St Nicholas’s Church (Church of England) in Steventon, one of the churches of which Jane Austen’s father George was Rector. As it was a rural community and the stipend was not large, George, who had been on the staff of Tonbridge School, boarded private tutees at the Rectory, taking three or four at a time, and farmed some 200 acres as well.
Part 1 of 2
GEORGE Austen, a rural clergyman in Steventon, Hampshire, was blessed with a family of six sons and two daughters.
His next-to-youngest child was Jane, whom he encouraged to write tales for the family’s entertainment. A busy round of relatives and parishioners provided plenty of material for her acute observation.
As a country Rector, George was a Gentleman but not wealthy. His wife’s relatives, the Leighs, were aristocracy, however, and two of Jane’s brothers rose to the rank of Admiral in the Navy; another, Henry, went into banking.
Jane welcomed such social mobility in Georgian England, and in her novels she criticised snobbish resistance to it.
Yet she was wary of it too. Her heroes and heroines embrace the change, but only by remaining people of old-fashioned good character, nurtured by close-knit families and traditional Christian morals.
This idyllic life in Steventon was interrupted by George’s retirement to Bath in 1800, but worse was to follow when, in 1805, Jane’s much-loved father died unexpectedly.
Précis
Jane Austen learnt her trade as a novelist writing for the amusement of her busy extended family, exploring the rapid social changes of Georgian England (a feature of her own life too) with both enthusiasm and caution. However, the death in 1805 of her father, a Hampshire clergyman, turned her settled life upside down. (53 / 60 words)
Part Two
Chawton House in Hampshire belonged the Knight family, who were distant cousins of the Austens and who adopted Jane’s brother Edward. It was Edward who made a house on the estate available to his mother and two sisters after the unexpected death of their father in 1805. There is a picture of it here (the brick house on the left).
JANE’S father and brothers had already tried and failed to get her work published. With Mrs Austen now a widow, the family renewed their efforts, and in 1811 success came with ‘Sense and Sensibility’.
It was quickly followed by the enduringly popular ‘Pride and Prejudice’, and Jane won a loyal fan-base that included the Prince Regent.
Jane herself never married. Her life revolved around her music – she was a keen pianist – and managing her house in the Hampshire village of Chawton, which she shared with her mother, her sister Cassandra, and Martha Lloyd, a widow and family friend.
And of course there was her writing.
By 1816, Jane’s brothers in the Navy and her stay in Bath had supplied her with sufficient material to embark on her sixth published novel, ‘Persuasion’.
But it was to be her last. Her health began to deteriorate, and a specialist in Winchester was unable to help her. Jane died there on 18th July, 1817, aged forty-one.
Précis
To support herself, her sister and their widowed mother, Jane turned to her writing as a source of income. From 1811, a series of six novels was published including the evergreen ‘Pride and Prejudice’. However, in 1816 Jane’s health began to fail, and the following year she died at the home of a Winchester specialist, aged 41. (54 / 60 words)
