At Southampton the mother and daughters lived, after the father's death, in a house in that secluded part of the town which stands between the High Street and the old walls above the { 242} "Water." There is a bit of those walls which abuts on the spot where the Austens' house stood, and it is one of the places where we may feel confident that we are walking where Jane often walked, and gazing out over a scene which was familiar to her in almost all save the funnels of the steam yachts and the distant view of the train on its way to Bournemouth or to London.
In London itself there are many spots that will always recall Jane Austen to her devoted friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street (Covent Garden), in Hans Place, in Cork Street, we know that she herself stayed. Many of the characters in _Sense and Sensibility_--the only novel in which we hear much of London--are associated with familiar streets. Edward Ferrars stayed in Pall Mall, the Steele girls in Bartlett's Buildings, Mrs. Jennings in Berkeley Street, the John Dashwoods in Harley Street. The Gardiners (_Pride and Prejudice_) lived in Gracechurch Street.
The day has not yet come when public bodies could be sufficiently affected by imaginative literature to place memorials on the houses where fictitious personages have been supposed to dwell. { 243} In Paris the memorial to Charlet is an admirable group of a grenadier and a gamin--typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that any sculptor should be commissioned to give us life-size figures of Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen. But when next the London County Council contemplates the placing of plaques on the former residences of departed worthies they might consider whether--of course with the consent of the freeholder and the leaseholder--her name might not be placed on the house in Henrietta Street, once her brother Henry's home, where so many of her letters were written. She tells of the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort of herself and her nieces, and from its door she went to the neighbouring church, or the theatres, which were within a few minutes' walk. It is not likely that any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced Progressive on the Council to object to the name of so very mild a Tory being thus honoured. As to the more probable objection that she did not "reside" there, but was only a visitor, one may plead that as there is { 244} a plaque on a newly-erected tube station recalling the "residence" of Mrs. Siddons, and that a tablet proclaims that Turner "lived" in a house built thirty years after his death, there would be no great straining of logic in admitting the claim of a house in which Jane Austen did undoubtedly write, and sleep, and talk. The front was cemented in the middle of the last century, and the ground-floor is now used for business purposes, but otherwise the house is little changed since the Austens were there.