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PLACES OF OUR OWN

In search of literary treasure, Gillian Dow travels beyond the bookshelf

In 1857, just two years after her close friend’s death, Elizabeth Gaskell, an important novelist in her own right, published her Life of Charlotte Brontë. In this work, the first substantial biography of a woman writer by a woman writer, Gaskell placed great emphasis on the importance of ‘locating’ the woman genius and her vision. She finds the origin of Brontë’s creativity in the parsonage that was home to three exceptional women writers of their day, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. The Yorkshire village of Haworth in which they lived– and the moors surrounding it – are painted atmospherically by Gaskell, telling details behind Charlotte’s drive and creativity.

Following the publication of Gaskell’s biography, literary tourists arrived in Haworth to see the parsonage and the moors first hand – a steady trickle at first, and then in increasing numbers. In July 1857, local papers wrote that ‘the quiet rural inns, where refreshment for man and beast, of a plain but excellent kind, used to be obtainable at a fabulously low price, have raised their tariff to an equality with the most noted hotels in the pathways of tourists.’ Today, the descendants of these Victorian tourists arrive in ‘Brontë country’ in hordes. They are guided by signs in both English and Japanese, and encouraged to contribute to the local economy by staying at establishments like the Wuthering Heights Inn, and visiting Ye Olde Brontë Tea Rooms and the Villette Coffee House. The Brontë Parsonage is now a museum, in itself a large industry featuring lectures and study days, and a gift shop. But what are people looking for when they visit a site that has a connection with a famous writer? Is it possible to ‘find’ the author amongst the souvenirs and the tea shops? And can the discovery, once made, inspire one’s own creativity?

Is home where the art is?

As a frequent literary tourist myself, I have visited the former homes of writers I admire in Europe and North America. Sometimes, there is little more than a plaque to commemorate an author’s mark on a location: Edith Wharton’s Paris flat is owned privately, and can only be contemplated from the pavement on the Rue de Varenne. Sometimes, entire areas are said to embody the spirit of the writer. The Lake District is inextricably linked with Beatrix Potter – although she was born in London. Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the enduringly popular Anne of Green Gables series of children’s books, is firmly located on Canada’s Prince Edward Island (now the setting for an annual performance of Anne of Green Gables – The Musical). At times, there are several sites to be visited: Harriet Beecher Stowe has two visitor centres devoted to her, one in her native state of Connecticut, and one in Cincinnati, where experiences of life in the city informed her bestselling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Some places linked to famous writers may downright disappoint: current literary tourists looking for the essence of Simone de Beauvoir will struggle to find any real sense of the feminism that informed the impassioned lines ‘one is not born, but becomes, a woman’ in the expensive cafés of Paris’ Left Bank. These cafés are famous because they were once frequented by Beauvoir and her fellow existentialists, but there is little trace of the group there – not least because smoking has been banished to the terraces!

Other destinations require a real devotion to the author to make them worth a visit. My own journey has taken me (and my long-suffering partner) to remote spots, which, off-season at any rate, can be somewhat bleak. The town of Montauban in the south of France, birthplace of Olympe de Gouges, a writer who published a Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne in 1791, had just one trace of this remarkable playwright and feminist: an ‘Olympe de Gouges’ set menu in one of the hotels. And there would be little reason for anyone other than devoted admirers of Germaine de Staël to visit the Château de Coppet, a small, rather ugly estate on the banks of Lake Geneva. Exiled by Napoleon from Paris for publishing a novel, Delphine, in 1802 – the Emperor saw this as a veiled attack on his regime – Staël became a living exhibit inside the walls of her château. She hosted the literary tourists of her own day (such as Lord Byron), but visitors today are few and far between. On the day I went to Coppet, the château itself was closed, while the cellars were hosting a display of porcelain from a local art school. Nearby, however, another literary site has maintained its interest for pilgrims: the Villa Diodati, like Staël’s home, on the banks of Lake Geneva, has links with both Milton and Byron, and is today still famous as the site where the young Mary Shelley created her masterpiece, Frankenstein.

