The Pilgrimage
In the summer of 2012, I was living in the London for an internship. It was my first time visiting the UK, so I took advantage of staying several months to visit many destinations related to my literary heroes. This post was originally published on my old travel blog circa May 20, 2012 and has been lightly edited from the original version.
It is a cliche these days for an unmarried woman of little fortune and few prospects to claim personal affinity with Jane Austen. However, her novels have been a guide of personal conduct since I first read Pride and Prejudice at age eleven. I quickly devoured the full canon, including versions of her partial works that were finished by others (I recommend Sanditon by “Another Lady” and The Watsons by John Coates).
It’s possible that such early exposure to the handsome sentimentality of Mr. Knightley and Captain Wentworth at such an impressionable age was quite destructive. I still wonder why men these days can’t compete with these gentleman heroes who are so discomposed by, and yet ultimately devoted to, Ms. Austen's strong, funny, stubborn heroines.
To leave gray, noisy London for a while and see a bit of the English countryside by train, bus, and foot was a treat. The train from Waterloo to Alton took an hour at which point I transferred to a bus to Chawton. I can't say that it was necessarily the Odyssey, but this had the air of a pilgrimage for me. Though neither British nor likely to be married anytime soon, from a young age I deeply identified with Elizabeth, Elinor, and Anne. I wanted to be more like Emma and less like Fanny (funny how that’s changed as I’ve matured). Many of my early attempts at writing stories were truly awful tales of Edwardian manners and chaste courtship. Here was the early lesson to write what you know! After all, that is what Ms. Austen was doing in her time.
The house has been beautifully maintained and restored. Visitors are allowed to wander so I entered every room—pausing to admire the shelves in the closet and the way the light came in through the back parlor. I took the liberty of making several turns about the garden.
On a plaque upstairs, I found this quote by Winston Churchill from a time when he was very ill:
"[N]ow I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought it would be better that its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion, as far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances."
This clear window into calm lives is also why I soak them up over and over again. As I was taking the trip to Chawton as an excuse to re-read Persuasion, I already felt imbued with a sense of principled politeness that hovers around me while reading one of her books.
Her tiny writing desk (pictured)—where at least four of her novels were written and revised—is situated in the dining room. Allegedly, the door to this room had a squeak to it that was never mended because the sound warned Ms. Austen, if she was writing, that someone was coming to interrupt her. She would set down her pen and engage with the intruder—something I can hardly imagine doing with much civility myself—and though this was undoubtedly a nuisance, she would often include these small real life conversations about her neighbors or what was for supper that evening in her books. Part of her genius, that made her both a contemporary sensation and a modern phenomenon, was the ability to make the worlds of her books come fully to life.
What’s your squeaky door?
I walked the few miles back to Alton because I felt that was a very Austen-ian thing to do (never mind that I could not figure out the return bus schedule). Walks are often major plot devices—as any reader of Sense and Sensibility would know. I met no rakish suitor, but I muddied my hem (of my jeans), which I counted as success. In the charmingly bland town of Alton I waited for my train at a pub called the Railway Arms and finished Persuasion with a warm cider in hand.
I plan to continue this series on “literary tourism.” Not only were many of my weekends in 2012 delightfully literary-themed, but as a current resident of New York City, I have the advantage of living within walking distance of many literary destinations—both real life and fictional. Please share any authors’ homes or fictional location ideas for me to track down in NYC!
