow of a missing and beloved character: Anne Elliott’s mother; both of Darcy’s parents; Elinor and Marianne’s father. Henry Tilney and his sister are, in Catherine Morland’s mind, literally haunted by their dead mother. This is no surprise when we examine Jane Austen’s life, because death was a constant part of it. Before she herself left the world in 1817 at the age of forty-one and a half, she suffered the loss of her sister’s fiancé, four of her brothers’ wives, her father, and her close friend, Anne Lefroy. Grief for her father and Madame Lefroy, most Austen scholars would agree, weighed so heavily upon Jane that she stopped writing altogether for several years.

As I sat at my desk one late afternoon writing the last chapters of Jane and the Final Mystery, my husband texted me from the airport, where he was meeting our younger son’s plane. Have you heard from him? he asked. He’s not here, and he’s not answering his phone.

That was the beginning of the worst hours of our lives, when we learned that our son Stephen was dead. His loss came out of the blue, on a stormy October afternoon when he was supposed to be arriving home, and the tragedy of his death at the age of twenty-four destroyed any ability I might have had to confront Jane’s end.

I set aside this manuscript and fell into the dark maw of grief. When I was able finally to look at the pages again, I found Jane waiting at the edge of my mind, as I always have. For once, she was silent. But her stoicism and hope in the face of her own decline, her gratitude for the people she loved, and her ability to let go of what she cherished most, offered me a bit of grace. Jane learned wisdom early, and she culled it from the most unforgiving of circumstances as well as the most rewarding. Her stories endure in fact because they do not spin fairytales of unalloyed happiness. As I am sure she knew too well, the price of love is sometimes pain.

In the end, we all have our brief passage through the world, in light and shadow, as my version of Jane has had hers in these fifteen novels. It is the words that will outlast all of us.

 

Stephanie Barron