Jane Austen

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79032879

Marilyn Butler, ‘Austen, Jane (1775–1817)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2010 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/904, accessed 1 Sept 2017]

Austen, Jane (1775–1817), novelist, was born on 16 December 1775 at the rectory in Steventon, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, the seventh child and younger daughter of George Austen (1731–1805), rector of Deane and Steventon and private tutor, and his wife, Cassandra (1739–1827), youngest daughter of the Revd Thomas Leigh (1696–1764) and Jane Walker (d. 1768). George Austen was the only son of William Austen (1701–1737), a surgeon of Tonbridge, Kent, and Rebecca, daughter of the Gloucester physician Sir George Hampson, bt, who died in 1733. When William Austen died less than five years later, the responsibility for George and his sisters Philadelphia (1730–1792) and Leonora (1732–1783) was shouldered by their uncle Francis Austen (1698–1791). George was educated at Tonbridge School at his uncle's expense, and thereafter by a scholarship at St John's College, Oxford. He was ordained deacon at Oxford in March 1754 and priest at Rochester, Kent, in May 1755. Returning to Kent renewed George's contacts with his uncle Francis, who by the early 1750s had become an influential figure in county affairs. He easily arranged for George to serve as a curate at Shipbourne, near Tonbridge, and as an assistant master at his old school. In 1761 another family benefactor, Thomas Knight of Godmersham, Kent, presented George to the living of Steventon, Hampshire. Francis Austen purchased two livings adjacent to Steventon, Deane and Ashe, so that George could take on the first to fall vacant (this would be Deane in 1773). Absent for the first few years, George's move to Steventon in 1764 was prompted by his marriage to Cassandra Leigh, whom he probably met at Oxford. Cassandra came from a large family of prosperous clerics and successful Oxford scholars. Her father, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, was rector of Harpsden, Oxfordshire, and her mother was connected to the wealthy and old-established Oxfordshire family of Perrot. From their great-aunt Anne Perrot, Cassandra and her sister Jane (1736–1783) each inherited £200, while a moderate fortune went at sixteen to their brother James (1735–1817), who now added ‘Perrot’ to his name. Her younger brother Thomas (1747–1821) was born with a mental disability, and was cared for outside the family circle.

George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church, Bath, and moved first into the rectory at Deane, which was vacant; Steventon's was dilapidated. They had six sons: James (1765–1819), who became a curate and was rector of Steventon from his father's death; George (1766–1838), who was epileptic, and at six was sent to join Cassandra's brother Thomas; Edward (1767–1852), who in 1783 became heir to the property of his second cousin Thomas Knight, took his name, and was the steady benefactor of his mother, brothers, and sisters; Henry Thomas (1771–1850), militia officer, banker, entrepreneur, and finally clergyman; Francis William (Frank) Austen (1774–1865); and Charles John (1779–1852), who both entered the navy and rose to be admirals. Their elder daughter, Cassandra Elizabeth (1773–1845), died unmarried as did Jane.

George Austen and his wife each inherited about £1000 during their early married years. With a growing family they moved in 1768 to the Steventon rectory, but found that they were living beyond their means. Immediate help came from a legacy left by Cassandra's mother, which her brother, James Leigh-Perrot, a trustee, released for the couple to invest. In 1773 George decided to take boys ‘of good family’ as boarders, preparing them for university, where they would meet a largely classical syllabus. Meanwhile his wife kept a bull and cows and grew vegetables in order to feed their large household. Cheerful and optimistic like her husband, Cassandra lacked formal education but had a homespun wit, and for thirty years managed her domestic world competently and energetically.

Childhood and education

Jane Austen was born a month later than her parents expected; like the other Austen children, she was baptized at Steventon rectory on the day of her birth by George Austen. The formal ceremony took place on 5 April 1776 at St Nicholas's Church, which stood on the rising ground behind the rectory. The Austens' resident children divided into two groups. The three eldest boys (not counting George) commanded respect from the younger ones and were being prepared, like their father and maternal grandfather, for Oxford University. The boys qualified, on Cassandra's side, as ‘founder's kin’ at St John's College, which entitled them against competition to free tuition. Edward did not go. He was adopted instead by Thomas Knight and his wife, Catherine, and sent for four years on the grand tour of Europe to qualify him for the life of a landed gentleman in the Austens' native Kent. The younger group, two girls and two boys, formed a companionable and less competitive little community under the effective leadership of the practical, self-confident Cassandra, who from an early age could hold her own in adult company. Both parents and the trio of older boys seem to have been kind to the little ones, who were all healthy and active.

