Spending too much time indoors taking in gently toxic vapours

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 132.

Chawton is another sweet little village – this part of the world is full of them – tucked away down a side lane and not on the face of it a great deal changed from Jane Austen’s day. Chawton Cottage, where Jane lived with her mother and sister, is built of mellow brick and sits close to the road. The interior is furnished simply, with a few good pieces of furniture but with a curious air of emptiness enhanced by the bare floors and empty grates. Knick-knacks and personal effects are conspicuously absent from table tops and mantelpieces, presumably because anything left out would be filched. The result, as with so many homes of famous people, is that you get a good notion of the walls and windows but not so much of the life of the person who lived there. That’s not a bitter complaint, just an observation. It’s the way it has to be.
Jane Austen lived in the house for eight years, from 1809 till 1817, and during that time did most of her most lasting work: wrote Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park, and revised and prepared for publication Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions – surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement – in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture.

When Jane Austen left the house, in the summer of 1817, it was to go to Winchester, sixteen miles to the west, to die. She was only forty-one, and the cause of her death is unknown. It may have been Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma or a form of typhus or possibly arsenic poisoning, which was surprisingly common in those days as arsenic was routinely used in making wallpapers and for colouring fabrics. It has been suggested that the general air of ennui and frailty that seemed so characteristic of the age may simply have been generations of women spending too much time indoors taking in gently toxic vapours. In any case, three days after St Swithun’s Day 1817 she breathed her last.