- In Bath, Austen spent time with a known adulterer, who made better conversation than others provided in the superficial spa town -- and who had a fashionable open carriage. Their meetings distressed her aunt, but provided Austen with more fodder for teasing her sister: "There is now something like an engagement between us and the Phaeton, which to confess my frailty I have a great desire to go out in."
- Another romantic faux pas occurred when Jane Austen accepted a marriage proposal only to revise her decision the next morning. The suitor, Harris Wither, was six years younger than she, ill-mannered, and quick-tempered. Surprised by the proposal, she accepted on the spot, knowing that his wealth and position would mean security for her family. As her biographer Park Noonan writes, "When Mr Austen died their income would be so reduced that she, her mother and Cassandra might face penury. . . . to have said no to Harris Wither would have been patently foolish and very nearly selfish."
Nonetheless, after a sleepless night spent considering her life as the future Mrs. Wither, she called off the engagement, creating something of a scandal and putting a lasting strain on the relationship between their two families.
- When her father died in 1805, Austen ceased work on a novel she'd begun entitled The Watsons. It was the only time in her life that she was not writing or revising something. After only a few months, however, Austen returned to a novella she'd begun earlier, Lady Susan.
- In 1806, Mrs. Austen, Jane, Cassandra, and a friend, Martha, left Bath, eventually settling together in a house in the village of Chawton. In the years that Austen lived at Chawton Cottage, she woke every morning, practiced the pianoforte before anyone else got up, cooked breakfast for the household, and then retired to write, free of further household duties. She apparently worked in a room that was both a hallway and a dining room, but the room had a squeaky door. Austen refused to have the door repaired, ensuring that she had notice of anyone's approach.
- The Chawton years were by far her most productive. She revised and published Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Sense and Sensibility (1811), and wrote Emma (1815), Mansfield Park (1814), and Persuasion, which, along with Northanger Abbey, was published posthumously. During her life she earned about L684.13 in total from her writing.
- Around 1816, Austen began to suffer from a debilitating and painful illness, which was never diagnosed. Today it's believed to have been Addisons Disease, a tubercular disease of the kidneys. Cassandra was with her when she died in 1817 at age 41. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
- Almost a hundred years later, Virginia Woolf wrote about her, "Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote . . . and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every work she wrote, and so does Shakespeare."
If you've never read Jane Austen, and curious about what her prose is like, you can read a short exchange from
Pride and Prejudice in an article,
"Examples of Third Person."
