Jane Austen

Dr Norman has written an excellent biography of Jane Austen, which I have thoroughly enjoyed reading. He has kept my interest throughout with his easy style and, having written it from a doctor’s point of view, has noticed entirely different aspects of her life and times from those which we are used to reading about in her letters, novels etc. This makes it of great interest to us all, especially as he progresses through her family. In particular, he describes how Jane’s own health, or latterly her lack of good health, affected her writing, especially the fragment of
Sanditon
written in 1817 when her youth and bloom had faded. This was a novel in the making in a style entirely different to her normal one. What a very great pity she was not well enough to complete it. Dr Norman has also drawn attention to the influence which Jane’s exotic cousin Eliza, Comtesse de Feuillide had, both on Jane as a person, and as a writer.

I think that Dr Norman probably asked me to write the foreword to his book because he had heard that I was closely related to Jane Austen and have studied her work, life and times for very many years. Both my grandmothers, Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Bradford (
née
Knight) and Louisa Hardy (
née
Knight) – who were sisters – were granddaughters of Jane Austen’s very wealthy and generous brother Edward Knight (formerly Austen) with whom both Jane and her sister Cassandra often spent months at a time.

It was Edward who gave Mrs Austen, Cassandra and Jane the Chawton Cottage in which they could live comfortably. This was situated near to Edward’s own Chawton House – or ‘The Great House’ as they always knew it – built in Elizabethan times by John Knight. My father, Edward Austen Bradford, was brought up there (having a wet-nurse in the village when a baby while his mother Lizzie had to go back to India to my Grandpapa: her husband, Indian Army officer, Sir Edward Bradford). Also, my father married from ‘The Great House’, as did both my grandmothers.

Dr Norman deduces from her writing that Jane Austen was fiercely egalitarian, feeling very strongly that men, and women too, should be judged on their merits of character, judgement and education rather than their connections or their bank balance. Jane Austen was the first novelist to expect women to have the same moral values and standards as men, and this is one of the reasons that her novels are as relevant today as when they were first written.

There is a deep underlying humanity in all of Jane’s novels and one can sense that courage and humanity were very much part of her make-up. She demonstrates that young people are often very bad judges of what will make them happy. However, if a character in her novels is found wanting, she does not seek to destroy them or humiliate them. This is an Austen trait. Peaceful co-existence is the order of the day, as Jane’s naval brothers discovered when they came to stay. There were never disagreements as it was not their habit (neither is it the habit of the family today).

Jane showed that she was very much aware of the disadvantages suffered by young women entering the job market due to a lack of education and also a lack of available paid work for women. She also wanted to warn them not to rush into a relationship without due consideration, in case they were abandoned and left with a babe.

Luckily, Jane’s ability to see the humorous side of things permits the present-day reader to look back at her life and times, and the lives of her contemporaries, in the same light-hearted way, rather than judging them by present-day standards.

Doctor Norman’s book is a pleasure to read and you will be rewarded with information of great interest!

Diana Shervington, July 2008

A Vice-President of the Jane Austen Society

Whereas many aspects of Jane Austen’s life are well known and well documented, others are shrouded in mystery. This was not as a result of any action on her part; it was principally because of the actions of her sister Cassandra.

Jane Austen scholar Deirdre Le Faye, for example, in her book
Jane Austen’s Letters
, has demonstrated that numerous letters – sent by Jane to family and friends – are missing from the years 1796, 1798–1801, 1805, 1807–09 and 1811–15. (That these letters once existed can be deduced from the contents of the ones which survive.) In particular, no letters whatsoever survive for the period between June 1801 to September 1804. Also, Edward, Lord Brabourne – Jane’s great-nephew – refers to ‘nearly two letterless years’ between 6 June 1811 and 24 May 1813
1
. What is the explanation for this? If a recipient saved
some
of Jane’s letters then why not all of them?

The answer is provided by Jane’s niece Caroline, daughter of her eldest brother James, who states, with reference to these missing letters:

What prompted Cassandra to act in this way? Author Constance Hill refers to an article by Jane’s niece Anna Lefroy (
née
Austen), ‘that appeared in Temple Bar some years ago’. In it Anna, referring to the missing letters, declares that Jane:

Deirdre Le Faye took the view that Cassandra decided to destroy many of the letters:

Granted, this may certainly have been the case with many of the destroyed letters. However, it should be pointed out that Cassandra made no effort to destroy those in which Jane referred to her short and painful relationship with Tom Lefroy; or those in which Jane described, in detail, the symptoms of the disease which would finally terminate her life.

So could Cassandra have had another, quite different motive? Was there a more profound reason for her act of destruction; one which had nothing whatsoever to do with Jane’s alleged sensibilities? Was it Cassandra’s view that if these letters were to be made public then the relationship between herself and her sister – hitherto portrayed as loving and idyllic – would be seen in a somewhat different light?

I am grateful to the following for their help:

Chawton House Library, Chawton; Devon Record Office, Exeter; Exeter Local Studies Library; Hampshire Record Office; Jane Austen’s House and Museum Collections; Plymouth Central Library; Sidmouth Parish Church; Westcountry Studies Library, Exeter; Lyme Regis Museum. Also to the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Emmanuel College Cambridge Archives; Society of Genealogists; Victoria & Albert Museum.

And to Tibbie Adams; Ronald Bragg; Max Hebditch; Joan Jordan.