The standard picture of Jane Austen's happy childhood in a pastoral idyll derives from her nephew (James) Edward Austen-Leigh (1798–1874), who with the help of his half-sister Anna Austen (later Lefroy; 1793–1872) and sister Caroline Austen (1805–1880) wrote the first extended memoir of the author (1870). Edward evoked the big, rather shabby, three-storey house, the kitchen gardens, the farmyard, and a grassy bank down which children could roll. In the evenings the parents joined their children in board games, card games, puzzles, and charades. From time to time they entertained neighbours—and when the boarders were absent, house guests—to dinner. Both adults and children enjoyed dancing afterwards. When on their own they read aloud, often novels, to the circle before bedtime. (Nothing is said in the Memoir of Jane's performances of her juvenilia.) Mrs Austen and the two girls sewed dresses for themselves, shirts for the brothers. From 1782 to 1789 there were theatricals, almost without exception comedies then in the stage repertory, invariably produced by James.

The Memoir reveals that the family could be obtuse about the two sisters, though more perspicacious in the case of the brothers. Mrs Austen almost always spoke of ‘the girls’ as a pair or, if forced to single out Jane, mentioned her attachment to her sister. Anna Lefroy remembered her grandmother saying that ‘if Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate’ (Austen-Leigh, Memoir, chap. 1). George and Cassandra Austen valued family cohesion, which led them to indulge the very young Jane in her reluctance to be parted from her sister. As Cassandra grew up, this was sometimes difficult for Jane herself. Chronically shy in early adolescence, she compensated by remaining silent, or by showing off, speaking affectedly, and conspicuously flirting. Observers commented on her unpredictability in public, to which Jane lightly confessed in the earliest of her letters to Cassandra that survive. The family barely referred to her awkwardness in society. On the contrary, one former member recalled that while Cassandra ‘had the merit of having her temper always under command’, Jane had ‘the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded’ (ibid.). Cassandra, who knew her best, received letters in which Jane sounded dissatisfied with her lot, impatient, angry, or unhappy: ‘Theo ... came back in time to shew his usual, nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless Civility’ (Letters, 179); ‘the Lances ... live in a handsome style and are rich, and she [Mrs Lance] seemed to like to be rich ... she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance’ (ibid., 117).

Serious, judicious, and familial, Jane's nephew Edward saw his aunt and her talent for writing as part of a rounded family achievement. Their scholarly father educated his daughters as well as his sons, and the older brothers discussed books with the younger children. Edward commented that ‘she certainly enjoyed that important element of mental training, associating at home with persons of cultivated intellect’ (Austen-Leigh, Memoir, chap. 3). Even so, in spring 1783, at the very age when Jane could read for herself, her parents dispatched their daughters and their cousin Jane Cooper to Oxford to be tutored, with apparently little aptitude, by Mrs Ann Cawley, the widow of a former principal of Brasenose College and a sister of the Revd Dr Edward Cooper (Mrs Austen's kinsman by marriage). Jane did not get on well with Mrs Cawley. In the girls' second term (summer to autumn 1783), without informing their parents, she moved her pupils to Southampton, presumably to economize. The sea port was in the grip of an epidemic, probably typhoid, which all three girls caught. After Jane Cooper managed to get a message home, the two mothers came to fetch their daughters away. The girls recovered, but Mrs Cooper caught the disease and died on 25 October 1783.

Despite this miserable experience, after they had spent a further year at home George Austen decided that his daughters should attend the Abbey House School, Reading, from spring 1785 to December 1786. It was a boarding-school patronized by wealthy merchants and tradesmen, and in the mornings offered instruction in English (including spelling but not punctuation), French, some Italian, history, and needlework. There were dancing classes, and some special end-of-half-year events such as theatricals and recitations, which the headmistress organized jointly with the adjoining boys' school, Valpy's. But other Abbey House girls afterwards best remembered the school for its long leisurely afternoons, allowing visits to the nearby lending library, which catered adeptly for the tastes and imaginations of girls and young women by way of romance, adventure, and much male greed and villainy.