More problematic is the quest for the origin of fictional characters which literary tourism cannot help but inspire.

A site that is important for its links to an author can of course be visited for entirely different reasons by the majority of tourists. Most of the visitors to the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, care little for the fact that it is housed in the former home of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, author of a correspondence that was read and praised Europe-wide in its time. And Slot Zuylen, a château near Utrecht in Holland, welcomes those interested in the cultural history of the building itself (originally a medieval castle, Slot Zuylen was rebuilt in the early 16th Century), rather than by those who admire the château’s most famous literary inhabitant, author Belle de Zuylen (also known as Isabelle de Charrière).

Props to the lady

One main reason for visiting a site with connections to an author is to pay respects to a writer that has given pleasure through her works. Hermione Lee describes this movingly when she writes of her visit to Edith Wharton’s grave in Versailles:

Clearly no one had been there for a long time….In the rain, I weeded Edith, and planted a single white silk azalea, bought from the flower-shop at the cemetery gate. She would probably have been scornful about the artificial flower, but would, I felt, have been glad to have her grave tidied up.

It is a fitting tribute that Wharton’s memory be preserved by the writer of her biography in the very real act of tending her grave, as well as through the publication of the biography itself. Indeed, there is nearly always a sense, in literary tourism, of performing an act of homage.

More problematic is the quest for the origin of fictional characters which literary tourism cannot help but inspire. In her magisterial group biography of the Brontës, Juliet Barker writes of ‘the Brontë myth.’ In large part because of Gaskell’s polemical biography of Charlotte Brontë, Barker argues that each of the Brontë sisters,

became graduates of the school of adversity, writing in all innocence about the barbarous society in which they lived because that was all they knew….However distasteful Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might be, they were simply an accurate representation of provincial life.

…and never confuse fact for fiction…

Of course there is a danger of reading the life as fuel for the fiction. As Barker succinctly puts it, the attempt to find a ‘model’ for Heathcliff or Jane Eyre is sometimes ‘as fanatical as it is irrelevant.’ And yet the ‘search for originals’ is somehow both tempting and unavoidable. Moreover, it seems to be exactly what many visitors to homes of authors that are now museums are looking for – and that these same museums are happy to provide. On a 2006 visit to Concord, Massachusetts, I was shown around Louisa May Alcott’s home, Orchard House, by a guide who insisted at every turn that the origins of Little Women were here, that Orchard House was the March family home, that each of the much-loved siblings Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy had her counterpart in Alcott’s own family. This was all part of the marketing for the tours that insisted that ‘a visit to Orchard House is like walking through the book,’ and is of great importance when the financial security of a site depends on the number of visitors it manages to tempt through the doors. But I had gone to celebrate Alcott’s creativity and, though I was aware of the argument that has frequently been made for the autobiographical nature of Alcott’s tales, I left feeling that the insistence that Alcott ‘wrote from life,’ and that everything within the pages of the novel could be found inside the four walls of Orchard House, was somewhat reductive.

The attempt to find characters in life that must have motivated the writer in her fiction is no more apparent than in the case of Jane Austen, an author who inspires a real sense of ownership in her fans, perhaps more than any other writer, male or female. There seems to be no end in sight for the kind of ‘readings’ of Austen that take up where she left off – or, indeed, which use her life to write more fiction. The recent film Becoming Jane was based on the very premise that Austen’s own fiction must have its roots in reality. In that version of Austen’s life, Tom Lefroy, an acquaintance of the young Jane, provides not only the model for her male characters in her novels – and more particularly the romantic hero Darcy – but also the inspiration for her actual creativity. The film seems to be simultaneously asking the question ‘How is it possible for a inexperienced spinster to create wonderful romantic heroes?’ and answering it with a simple, ‘It’s not – she clearly experienced great romantic passion first-hand.’ It’s an interesting fiction, but, like the insistence that Alcott’s Little Women actually happened and simply needed to be recorded, it reduces Austen’s mastery of her art.