I am especially grateful to Diana Shervington and, as always, to my dear wife Rachel for all her help and encouragement.

The small village of Steventon near Basingstoke in Hampshire would probably have remained largely unknown to the world had it not been for the fact that there, on 16 December 1775, Jane Austen was born. It is also true to say that were it not for her six completed novels, poems, and several other minor works and uncompleted fragments, our knowledge of country life during that period would be that much the poorer.

Jane’s novels, in the main, share a common theme: the necessity for a young lady – the heroine – to find a man of sufficient wealth and income, perhaps
£
10,000 a year, in order that she might marry and live in circumstances to which she is, or would like to become accustomed. Yet it is not quite as simple as that; for the prospective partner will be no good unless he or she possesses certain qualities to be admired.

In the vicinity of Steventon were many stately homes occupied by the landed nobility and gentry, where Jane attended balls and social functions. Her letters reveal just how much she enjoyed this aspect of her life. She describes what she proposes to wear at such occasions and afterwards, describes in equal detail who was there. More interestingly, she gives her opinion as to the qualities of certain individuals and his or her suitability as a prospective partner. The question is, would Jane herself, the author whose fictional characters with their lives and loves are today well known throughout the world, find love in her own life?

Steventon in Hampshire, the birthplace of English novelist Jane Austen, was said by William Austen-Leigh, Jane’s great-nephew and grandson of her eldest brother James, to be ‘the cradle of her genius’.

The hamlet, with its cottages, church, rectory, and manor house, was situated 6 miles from Basingstoke amidst rolling hills, woodland and farmland. A drawing by Jane’s niece Anna Lefroy, daughter of her eldest brother James, depicts Steventon in the late eighteenth century. Here, in a meandering leafy lane, are sturdy-looking cottages with climbing plants ascending their walls and hurdle fencing and wicket gates enclosing their gardens. And who inhabited these cottages? Why, shepherds and farm labourers whose wives and children assisted them in the fields, especially at harvest time.

In the words of Oxford scholar R.W. Chapman:

James E. Austen-Leigh, son of Jane’s brother James, describes how, in the shelter of Steventon’s hedgerows, primroses, anemones and wild hyacinths grew. Whereas in the churchyard were to be found sweet violets, both purple and white, ‘which grew, “in abundance” beneath the church’s south wall’. Here,
also, were to be found ‘large elms … old hawthorns’, and ‘the hollow yew tree’.
2

As for the surrounding area, small thickets or plantations of trees dotted the landscape – Burnt Wood, Popham Woods and Nutley Wood, for example. But generally, this was a landscape of fields devoted to crop-growing and cattle- and sheep-grazing. (In former times there were areas of common land, such as Basingstoke Down and Basingstoke Fields to the east, where the lower classes had been accustomed to graze their animals or collect acorns for their pigs to eat, or timber and turf for firewood. This land had, however, been swallowed up by the Enclosure Acts of 1787 and transferred to private ownership.) At nearby Overton there were silk mills and a brickworks.

Although not located on a main thoroughfare, the hamlet of Steventon was by no means cut off – except perhaps in winter when deep snow lay on the ground. A mile or so to the north was the Basingstoke to Andover road from where it was possible to catch the London coach, two of which ran nightly, from Dean Gate. On this road lay Overton – the post-town – which was where a main branch of the Post Office was situated. Likewise, a mile or so to the south was the Basingstoke to Winchester road, known as Popham Lane, along which coaches also ran.
3

Steventon is recorded as a manor (feudal lordship) in the
Domesday Book
– a comprehensive record of the extent, value and ownership of the land made in 1086 by order of King William I. However, there is no mention of a church there, although churches were recorded at the nearby villages of Ashe and Deane. Nonetheless, evidence that the Saxons may have worshipped there is provided by the limestone fragment of the shaft of a Saxon cross, believed to date from the ninth century, which was discovered in 1877. It had been used in the construction of one of the walls of Steventon Manor House.

The Norman Church of St Nicholas, Steventon, with its crenulated tower and spire, was built in about the year 1200 by the lords of the manor: the de Luvers family; minor alterations were made in the thirteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The stencilled wall paintings which decorate the chancel arch are thought to date from the Victorian era, whereas the small decorated area below the wall light to the right of the chancel arch is from the medieval period.

Here, members of the Austen family served as clergymen from 1754–1873, a period of 119 years. They were curate Thomas Bathurst (1754–65), and rectors Henry Austen (1759–61), George Austen (1761–1805), James Austen (1805–19), Henry Thomas Austen (1820–23) and William Knight (1823–73). This is where Jane and four of her siblings: Henry, Cassandra, Francis and Charles, were baptised and where Jane’s maternal grandmother Jane Leigh is buried.

When the Reverend George Austen arrived in Steventon in the spring of 1764, he found the church roof to be in a poor state of repair; the reason being that the spire, a pyramidal wooden structure atop the church tower, had blown down onto the roof in the winter of 1763–4 in a severe gale.

Steventon’s Tudor manor house, with its ‘circling screen of sycamores’,
4
was situated adjacent to the church at the end of Church Walk. It was built by Sir Richard Pexall to replace the former Norman building which he demolished in 1560. The present occupants were the Digweeds who rented the property from the Knights of Godmersham Park, Kent.

Curiously, there were no cottages in the vicinity of the church and manor house, perhaps because the original hamlet had been destroyed by a pandemic of bubonic plague, known as the Black Death, which occurred in the fourteenth century.