Early writing, 1787–1793

In his Memoir of Jane Austen, Edward Austen-Leigh planted the tradition, subscribed to by most twentieth-century critics and biographers, that Austen the novelist was substantially created at home. Thanks to tuition by her father and brothers Jane was exposed as a child to the essayists Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson and to the novelists Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney. It is probably true that the clarity, sharpness, and wit of the prose of Austen's juvenilia indicate attentive reading in the century's stylists, a good ear for the balance of a sentence, and sound regard for verbal economy. Her seniors did right by her on these counts, but they cannot have done everything. Austen's immersion in contemporary popular fiction began at school and was equally fundamental. At the Abbey House School she amused herself as her socially mixed classmates did in following the adventures and trials of modern woman, as these were purveyed most readily and cheaply in a handful of specialist magazines, such as George Robinson's monthly miscellany, the Lady's Magazine (established 1770). In his first issue Robinson boasted that he catered for the widest possible range of taste, status, and income, from a duchess to a newly literate housemaid. In each issue from a quarter to a third of the space was likely to be occupied by fiction, much of it sent in by readers, who might set their narratives in stylized exotic worlds or in common domestic life among the middling sort. But the standard plotline for most longer fiction, whether published in multi-volume book form or serialized in a magazine, was the courtship of lovers of unequal rank and means, involving the woman particularly in picaresque adventures and trials, with a happy ending always in jeopardy from the economic and social differences between the protagonists. Austen's first three novels conform to these archetypal features of the fiction of the 1780s and 1790s.

At the age of eleven, however, Jane Austen was not concerned with novels but with reinstating herself among the people and activities of the crowded rectory at Steventon. In December 1786 Jane and Cassandra left school for good, to find a household populated with exotic visitors. Their father's sister Philadelphia Hancock had brought to Steventon her 25-year-old daughter Eliza (1761–1813) who, by her marriage in 1781, had become Comtesse Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza's experiences in Paris and Versailles, where she had attended court, had given her style, polish, and the French language, almost irresistible attractions for her young Steventon cousins; she had also performed amateur dramatics at the family home near Nérac in south-west France. With a trust set up for her as a child by Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal and a friend of her parents, Eliza was able to lead an independent life in Paris, London, and the English resort towns of Bath and Tunbridge Wells. But, family-minded like other Austens, Eliza also became over the next decade a frequent visitor to Steventon and a powerful influence on her cousins, the girls as well as the boys.

Jane Austen, her sister, and even her brother Henry ‘came out’ socially while under the wing of their exotic cousin Eliza. Her hospitality in the West End houses she rented, her tireless mobility, and her appetite for flirtation were never more in evidence than in the year in which she made plans for an ambitious theatrical programme at Steventon the following Christmas, 1787. Eliza was already well briefed in the playwright Hannah Cowley's recent London stage successes, beginning with The Belle's Stratagem (1780), which had two vigorous and intelligent female roles, and an undoubtedly feminist message. It was, however, Lady Bell Bloomer, the intelligent and kindly heroine of Cowley's Which is the Man? (1783), that Eliza had studied, by sponsoring a performance of the play at Tunbridge Wells Theatre in September 1787, and that she meant to act at Steventon. Unfortunately Eliza's plans included an acting part for a Kent cousin of about her own age, Philadelphia (Phila) Walter, who positively refused to act. She was taken at Steventon to have an objection to the particular play, or to acting on principle. Eliza with her customary amiability gave up her choice of play, and a safe old favourite, Susanna Centlivre's The Wonder: a Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), was chosen instead, with James producing, Henry the leading man, and Eliza the leading woman. By comparison with the jealous resentments of the Bertram family in Mansfield Park, the Steventon theatricals of 1787 appear to have passed off decorously, except that Cassandra and Jane were on hand to observe Eliza flirting finely with both James and Henry during the rehearsals and performances of a mildly saucy play.

The following year was busy theatrically, but it was also the last season, because all the brothers but Charles had left home. After Eliza returned to London, Henry Fielding's burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731) was performed in March 1788. James Townley's rumbustious High Life below Stairs (1759) and Isaac Bickerstaff's farce The Sultan (1775), a likely future source for Pride and Prejudice, followed at the end of the year. The first of the three projects parodies the exaggerated conventions and rhetoric of John Dryden's heroic dramas, and, in a new contemporary version, ends with a battle scene in which the entire cast dies, orating as they fall. The other two have popular settings and situations: servants take on the roles of their masters; or an Englishwoman, finding herself a captive in a harem, cheekily teaches the sultan how to become agreeable to his subjects. Traces of the knockabout humour, caricature, and mockery calculated to please adolescent schoolboy boarders are evident in the plays put on in 1788 largely for their amusement, but Cassandra and Jane also took part.

