A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
into the century, and in so doing to overshadow Austen’s different
contribution. The identity of artistic effort with economic worth,
by which Scott laboured so vigorously to give significant value
to the work of the novelist, is just as vigorously denied in
Austen-Leigh’s account of his aunt’s unremarked (and littleremunerated)
writings. Instead, what he does emphasize is that,
settled in Chawton after the disruptions of the Bath and Southampton
years, her habits of composition assumed identity with
those he conjectures for the Steventon years, ‘so that the last five
years of her life produced the same number of novels with those
which had been written in her early youth’ (p. 81). The structure
Austen-Leigh imposes here has been of profound significance
for how critics have viewed Jane Austen’s creative life. He
suggests that the novels as we know them were the products of
two distinct and matching creative periods–– roughly Austen’s
early twenties and her late thirties–– and that these were divided
by a largely fallow interlude. But another interpretation of the
same evidence and dates, one which has found less favour, might
be that, with the exception of Northanger Abbey (sold, under the
title of ‘Susan’, to a London publisher in 1803), all the finished
novels were the products of the mature Chawton years, and that
this intense burst of creativity between 1809 and 1817 was not
necessarily the consequence of a return to emotional or environmental
origins but the culmination of some twenty years of
uninterrupted fictional experimentation. A case can be made for
linking Northanger Abbey, possibly in a second drafting, The
Watsons, and Lady Susan with the disrupted Bath and Southampton
years, but there may also have been other draftings or revisions
at this time. Given the hard critical gaze Austen turns upon
homes and families in her fictions, can it be that they are
exclusively the products of home and rootedness? In other words,
what intervened between Steventon and Chawton may not have
been just one long swoon of unconsciousness, a syncope of
around eight years, from which she only recovered when time and
events conspired to restore as nearly as possible those primal
scenes.
The structuring device of home, and of Hampshire homes in
xli