The Rev Austen, Mrs Austen, Miss Austen and Miss Jane Austen are arrived in Bath.
They take lodgings at No. 4 Sydney Place, ready for all the Cheerfulness of Town life.
With this final banishment from Steventon, Jane is utterly unmoored.
She feels it at first as the loss of the pleasures of Spring.
She had not known before how much the unfurling flowers in the garden, the glory of the budding woods, had delighted her — what animation, both of body and mind she had derived from watching the advance of that Season. To be losing such pleasures is no trifle. To be losing them, because she is in the midst of closeness and noise, to have confinement, bad air, bad smells, substituted for liberty, freshness, fragrance, and verdure, is infinitely worse.
She sighs for the air, the liberty, the quiet of the country.
The sun’s rays falling strongly into the parlour make her still more melancholy, for sunshine appears to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country.
Here, its power is only a glare, a stifling, sickly glare, dazzling on white pavements.
There is neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town.
Jane is not in Spirits.
The whole family perceives it.
She is propelled, like an automaton, through the whirl of social engagements.
"Such elegant stupidity."
"I will be as civil to these people as their bad breath will allow."
"I hate tiny parties. They force one into constant exertion."
"There is a monstrous deal of common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any Wit."
"The usual nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless civility."
"I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreable."
Cassandra and Jane are not stupid.
They full know the reason for their removal.
The object is to captivate some Man of much better fortune than their own.
But, by the same token, they know how desirable they aren’t: the portionless, ageing daughters of a country parson.
Even Bath itself is past its best.
These days, the truly fashionable frequent Brighthelmstone, or perhaps, the Isle of Wight.
"A heart wounded like yours can have little inclination for matrimony."
"Not much indeed — but you know we must marry."
"I could do very well single for my own part. A little Company, and a pleasant Ball now and then, would be enough for me."
"If one could only be young forever! But to grow old and be poor and be laughed at..."
"I have lost Tom, it is true, but very few people marry their first loves. I should not refuse a man because he was not Tom."
"I should not like marrying a disagreeable man."
"Nor me."
"But I do not think there are many very disagreeable Men. I think I could like any good-humoured Man with a comfortable Income?"