From early 1787 to June 1793 Jane wrote a large number of sketches, burlesque playlets (which may have been acted by others or by herself), epistolary novellas, and short picaresque adventures. Usually they were dedicated to a member of the household. Those she wished to keep she copied into three blank copy-books given to her by her father, which she named ‘Volume the First’, ‘Volume the Second’, and ‘Volume the Third’. The twenty-seven pieces in these copy-books resemble exercises in many kinds of literary form, and they had a function, since they were read out to or more likely performed for the family audience by the author, who was, according to her brother Henry, a confident speaker and a natural comic. Unfortunately there is no direct description of her performances, and since none is dedicated to boarders it seems likely that they were excluded. All the same, boarders were taken in at Steventon until 1796, and the presence in the house of adolescent boys, as well as her youngest brother, Charles, is worth considering as an almost certain influence on her early writing.

The juvenilia are full of self-confident and errant young women: Laura, Elfrida, Alice, the ‘Beautifull Cassandra’ (a milliner's daughter), and Charlotte Lutterell at Lesley Castle. There is something of Austen herself in all the heroines of her mature novels, and, surely, also in the bold, energized adventuresses of the juvenilia. It may be her physical appearance that is conveyed, or her coolness and cynicism. Rebelliousness and an anti-social impatience are qualities she confesses to in her correspondence with Cassandra, and seems to identify with in Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. This intolerance of mediocrity is also the offence committed by Emma Woodhouse, ‘the heroine whom no one but myself will much like’ (Austen-Leigh, Memoir, chap. 10). These brief hints are recognizable by readers as self-portraiture and are enjoyed for this reason. An obvious case is Alice Johnson of ‘Jack and Alice’, a heroine maddeningly badgered by Lady Williams because she has unfashionably full red cheeks, like Austen's own. A red face is also a sign of inebriety, and sure enough not just Alice but the entire Johnson family is soon alleged to be addicted to the bottle. Jane in real life probably endured jokes along these lines, and may even have found herself typecast in the production of Fielding's Tom Thumb, by being allotted the part of King Arthur's consort, Queen Dollallolla, a woman ‘entirely faultless, saving that she is a little given to drink’ and in love with Tom Thumb.

Jane Austen was always an exact writer. She alludes to specifics, from real-life people and events or from books in use in the household. Her early twentieth-century editor R. W. Chapman observed that she was ‘exceptionally and even surprisingly dependent’ on reality and ‘family and biographical truth’ as the ‘basis of imaginary construction’ (TLS, 10 Dec 1931). She was locked into family experience, as an observer of the relationships between siblings and a critic of richer members of the larger Austen and Leigh family. Her inner family circle, the three or four always on hand as an audience, could recognize, enjoy, or even correct these shared memories.

No doubt her parents and her elder brothers—brought up to value quick wit and puns, and to ridicule blunders—helped to lend Austen's writing its sharpness. The brothers and their contemporaries, the boarders, may also have encouraged the interest in caricature that both Cassandra and Jane displayed in adolescence. Cassandra exercised an uncertain taste in graphic satire in her illustrations for Jane's ‘History of England’ (November 1791), and was perhaps joking in Jane's manner when in 1804 she sketched Jane from behind, her face hidden by a large bonnet.

Later Jane took pleasure in the role of aunt, and resumed her adolescent practice of inventing stories, games, and puzzles, now to entertain nephews and nieces. One explanation for the surreal, violent, insubordinate world of her juvenilia could be that it originated with oral tales she made up perhaps while still at school to tell other children. Here and there her adventurous plots echo oriental fantasy, Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and Horace Walpole's Hieroglyphic Tales (1785). Other current items are satirical, in the vein of burlesque and ridicule that Jane picked up from Henry Fielding and more contemporary wits, among them Fanny Burney. Members of the household, including the boarders, would be as familiar as she was with the books in her father's circumscribed library. Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1771) and especially Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) offered a fine opportunity for parody, a form that required a knowing audience, or simply challenged young readers to identify a source. Throughout her writing career Austen teased and puzzled her readers by mimicking other novelists, recycling and neatly improving on her materials, amusing readers who could still spot the original—devices learned at home to activate her readers of school age and make them her allies.

