Jane Austen's England

She was a master of stories of romantic love, yet found little in her own life. The happy endings in which affection and respect trump class and crass didn't quite play out in her own short time on Earth. She lived most of her life in a beautiful corner of England -- but used it only once as the locale of her immensely popular books.

Jane Austen's quiet birth, life and death in early-19th-century Hampshire are not the stuff of romantic legend. But more than 200 years after her birth, Austen's books are romantic icons.

"Janeites" are the fans who have read and reread the books and when given the chance, scour the English countryside for all the places, real and imaginary, connected with Austen and her books.

My own Austen journeys have stretched from Steventon, where Austen was born, to Winchester, where she died -- with stops in Bath, Southampton, Portsmouth, Oxford and Chawton along the way.

These trips were taken out of love -- not for the author, but for my wife, whose stacks of dog-eared Austen paperbacks are on the short shelf next to her nightstand. I am not so much a "Janeite" as an enabler of one, but I enjoyed the journeys all the same.

Steventon

"To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment."

The pretty Hampshire village is where Austen was born in the rectory of her father's church in 1775. Like many places that have an early connection with a famous person's life, Steventon has less to offer the fan than hoped. It was the incubator of Austen's talents, but her literary life really started after she left town. The 13th-century St. Nicholas Church where her father was vicar still stands, though the rectory was torn down in 1828.

Life in the small village shaped her country-centric attitudes. The Vyne, a great house in nearby Basingstoke that is now maintained by the National Trust, was the scene of the kind of parties that populate her books.

Austen's father's decision to retire from the church and move in 1801 to the busy, expensive city of Bath came as culture shock to Austen, then 26. In what may be an apocryphally melodramatic story, Jane is said to have fainted dead away when her father broke what he thought was the happy news.

Bath

"But Catherine could be stubborn too; and walked out of the Pump Room, leaving Isabella with Captain Tilney."

My first exposure to Austen tourism was on a visit to Bath, the lovely but tourist-filled spa town with its famous Regency-era crescent-shaped row of houses. Austen visited the Lower Assembly Rooms and the town's famed Pump Room, both of which still look much as they did in Austen's time. My wife sought out the house on Sydney Place where Austen lived. When she stood in the doorway, it was as if I were witnessing the literary equivalent of a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

Austen herself had mixed feelings about Bath, which taught her much about the class-based manners and backbiting that would be laced throughout her books. Both "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" are set primarily in and around Bath. Neighborhoods just a few hundred yards apart had widely different social standing. Austen once wrote a relative of the social claustrophobia, lamenting, "I hate tiny parties; they force one into constant exertion," an idea echoed by Anne Elliott in "Persuasion," who complains of returning to Bath for the social season, "with a sinking heart, anticipating an imprisonment of many months." Whatever Austen thought of Bath, Bath loves Austen. There is a Jane Austen Centre chronicling her life on Gay Street.

Southampton/Portsmouth

"The men appeared to her all coarse, the women all pert, everybody under-bred."

- Fanny Price remarking on the people of Portsmouth in "Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen

Life in the navy towns of Southampton and nearby Portsmouth excited Austen's creative mind, fueled in part by the presence of her brothers Charles and Frank, who served in Portsmouth (and eventually became admirals in the Royal Navy). The Portsmouth scenes in "Mansfield Park" are the only time she actually sets part of one of her novels in Hampshire, the region where she was born, lived almost all her life and died.

Unfortunately, the Navy connection has all but erased the cities Austen knew. Nazi bombers hammered the wharfs and port during World War II, and what Adolf Hitler didn't destroy, misguided urban-renewal plans finished off. What is left is a sterile city with just a few pockets of Old World charm intact. The area where Austen lived around Castle Square has been completely modernized.

Chawton

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

- Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice," written primarily in Chawton, 1811

No place evokes the English country manners and dispositions of Austen's characters better than Chawton. There's a nice Fuller's pub and a tea shop. But for true fans, the place and the cottage -- with Austen's tiny writing table -- is the touchstone of any Austen journey.

Winchester

"The last sad ceremony is to take place on Thursday morning; her dear remains are to be deposited in the Cathedral."

- Cassandra Austen, writing of the death of her sister, Jane, in 1817

Jane Austen's life story ends in the famous cathedral city. Increasingly ill, she moved to Winchester in March 1816 for treatment and lived in a small yellow house a short walk from Winchester Cathedral.

Around the corner from Austen's final residence is the Wykeham Arms pub -- a phonetic version of the cad British officer at the center of "Pride and Prejudice."