There is something very beguiling about learning basketry in Tucson or discussing Jane Austen at the movies in Sydney.

There are active Jane Austen Societies in North America, Buenos Aires, Japan and Australia as well as the UK, all of which have annual gatherings of some sort and a large virtual home on the Internet. The emphasis is similar for each society: the ‘enjoyment and appreciation’ of the author and her writing, which can include all aspects of her life and times. There is something very beguiling about learning basketry in Tucson or discussing Jane Austen at the movies in Sydney. But there is an obvious attraction, too, for these groups, in spending time in Austen’s own country. Several of these overseas societies have annual group tours, or write reports of their independent trips for the society newsletters.

Where should one visit as a literary tourist interested in Austen? One starting point may be the sites mentioned in the novels. A devoted pilgrim could trace the steps of Anne Elliot to Lyme Regis and find the spot where Louisa Musgrove falls, seek out Fanny Price’s family in the poorer parts of Portsmouth, or even follow Elizabeth Bennet and the Gardiners to Derbyshire. Fun can be had, too, with attempting to ‘find’ the large fictional estates such as Pemberley, Hartfield and Donwell Abbey. Indeed there is an interesting sub-branch of literary tourism that attracts Austen fans to sites where recent adaptations were filmed. Lyme Park in Cheshire (featured in the exterior shots in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice) uses its website to promote the fact that the scene where Colin Firth emerged in a wet shirt from a lake was filmed in its grounds. It’s a scene that millions of viewers – particularly women – remember, and it’s understandable that Lyme Park would list it as a claim to fame. Since the scene does not, however, appear in Austen’s novel, it is perhaps not an essential point on the Austen map.

A literary tourist is on more solid ground, both literally and metaphorically, when visiting places with genuine connections to Austen, places she lived in or visited. Her birthplace and childhood home, a rectory in the northern Hampshire village of Steventon, no longer stands, although the church her father preached in is much as she would have known it. And there is plenty for an Austen enthusiast to see in Bath, the setting for major sections of both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and Austen’s own residence from 1801-1806. Home to a large Jane Austen centre, and an annual festival, those with a passion for Regency dance workshops and parades will find their interests well-served in this town. But Austen’s own creativity did not flourish in Bath. She started a novel, The Watsons, there but did not complete it, and it remained a fragment, unpublished – and, indeed, untitled – until the 1871 publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen. Southampton has done less well than Bath when it comes to capitalising on Austen’s 1806-1809 stay in the city: although the city council has now produced a leaflet for a self-guided Jane Austen Trail tour, many of the buildings Austen would have known, including the house she lived in, are no longer standing. It is possible to see inside the Dolphin Hotel, the dance hall in Austen’s day, but Regency Southampton has disappeared, and the city, which like Bath was a fashionable spa town in the 18th Century, is better known today as the port the Titanic set sail from in 1912.

Will the real Jane Austen please stand up?

Finally, there is Chawton, the village where Austen, her mother and her sister Cassandra moved in 1809 and where Austen lived until her last few months when she left the village to seek medical care in nearby Winchester (the final point on an Austen pilgrimage). In Chawton, Austen found her creative home. She set to work revising the manuscripts that would become Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), and composed Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816) and Persuasion, published posthumously alongside the earlier Northanger Abbey in 1817. The house she lived in has been sensitively restored as a museum. Carol Shields, in her tribute Jane Austen: A Life, rightly points out that although thousands of Austen’s readers have visited Austen’s Chawton home, responses are mixed: some find the house surprisingly modest, others are surprised to find a ‘cottage’ with a substantial garden and six bedrooms. What strikes and shocks Shields, a writer herself, is the extent of Austen’s isolation in Chawton, and indeed throughout her literary life:

Just as she walked behind a wall of shrubbery at Steventon and later at Chawton, she wrote her novels behind a wall of isolation. Sympathetic readers are one thing, but writers are hugely dependent on the shared experiences of other writers. Why otherwise do we have such an empire of writers’ colonies, writers’ unions, writers’ congresses, writers’ guilds?