Austen's three volumes of juvenilia constitute a miscellany of the conventions and clichés of late eighteenth-century fiction, drama, and stage farce: they contain characters, incidents, and scenes out of a largely picaresque tradition, straight or comic; stereotypical fools or villains from different ends of the social scale; haughty or cruel aristocrats and parents, conceited young males, pleasure-seeking women. Only in ‘Catharine, or, The Bower’ (dedication dated August 1792, ‘Volume the Third’) does Austen at this stage employ the central convention of the novel, a sympathetic protagonist. More typically it is the scenic aspect and broad brush of eighteenth-century novels, their vivid social panorama, that is evoked by Austen's crowd of minor characters, and their familiar venues: the visit, the day excursion, the journey, the spa, the ball, along with a short list of dramatic incidents, such as an accident to a carriage or a boat, a robbery, or a murder. Jane Austen's tastes were at this time as tomboyish as the vigorous practices she attributes in Northanger Abbey to Catherine Morland—of rolling down the grassy bank behind the house, and playing cricket with the boys.

Adolescence

In summer 1788 the Steventon Austens decided that it would be a timely gesture to visit George's uncle and boyhood patron ‘Old Francis’ Austen. Cassandra at fifteen and a half could be described as of an age to ‘come out’. And if she went, then Jane, though only twelve and a half, must also go. On 21 July Francis gave a grand dinner at the Red House, his handsome Georgian home in Sevenoaks, Kent, for them to meet their second cousins and contemporaries from the senior and wealthiest branch of Kent Austens, later known as the Austens of Kippington. The occasion must have been gruelling for Jane, if, as seems likely, it is recalled by the dinner party at the Grants' rectory in Mansfield Park. Here Fanny Price, who suffers from agonizing shyness, is put through a series of ‘coming-out’ occasions, though, like her creator at twelve, she dreads conversing with strangers. As more and more strangers appear Fanny tells herself that numbers help, ‘since every addition to the party must rather forward her favourite indulgence of being suffered to sit silent and unattended to’ (vol. 2, chap. 5).

Yet Jane at the Red House was not silent enough, according to her cousin the censorious Phila Walter. But Phila already knew something to the discredit of Jane's brother Henry (the vigorous flirtation he had conducted with Eliza for a year and a half), and seemed determined to dislike the Austen sisters. She compared Cassandra to herself:

As it's pure Nature to love ourselves I may be allowed to give the preference to the Eldest who is generally reckoned a most striking resemblance of me in features, complexion & manners. I never found myself so disposed to be vain, as I can't help thinking her very pretty.

Jane, however, was barely tolerable. Phila's assessment is the first full description of her behaviour in company: ‘The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty & very prim, unlike a girl of twelve’ (Austen Papers, 131). Phila completed her résumé of the family by noting: ‘My aunt has lost several fore-teeth which makes her look old; my uncle is quite white-haired, but looks vastly well: all in high spirits & disposed to be pleased with each other’. On the following day Phila entertained the Steventon Austens at her home, Seal, and revoked her criticism of the younger Cassandra. ‘She keeps up conversation in a very sensible & pleasing manner.’ Otherwise her first impressions stuck: ‘Jane is whimsical & affected’ (ibid.).

From 1791 to the summer of 1793, when Jane Austen wrote the last of her juvenilia, the Steventon Austens experienced a season of marriages in the family, which was also darkened by several deaths. In December 1791 Jane's brother Edward married Elizabeth Bridges, from a wealthy Kent family, and in March 1792 James married Anne Mathew, daughter of a general and granddaughter of a duke. About this time the most significant union of all for the Austen sisters occurred, Cassandra's engagement to one of George Austen's pupils, Tom Fowle, who, as verses by Mrs Austen show, was and continued to be a family favourite. Old Francis Austen died on 21 June 1791. Sympathetic and watchful of deserving young relatives in the past, Francis had in his last arrangements followed the established practice of concentrating the family capital on his eldest son and male heirs. As a partial exception George Austen received £500. In an exchange of letters later that summer between Mrs Cassandra Austen and her sister-in-law Philadelphia Hancock, with Eliza participating, the bitterness of Francis's overlooked nieces and great-nieces was vigorously expressed. They saw his policy as poor recompense for the attention and care the old man had received from his female relatives, and his largess redundant in relation to Francis Motley Austen, who was, Eliza wrote, ‘immensely rich before’ (1 Aug 1791, Austen Papers, 143).

