JANE AUSTEN’S BOOKS HAVE COMFORTED MANY, WHEN THEY NEEDED IT MOST. BEST SELLING AUTHOR AND JANE AUSTEN LITERACY FOUNDATION AMBASSADOR, NATALIE JENNER, ASKS ‘WHY JANE?’.
In 2016, I realized a lifelong dream of opening my own bookshop. Four months later, my fifty-four-year-old husband was diagnosed with a rare and terminal form of lung disease. We had no idea what to do with the time we had left together as a family. We closed down the bookshop, attended to our other careers, and took some bucket list trips with our teenage daughter.
The only other thing I wanted to do was read; specifically, to read Jane Austen.
Why Austen? At first, I had no idea. A fan since childhood, I assumed that I was using her books for distraction and entertainment as I had often done throughout my life. After all, I knew how the stories all ended: very happily. I knew the bad guys would get their comeuppance. I knew I could project myself into her very sparsely described yet capacious worlds, lose myself in the laneways and shrubbery and balls, and watch marvelously distinct heroines win the game of life armed mostly with an unerring moral compass and the goodwill of their creator.
It was when I announced that I wanted to travel from Canada, alone, without my family, to the village of Chawton, where Austen once lived, that I think people started to wonder about me a bit. But I no longer cared. Facing widowhood young, as surely as Mrs. Dashwood or as ominously as Mrs. Bennet, I ironically wanted to do exactly what I wanted. After months of aggressively rereading Jane Austen, my most pressing desire was to next immerse myself in her physical world and thank her for the comfort her words had given me.
© Andrea Nairn
I also wanted to get inside Chawton House, the stunning Elizabethan home inherited by Austen’s older brother, Edward Austen Knight. I had been many times, family in tow, to the other famous literary landmark in Chawton: Jane Austen’s House Museum. Every time, I would stand by the awfully small table in the front dining parlour, look out the window on the central junction to the village, and tear up at the prospect and intimacy of Austen’s authorial eye. I had the exact same experience now as I finally stood inside the reading nook at Chawton House or sat in one of its many window seats, all designed to look out upon the long, stately front drive as if constantly on the hopeful watch for visitors.
On this solo trip to Chawton, I read, walked, and finally heard myself think without all the chatter and responsibilities of family life. To the inspiration offered by Austen, I could now add the physical beauty and the weight of history around me—hard-won history, rescued and preserved over the centuries by many people, most significantly the descendants of Edward Austen Knight.
Then, one morning, something happened to me that I will never forget. Waiting for Chawton House to open for the day, I lay down on an old stone wall in the St. Nicholas churchyard that abutted the estate and was able—for the first and possibly only time in my life—to coexist fully with both life’s ongoing trauma and the beauty still there to be found. In that coexistence, I felt the beginning of what could only be called hope.
St Nicholas churchyard, Chawton
I returned to my home and family in Canada and continued to immerse myself in works by and about Austen. During this time, my husband was approved for an experimental drug treatment, which halted his lung decline to the delight and surprise of everyone, including his many doctors. We allowed ourselves to think, perhaps he does not have quite as little time left as we have been told. And with that uncertainty—the good kind of uncertainty—also came more hope.
A few months later, I felt a new impulse to creatively write after a ten-year break from many manuscripts and attempts to get published. I thought I might write about a group of people trying to save an old British house: trying to rescue history. But it was while listening to lectures on grief in Persuasion during a regional meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America that the answer to why Austen? finally became clear.
I was in a state of grief myself.
Although hopefully years away from losing my husband, I still had lost something so ineffable and critical to daily happiness: the future that you thought you were going to have. The future that you plan and save towards, be it one month or one decade from now. The kind of grief that, sadly, the entire world has been experiencing during these dark days of the pandemic.
From my research, I already knew that Austen’s books had comforted many people throughout history in times of grief; it turned out that it was now my turn. Almost on cue, one day soon after this realization, I looked up from my reading and announced, as if a lightbulb had switched on above my head, that I was going to write a book about a group of people who, coming out of the trauma and grief of World War II, bond together over a shared love of books and of Austen, and try to save her house.
Writing this book would enable me to stay in Austen’s world, continue thinking about her, and interrogate her texts with a made-up society of her most ardent admirers. But it would end up doing much more. For one thing, writing ended up helping me engage with my most painful thoughts in a very subtle, subconscious, and creative way. As I wrote, I felt myself heal, and I felt very close to Austen. I wondered what writing had done for her, too, in a life marked by uncertainty, grief, and a rare and mysterious illness.
Natalie Jenner
Looking back now on that time, with my husband currently still healthful and productive, I see how a lifelong love of Austen’s books helped me move forward in the face of tremendous uncertainty. How books magically allow us to enter the consciousness of someone else in a way that is peculiar and unique to literature, and thereby attach us to the author so movingly and intensely. How privileged we are to enter the author’s world, real or imaginary, to live their life experiences and lessons alongside them and their characters, and to derive from their example a measure of hope for the unpredictable arc of our own lives.
And I know, as certain as I can be of anything, that Jane Austen felt the exact same way.
© Natalie Jenner, JALitF Ambassador and author of The Jane Austen Society
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