Jane and the Man of the Cloth

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When Jane Austen traveled to the Dorset coastal town of Lyme Regis in the late summer of 1804, she returned to a part of England she had first visited the previous year and that she is thought to have loved. She chose Lyme and its peculiar blend of fishermen, retired naval officers, and fashionable pleasure seekers for a pivotal passage in her final novel, Persuasion, published posthumously in 1818. Her affection for the town's steep streets and bracing Cobb (a stone breakwater encircling the harbor of the same name), the secretive wilderness called the Pinny and the high downs beyond, shines through the scenes she set down on paper over ten years after the action of this memoir.

For Jane and the Man of the Cloth is exactly that — a memoir of Austen's detective adventures in Lyme in the late summer of 1804. Austen scholars have long been frustrated by their lack of knowledge about this period in her life, since only one letter written from the town survives in the collected correspondence. In that lengthy note to Cassandra, Jane talks of many people and events that will become familiar to the reader of the present volume. We listen as she discusses Mr. Crawford, with whom she had danced the previous evening at the Thursday night Assembly; the servant-man James and his lanthorn; Miss Armstrong; the Schuylers and the Honourable Barnewalis—“bold, queer-looking people, just fit to be Quality at Lyme”—and the mysterious man she names only as Le Chevalier, who divided the winnings of a card game with her mother. The details are tantalizing, because they are fragmentary — and yet powerfully suggestive of the richness of the author's visit to the Dorset coast.

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