With scant further prospects of a legacy from Kent, Jane's parents seriously turned their attention in the 1790s to the nearest of the Oxfordshire Leigh connections, Mrs Austen's childless brother, James Leigh-Perrot, and his wife, Jane, née Cholmeley, heiress of a Lincolnshire family of Atlantic traders long resident and prominent in Barbados. In 1793 their parents pressed Jane and Cassandra in vain to visit the couple in Bath. In the privacy of letters to Cassandra in the 1790s and 1800s, Jane often showed reluctance to visit unfamiliar cousins, such as her mother's connections the literary Cookes of Great Bookham. Fanny Burney, then Austen's favourite contemporary author, was living there in a picturesque area close to Boxhill. It had become a refuge for French aristocrats fleeing the revolution. Germaine de Staël, her lover Narbonne, and General D'Arblay, who married Burney in July 1793, visited Bookham at this time. Jane still felt shy at parties full of strangers and, now that she paid visits every second year at least to her brother Edward in Kent, she was made keenly aware of the social gap between ‘East Kent wealth’ and economies at the Steventon rectory. ‘Kent is the only place for happiness. Everybody is rich there’, she wrote sourly to Cassandra (Letters, 28), and, when her parents moved to a yet more unfashionable early dinner hour, ‘half after Three ... I am afraid you will despise us’ (ibid., 27).

By 1795 Cassandra's long-standing engagement to Tom Fowle had become increasingly frustrating. Although his kinsman Lord Craven, commander-in-chief of the British expeditionary force to the West Indies, had offered him a living at Allington, near Amesbury, Wiltshire, the income could not support a wife and family. In January 1796 Tom accompanied Craven to the West Indies where he had a wealthy uncle who died that summer. Tom himself died of yellow fever on his return journey in February 1797 and was buried at sea off Santo Domingo. He left Cassandra his savings of £1000. Up to that time, especially in the correspondence of Eliza de Feuillide, the Austen sisters—particularly the poised, good-looking Cassandra—were thought marriageable with or without a dowry. In her letters to Cassandra, Jane joked about flirtations, and about young men with dark eyes who were, she claimed, in love with Cassandra, or more rarely with herself. One such suitor was Tom Lefroy (1776–1869), the Irish nephew of (Isaac Peter) George Lefroy, rector of Ashe. The rector's wife, Anne, usually known as Madam Lefroy, was a cultivated woman with some scientific as well as literary interests. She was both a stimulating teacher who widened Jane's taste in poetry, and a sympathetic listener to whom Jane went for advice. Between 1795 and 1796 Jane flirted with Tom Lefroy, and enjoyed reporting her progress to Cassandra in the earliest of her lively intimate letters to her sister that survive: ‘Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together’, she wrote on 9–10 January 1796 (Letters, 1). But if Jane hoped for her friend's blessing on the rapidly developing romance, she was quickly disabused: Madam Lefroy was sufficiently alarmed to send Tom precipitately back to London. Jane was also flirting with Tom Fowle's younger brother Charles, another former boarder, shortly before Tom left for the West Indies. Most of this was unserious. The loss of Tom Fowle was not. Cassandra did not contemplate another attachment, and her decision came in due course to stand for Jane as well.

Early novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey

Having copied and put away her miscellany of juvenilia in June 1793, Jane Austen began work on ‘Elinor and Marianne’, a very early version of Sense and Sensibility, said to have been first written in an epistolary form, and read out to the family about 1795. It was possibly at this time that Austen also began her novella, Lady Susan, although the fair copy of the manuscript (now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) is untitled and was written on paper of which two leaves are watermarked 1805. A spirited depiction of a woman seeking self-advancement, Lady Susan was first published as an addition to the second edition (1871) of Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir. In August 1796 Jane visited her brother Edward and his wife, Elizabeth, at their first home, a large farmhouse at Rowling in Kent. It was while there, or immediately after returning home that October, that she began Pride and Prejudice under the title ‘First Impressions’, perhaps as an instinctive reaction against Kent hauteur. The author was the same age as her heroine Elizabeth Bennet at the start of composition (‘not one and twenty’). This, the first of her novels to be completed, was finished in August 1797, and offered by her father to the publisher Thomas Cadell on 1 November 1797 as a novel in three volumes ‘about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina’ (Austen-Leigh, Memoir, chap. 8). The publisher declined without asking to see the manuscript. ‘First Impressions’ remained a family favourite, a fact confirmed by regular rereadings by Cassandra and Jane's close friend Martha Lloyd (Letters, 35, 44). The title had to be changed, however, after the publication of Margaret Holford's novel First Impressions, or, The Portrait in 1801. Austen replaced it with Pride and Prejudice, taking a phrase from Burney's Cecili