powerfully suggestive of the richness of the author's visit to the Dorset coast.
At long last, the full story of Jane's extraordinary Lyme experiences may be shared with the world, in the form of this diary account, one of many discovered among the long-lost Austen journals currently undergoing restoration and editing in the United States.1
Although the events Jane Austen describes in the following pages are surprising enough, it is possible that they serve to elucidate a personal episode in her life that has been the subject of much conjecture and debate. Years after Jane's death, Cassandra Austen, Jane's older sister and closest confidante, told her niece Caroline that the writer was involved in an unfortunate love affair with a clergyman whom she had met during a seaside holiday. The young man died or otherwise disappeared before an engagement could be formed, and since Cassandra was notoriously closemouthed regarding her sister's private life, neither the gendeman's name nor the exact history of the affair have come down to posterity. Various Austen family members recorded conflicting explanations of the episode—which Caroline Austen termed Jane's “nameless and dateless*’ romance—and the facts appear to have been garbled with time. It has been suggested that the clergyman's brother was a doctor, whom Cassandra visited years after Jane's death; or that the unknown suitor was in fact the Reverend Samuel Blackall, an acquaintance of Jane's for many years previous to this period. Constance Pilgrim, in her book Dear Jane: A Biographical Study of Jane Austen (Pentlands Press, Durham, 1971), goes so far as to suggest that the writer's mystery lover was Captain John Wordsworth, a naval officer and brother of the poet William Wordsworth, who was lost with his ship in 1805, and that they met in Lyme Regis as early as 1797—a theory described as “fanciful” by George Holbert Tucker, another Austen scholar. Some have asserted that Jane met the unknown clergyman while traveling with her family in Dorset during the summer of 1801; others place the encounter closer to 1804.2
Jane and the Man of the Cloth offers one possible answer to the debate. Austen's acquaintance with both Geoffrey Sidmouth, whom she believed to be the notorious Reverend, and Captain Percival Fielding—as well as Sidmouth's friendship with the medical doctor William Dagliesh, whom Cassandra knew and might well have visited in later years—make it likely that the writer's “nameless and dateless” romance occurred in Lyme in the late summer of 1804. To offer further evidence here would be to spoil the tale for the reader; so I shall allow Jane to speak for herself and leave it to the reader to determine the truth of matters.
In editing this volume, I found that Geoffrey Morley's 1983 work, Smuggling in Hampshire and Dorset: iy00—1850 (Newbury UK: Countryside Books), was very nearly indispensable. I would offer it to readers who wish to know more about Free Trade and the Gentlemen of the Night. Novelist John Fowles, who has lived and worked in Lyme for many years, is the author of A Short History of Lyme Regis (Little, Brown 8c Co., 1982), a concise but thorough summary of the town and its past.
STEPHANIE BARRON
EVERGREEN, COLORADO
1 For a full account of the journals’ discovery, readers are directed to the Editor's Foreword in the first volume of the Austen collection, published by Bantam Books in May 1995 under the tide of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor.
2 For an excellent survey of the “nameless and dateless” romance theories, as well as a rich portrait of Austen's milieu, see George Holbert Tucker, Jave Austen the Woman, St. Martin's Press, 1994.
3 September 1804
at High Down Grange,
on the Lyme road
∼
IT IS? TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, THAT THE EXPECTATION of pleasure is generally preferred to its eventual attainment—the attainment being marred, at its close, by the resumption of quotidian routine made onerous by the very diversions so lately enjoyed. But as I gaze upon the tortured aspect of my dearest sister, her head bound round in a makeshift bandage, her pallor extreme, and her features overlaid with suffering, I must declare all such nice distinctions the indulgence of a frivolous mind. For how much more melancholy still, to find pleasure usurped entirely by the advent of disaster! To have no chance of mourning the end of good times, by observing them waylaid and truly routed before they had even begun! And Cassandra's is the sort of misfortune one never anticipates, being met in unhappy accident—the chance of a moment decided it; and the course of our