Our January ’25 meeting featured a talk by Maureen Stiller, Honorary Secretary of the Jane Austen Society on Jane Austen: the woman and the writer.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) is often thought of as an isolated spinster who nevertheless wrote 6 major novels featuring 23 marriages. She lived for 41 years through the Industrial Revolution, American Revolution, Napoleonic Wars and the first years of the reign of George 111. She was one of eight siblings, mostly boys.
She grew up in the household of Rev. George Austen in the parish of Steventon, Hampshire, with access to his substantial library of 500 books. Jane and her sister Cassandra were sent away to school in Oxford, possibly to make room in the house for the Rector’s pupils. Later they were sent to the Reading Abbey Girl’s school . Jane was back home aged 11 when she began writing stories.
There are only two portraits of Jane – one a back view by Cassandra and another facial portrait by Cassandra which is in the NP Gallery in London. Her image appears on the reverse of the £10 note with a cheerful, benevolent expression.
She was described as a pretty thing, silly, much affected, and a husband hunting butterfly by author Mary Russell Mitford.. She was not refined but rather common, making humorous and caustic, sometimes cruel observations about other people. Her frank descriptions were not always complimentary. Her humour is evident in letters to her sister Cassandra.
Significant people in her life were her father, her brother James, sister Cassandra and her brothers in the navy. Many of Jane’s letters were destroyed by Cassandra. About 160 survived. She had important friendships with Eliza ( the model for Crawford in Mansfield Park) and Anne Lefroy who encouraged her in her writing. She never married but had a couple of romantic attachments – with Tom Lefroy, a law student in London, when she was 20 years old but this did not work out as she was penniless and not considered a “suitable’ marriage partner by his family. Later in 1802, aged 27 she received a proposal of marriage and accepted but then changed her mind the following day. His name was Harris Bigg-Wither from a family with estates who could have given her financial security. Another love interest she met in the West Country died.
She travelled to London, Kent, Bath and Surrey visiting family and friends and lived in Chawton, Hampshire, Bath, Southampton and Worthing. She played the piano, embroidered, enjoyed games and dancing at balls. She read widely (Dr. Johnson, Fanny Burney, W. Cowper) and liked Gothic novels such as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. When she was only 19 she wrote Lady Susan which was published on 1871. long after her death. In 1811 Sense and Sensibility was published and after rejection of First Impressions in 1796 it was later published as Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Northanger Abbey, published posthumously in 1818 was a spoof on the gothic novel.
She has been criticized for her lack of depiction of world affairs but she perhaps felt this unnecessary as the military was stationed in Brighton and her readers knew about such matters. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral but there is no mention of her being an author. Her brother Henry wrote a passionate tribute to his sister and Walter Scott was generous in praise of her keen observation of ordinary lives. Her nephew wrote a A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1871.
Pride and Prejudice is perhaps even more popular with modern audiences since Andrew Davies’s TV series version starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle and a number of TV adaptions of her novels.
Our thanks to Maureen Stiller for an interesting portrait, illuminated with slides of Jane Austen’s short life.
Lois Coulthart