The central subjects of Jane Austen’s work are romance and marriage, yet at the time of her death, at 41, she had never married. As Austen scholar Paula Byrne notes in the afterword to her new novel, “Six Weeks by the Sea,” the author had a flirtation with a lawyer named Tom Lefroy when she was 19 that ended in disappointment.
This is one of many factual elements Byrne weaves into her fictional narrative, set in the year 1801, when Austen was 25. That summer, Austen’s family spent six weeks in Bath. Based on the wisp of a story Jane’s sister, Cassandra, told after her death, this may have been the one time Austen did fall in love.
Certainly no one is better qualified than Lady Bate, as Byrne is also known, by virtue of her marriage to Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, to imagine and exp