The most intriguing of the shadowy real-life romances in the Austen biography is related in Caroline Austen's memoirs of her aunt, about a young man whom the family met at the seaside on the south Devon coast west of Lyme, who was taken with Jane, who promised at parting that they should hear again from him, but all they heard was of his sudden death.

The date is vague (the Austens spent summers at the seaside after George Austen retired to Bath in 1800, Jane would have been in her late twenties), and there are no letters to support it (none of Jane's survive from 1801-04). And the story came to Caroline through Austen's sister Cassandra, and sounds suspiciously similar to Cassandra's own blighted romance (her fiancé died suddenly of yellow fever in the West Indies). A sea-breeze could blow the story away.

But both the locale near Lyme and Austen's advancing age suggest a connection to her last-written novel, Persuasion, which also raises the poignant theme of love that survives when all hope is gone. This is the story that, in spite of scholarly skepticism, I hope is true.