The Jane Effect

Jane had it all. Her brother invited her to live on his estate rent free. Her sister managed the household. She didn't have a husband or children to suck every drop of creative energy from her soul so that she fell into bed exhausted each night, berating herself for not having written....again...

All I am saying is that she had no excuse NOT to write. This explains perfectly why, despite dying at 41, she wrote and pusblished seven novels. Right?

Wrong.

I am the master of not writing. Sometimes I am best at it when I have nothing else to do.

Here is a (partial) list of things I can do instead of write:

nap.

freeze 20 pints of blueberries.

sort winter clothes.

clean out the chicken coop (yes, some days, I would even do this to get out of writing.)

bake pumpkin bread to give to the teachers, the assistants, the school social worker, the school secretary, the school nurse, the cafeteria lady, and the principal on the last day before winter break.

watch What Not to Wear marathon.

watch Sex and The City marathon.

watch recorded episodes of Modern Family.

watch Angels in America.

watch Grey Gardens.

fold laundry.

drive two hours (one way) to rescue three hens.

walk the dog.

copy Anna Karenina.

If a writer doesn't want to write, she can find a way to get out of it. Jane could have done that too, even without cable television. She could have hand embroidered the bed curtains.

The most worthy of causes can be used to avoid our own work, the work we are meant to do. This becomes especially tricky when we avoid writing in support of those we love. Because of course we want them to succeed, to be healthy, to be happy. And this is a good thing.

In the winter of 2010, I was in my last semester of graduate school, the time when one is most likely to give up. I was revising my creative thesis, or would I call it now, my bookmanuscript. I worked in a little room off the kitchen that was the old butler's pantry. I turned the thermostat down to 60 degrees. I shut off the radiator in my little makeshift studio. I placed a small space heater beneath the desk, creating the only warm space in the house.

Once, when the kids were home, requiring me to heat the whole house, I stood up from the chair and yelled, I quit, I can't do this. In less than a minute, three faces appeared in the doorway, three daughters, one of whom was 17, though she was younger at the time, who put her hand on her hip and looked right at me and said:

"You can't quit. You have come too far to quit. And what kind of example would that set for me?"

Damn you, daughter who listens to my every freaking word.

Sometimes what we do for ourselves is what we do for the ones we love.

And so she write.

She carves out a tiny space where nothing can fit except her and her words, whether that is a small round table in her bedroom somewhere on her brother's estate or the one warm spot in an empty house, or the voice of a daughter who won't let her quit.

 

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The Cassandra Effect

I arrived in London at 8:30 on Tuesday morning. Despite having taken a red eye from Chicago, and knowing I had three days and no time to waste accomodating jet lag, I dropped my bags in the hotel room and headed back down to the front desk to call a taxi. I had read that we were close to Jane Austen's house, and I decided to venture out and find it.

This was not a planned trip to the UK. My husband had to go for work, and falling over our ten-year wedding anniversary, he cashed in ALOT of frequent flyer miles to surprise me with a ticket of my own. Our 25-year-old daughter, a teacher, agreed to stay at the house with 17 and 13 while I was gone. I located my passport and packed a bag, after I did the laundry, went grocery shopping, visited my dad at the nursing home and wrote out dinner menus for the girls.

"You should go to Bath," 25 said to me, having visiting the town when she was doing a semester abroad in college. "You will love it."

So I did my due diligence, read the train tables and made plans to go on Wednesday. (Details of this adventure to follow in the next post).

Jane's home, however, the house where she did most of her writing, is in Chawton. Her brother Edward inherited the Chawton Estate from a distant cousin, changed his surname to Knight, and invited his mother and two sisters to live rent-free in a small cottage on his property. They accepted. And it is here, at a tiny writing table by the window, that Jane wrote and revised her novels.

Standing in the bedroom Jane shared with her sister Cassandra, I read a plaque that told me about Jane's daily routine. She spent the morning writing. In the afternoon, she and her sister would walk for hours in the fields and pastures of her brother's estate. They spent the evenings reading, sewing and embroidering. Throughout the house I find examples of Jane's handiwork: a glass case of embroidered baby bonnets for her nieces and nephews, replicas of hand-sewn bed curtains, a pieced quilt top, and a delicate, embroidered shawl.

The plaque goes on to say that it is because of Cassandra that Jane found time to write. Those mornings that Jane spent at her desk, Cassandra managed the household. She oversaw the baking, the cleaning, the collecting of eggs and vegetables, as well as herbs from the medicinal garden. She planned meals, sewed her brother's shirts and took care of hundreds of other minute details necessary to keep house in the 18th century. She also drew and painted the only two known portraits of Jane. Reading this, staring at the little painting of Jane in a blue dress, I know who I came here to see.

Across the street is a teashop called Cassandra's Cup, a nod to Jane's sister, to her creative contribution. Two unmarried sisters, one of whom is wife to the other.

Instead of sitting in the teashop and enjoying scones and clotted cream as I had planned, I walk in the rain toward Chawton House, the old manor house of the estate that is now a library for women's writing of the 18th and 19th Centuries. I wander into the cemetery beside the church.

I find Cassandra's grave and pay my respects.

 

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