Austen’s world was indeed a world apart from the salons of France, or indeed from the close-knit bluestocking group that supported and nurtured the creativity of her near contemporaries such as Hannah More in Britain. Austen herself, however, seems to have felt that an element of isolation was a very good thing. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, sent from Chawton, and dated September 1816, she writes of the challenges facing her as a woman writer:

I enjoyed Edward’s company very much, as I said before, and yet I was not sorry when Friday came. It had been a busy week, and I wanted a few days quiet and exemption from the thought and contrivancy which any sort of company gives. I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the house; and how good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment. Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.

Perhaps this lament – this dry and witty plea for less rhubarb and more time – is all the more striking because Austen places herself in a community of women writers, albeit ones who are personally unknown to her: situating herself alongside the ‘good Mrs West,’ Austen is referring to Jane West, author of once-popular, now-forgotten works such as 1796’s A Gossip’s Story. Her literary community, her ‘writers’ union,’ ‘writers’ congress,’ was the books she read, either to sharply critique, as she was to do with the work of one of the most successful women writers of her age, Ann Radcliffe – the butt of several jokes in Northanger Abbey – or to admire (as she did Maria Edgeworth).

Literary tourists come to the village of Chawton because they want more of Austen, because they want to ‘find’ her at home. Chawton House Library, by its very existence, encourages us to read other women writers by locating Austen within a community.

It is fitting that there is now an entire virtual community of women writers in Chawton, in the form of a large research library. Chawton House Library, a collection of writing by women 1600-1830 now housed in the manor house belonging to Austen’s brother, Edward Knight, was largely set up as a homage to Austen, and with a desire to ‘rediscover’ the women writers who inspired her. It is open to any reader who makes an appointment. Once inside, a visitor can find the works read by Austen and her contemporaries. Jane West sits on the shelves, as do Germaine de Staël, Frances Burney and Sydney Owenson, all writers who frustrated and inspired Austen, much as they frustrate and inspire us. Literary tourists come to the village of Chawton because they want more of Austen, because they want to ‘find’ her at home. Chawton House Library, by its very existence, encourages us to read other women writers by locating Austen within a community.

The write destination

It is a sense of remarkable achievement that strikes us the most when visiting the homes of women writers of the past. The Brontës, overlooking the moors in a bleak and cramped parsonage; Louisa May Alcott, writing on a tiny desk in a crowded house in New England; Isabelle de Charrière, subject to the pressures of making a good marriage as part of one of the most important aristocratic families in Holland; Germaine de Staël, exiled from the Paris society she loved and thrived on; and finally Jane Austen, distracted from her current project by her brother Edward and his enormous family in residence in their nearby manor house: these women, nonetheless, found the time and inspiration to write. Their very industry can be exhausting, but it also inspires 20th Century visitors in their own creativity. Each of the sites devoted to preserving the memory of a woman writer – indeed, in the case of the Brontë parsonage museum and Chawton House Library, several or many women writers – does valuable work in preserving our heritage. Representing the various places of their own, they are a vital aspect of the community of women writers of which we are all a part.

GILLIAN DOW was educated at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford, before taking up a research fellowship – linked to Chawton House Library – at the University of Southampton. There, she teaches courses on women and writing, the French Revolution, literature for children and something entitled ‘dangerous readings’ which focuses on how the novel was viewed as dangerous and subversive for women readers in particular. When she is not travelling round visiting the former homes of women writers, she enjoys cooking and makes yearly batches of Chawton bramble jam and Chawton apple jelly.

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From Issue 39 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2008

• PHOTO: AUSTEN'S WRITING TABLE, JANE AUSTEN MEMORIAL TRUST