About six years ago to mark the publication of my novel, Ladies Coupe, there was a small book event in Delhi. Given that I knew exactly about one and a half persons in the capital, my editor, then at Penguin India, hastened to pad up the guest list by calling several fellow authors. One author declining said, "Anyway, my colleague will be attending. He thinks she is an Austen, Allende and Atwood combo!"

Later, my editor said in a bemused fashion, "I am not sure if that Austen reference was entirely complimentary!"
I knew what she meant. Jane Austen is very seldom referred to as a hallmark of great writing. In almost all countries, the literary establishment is a male bastion and so, the fact that writing by a woman is considered perhaps not that important or expansive or deep enough as compared to male writing is a bane women writers have to live with.
Though new to the world of letters then, I already knew that the literary world very often dismissed women writers as inconsequential if their works appealed more to women than men. And ordinary women unfettered by academic presumptions or baggage were bottom of the heap, so to speak.

Austen was to experience this time and again. With the publication of Sense and Sensibility, her book received just two reviews both loaded with 'masculine kindness, boredom and routine condescending praise'. When Pride and Prejudice appeared, the first three reviews were replete with pleased yawns of approval. Austen, whose identity was still unknown to the literary establishment, had to endure the mixed pleasure of seeing her novel become fashionable and live with the indignity of being told of a celebrated man of letters who is reported to have said, "I should like to know who the author is, for it is much too clever to have been written by a woman."
Last June, I was in Chawton in Hampshire. Almost 200 years ago, Austen, her mother and sisters, Cassandra and Martha, had come to live in a cottage provided for them by her brother, Edward. Now called 'Jane Austen's House', the cottage is a fascinating museum with daguerreotypes, topaz crosses, manuscripts, tea caddies and furniture. However, such places seldom stop at the literary or personal memorabilia. And so visitors are subject to both the morbid and the disturbingly intimate. From a lock of the novelist's hair to the washstand used by her.

What would have Austen made of this? I wonder. Would she have laughed perhaps at the American tourist who stood mesmerised by the sight of her chamber pot? Or raised an eyebrow at the young couple so moved by the presence of the lace collar sewn by her that they had to grope each other right there and then?
Behind the main house are the bake house, the wash house, the carriage house, displaying the bacon roller and the brick oven, the round clothes tub and a low-wheeled donkey trap. Various items used by the Austen household.

For me, these outhouses carry as much atmosphere as the insides of the cottage where the novels were actually written. If I could imagine Austen spooning out tea as part of her duties - tea, sugar and wine stores being under her charge - I could then see her weave that into the writing of her novels. The writer acquires substance here in the backrooms of her life. Fowl had to be roasted, clothes washed and ironed and visits made. Without the everyday, there would be no novel, nor would there be characters who eat and talk, love and cry, despair and dream, hope and live.

I go to sit in the garden. I think of that spindly chair and the little table placed by the window to perhaps recreate the spot where the novelist wrote some of her best known novels. If aspiring poets kneel at the Poets Corner in the Westminster Abbey, then it is here that all aspiring novelists must come to pay homage. For, Austen had importantly the patronage of the 'unknown readers'. The literary establishment may have maintained a resolute silence when it came to praising her work. But as anyone in the publishing world will tell you, the unknown reader is where the bulwark of a literary career rests.

And yet, I can't stop thinking of the creaking door. A swing door that led to the downstairs room that Austen wrote in was purposely left with its creak unattended so that the noise would warn the writer if anyone was coming and she could then hide her manuscript. As much as the need for anonymity, my own reading was that Austen didn't think it seemly to be caught writing. Like perhaps a child sucking on a stolen gobstopper, did Austen ever think, "I know this isn't exactly nice, this thing I do, and yet it is exactly what I want to do."
Austen, unlike many other women writers, was shielded from the actual process of running a home. She was perhaps fortunate in having sisters because in that cottage where others were absorbed in their chores, she was allotted only light housekeeping duties and did not have to apologise or feel guilty for being absorbed in her literary world. She and her work were valued in that household and they let her be with a respectful tolerance to her chief preoccupation - her writing.

I think then of the battles a woman writer has to contend with these days. For, there is a daily conflict of interests. How does one harmonise a literary life with a family life? Both require involvement, demand dedication and need the luxury of time. If she chooses to be a good housewife, the writer in her suffers. And if she chooses to put her writing above all else, she is seen by family and society as a cold, willful and selfish woman. She can expect little support and hardly any encouragement. And yet, she continues to write because as all writers or creative people will tell you, the need to create is paramount.