Moving to Bath and Southampton
In 1801, when Jane was 25, her father retired and moved with his wife and two daughters to Bath. After spending the majority of her life in rural Hampshire, this removal was a great upheaval and a dramatic change of lifestyle for Jane. In Bath, once a stylish spa town but by then past its fashionable best, she attended balls and concerts, and visited the Pump Room and the Theatre Royal. Over the next few years the family also took holidays to Devon and Dorset, where Jane enjoyed coastal walks and sea bathing.
In 1805, Rev Austen died suddenly, leaving his wife and two daughters with a much reduced income. They were forced to rent smaller and less comfortable lodgings, and the following year they moved to Southampton, where they lived with their friend Martha Lloyd and with their brother Frank’s new wife, Mary, whilst Frank himself was away at sea. Money was tight, and the ladies stretched a small income as far as they could.
The eight years they spent in Bath and Southampton, or on long visits to relatives, were an unsettled time, reflected in Jane’s productivity as a writer. Whilst living in Steventon she had completed first drafts of Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions and Susan (later to be published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey respectively); whilst living in Bath she seems only to have worked on The Watsons, a work that she left unfinished. There are many theories to account for this – that she was pining for the countryside, saddened at the loss of her childhood home, hated city life and had no space to write in their relatively cramped lodgings and no time in the busy whirl of her new social life. On the other hand, The Watsons, though unfinished, is one of Austen’s most interesting fictional experiments, introducing a new note of bleak social realism into her writing. Very few of her letters from this period survive, so we can only speculate as to whether the challenges of life at this time stalled her writing or ultimately improved it.
