first Commissioners of the Thames, deeply involved in a campaign to make the river more navigable. George Nibbs’s father owned a plantation in the West Indies: we will meet him in a later chapter. Richard Buller, who stayed for five years, became a clergyman in Devon before dying at a sadly young age. His closeness to the Austens is apparent from a letter written by Jane to Cassandra in 1800, in which she gives the news that he has recently married: ‘I have had a most affectionate letter from Buller; I was afraid he would oppress me by his felicity and his love for his Wife, but this is not the case; he calls her simply Anna without any angelic embellishments, for which I respect and wish him happy – and throughout the whole of his letter indeed he seems more engrossed by his feelings towards our family, than towards her.’19 The following year, they visited him in his Tudor vicarage in the little stone-built town of Colyton on the Devon coast.
Rear view of Steventon rectory: Jane Austen’s childhood home
Cassandra made an especially strong impression on another of her father’s boarders, Tom Fowle. They became engaged and were due to be married before he died of yellow fever in the West Indies. This loss was a decisive factor in the development of Jane Austen’s own life. George Austen clearly had no compunction about bringing up his daughters alongside a variety of unfamiliar young men, though no record survives of any romantic interest on Jane’s part. The uproariously funny tales that she wrote as a young girl, full of violence, drunkenness, madness and suicide, suggest that she played more of a tomboyish role at Steventon than that of a young ingénue looking for love. She was more of a Catherine Morland – playing baseball,20 rolling down the green slope at the back of the house, preferring cricket to dolls – than a boy-mad Isabella Thorpe chasing unsuspecting young men along the streets of Bath. There was indeed a green slope at the back of Steventon rectory, perfect for rolling.
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Perhaps in part due to the need to house an ever-increasing number of boarders, George and Cassandra Austen decided to send their daughters away to school. At the age of seven, Jane Austen, together with her ten-year-old sister, was taken to Oxford by their cousin Jane Cooper. They were to be taught by a Mrs Cawley, a Cooper relation. Seven seems to us an early age for a young girl to be living away from her family, especially from such a warm, loving home, full of life and animation. It must have been a wrench to leave the safety and security of the family home for school in Oxford, though elder brother James Austen was studying there and showed the girls the sights of the city. The arrangement was similar to that in Steventon: it was a case of a family taking in pupils, not a formal school environment. Presumably George Austen had made the financial calculation that the income gained from sending his girls away and creating more space for boy boarders in the rectory would exceed the outlay required to keep them in Oxford.
According to family lore, Jane insisted on accompanying her sister to Oxford. Mrs Austen claimed that if ‘Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate’.21 Hampshire to Oxford is about fifty miles, which the two young girls would have travelled in a stage-coach.
In September, Mrs Cawley moved her ‘school’ to Southampton, only for it to be struck by a typhus outbreak. The three girls fell ill, but Mrs Cawley failed to alert the family. It was Jane Cooper who wrote to her mother and told her the news. Mrs Austen and Mrs Cooper came immediately to take the girls home. Jane Austen was very ill and nearly died. They all made a full recovery, but Mrs Cooper caught the fever and died in October. One can only imagine the shock and distress of the family. Dr Cooper was heartbroken and devoted the rest of his years to bringing up his children Jane and Edward. To commemorate his beloved wife he sent Cassandra a ‘ring representing a sprig of diamonds, with one emerald’ and Jane was given a headband, which she wore to balls.22
The Southampton experience did not deter the Reverend and Mrs Austen from the idea of boarding school. Within a year, Jane and Cassandra, together with their now motherless cousin Jane Cooper, found themselves at a more formal establishment, this time in Reading, a prosperous trading town just over twenty miles from Steventon, on the main coaching routes from London to Oxford and the west country.
It was called the Abbey School and was run by Sarah Hackitt, who went by the name of Madame Latournelle, no doubt because female French teachers were the height of fashion. The school adjoined the remains of the ancient Abbey of Reading: ‘the greater part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful old-fashioned garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees in hot summer evenings’.23 The school was connected to an antique gateway, which looked out on the green and a marketplace beyond. Inside, new girls were received by the headmistress in a wainscoted parlour in which chenille tapestries depicting tombs and weeping willows were hung round the walls.
According to a family member, the school was a ‘free and easy one … In Cassandra and Jane’s days the girls do not seem to have been kept very strictly, as they and their cousin, Jane Cooper, were allowed to accept an invitation to dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper.’24 As the family descendants noted, it all sounds rather like Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma, which ‘had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter [she] dressed their chilblains with her own hands’.25 Madame Latournelle always dressed in the same way and had a cork leg. She encouraged the arts, dancing and theatre in particular. It seems to have been a happy place, full of girlish glee. ‘I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school,’ Jane Austen remarked in one of her letters to Cassandra.26
After twenty months spent in the Abbey School she returned home for good in December 1786, just approaching her eleventh birthday. Her formal education was over. But the home to which she returned was one from which her brother Edward was now permanently absent.
As has been suggested, the transference of children from one home to another by formal adoption, as with Edward Austen Knight, or by a more informal arrangement, as with the fictional Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, was by no means uncommon. If the Knights, like Lord Mansfield and the Chutes, had wanted a girl rather than a boy, then Jane Austen would have been separated from her beloved Cassandra.
Jane Austen reworked the theme of adopted children several times in her novels and uses it to suggest her ideas about nature and nurture, good parents and bad parents, the importance of childhood in relation to the adult. ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,’ as the old Jesuit saying had it.
Jane Austen was close to her father, who supported her ambition to become a published writer. Her feelings towards her mother were far more complicated. There are few examples of effective parenting in the novels. This is partly a plot device: the heroine must make her own choices, judgements and mistakes before reaching maturity and finding an equal mate worthy of her. The exception to this rule of the flawed heroine is Jane Austen’s most disliked (or least well-understood) heroine, Fanny Price. The fictional Fanny is almost the same age that the real Edward Knight was when he was first taken from his home. Mansfield Park is perhaps the first novel in history to depict the life of a little girl from within.27
Jane Austen enters intuitively into the feelings and consciousness of the child as she is uprooted from her family and transferred to Mansfield Park. Fanny’s fear and anxiety, exacerbated by the vicious bullying of Mrs Norris, are brilliantly executed. Told that she must be a good grateful girl and given the
