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Jane Austen Society of Australia

Jane Austen in Perspective

After Steventon

The entrance to Steventon Church

Jane Austen lived all of her early life at the Steventon rectory until her parents made the decision to remove to Bath when her father retired in 1800. The reason for the decision is not clear, although Mrs Austen’s closest relative, her childless elder brother James Leigh-Perrot lived there with his wife Jane.¹¹ The Austen parents did not discuss the move with their daughters, and it came as a painful shock to Jane Austen, who, according to one account, fainted on hearing the news; certainly she was extremely distressed.¹² The move meant that she would lose the only home she had known, and all the dear, familiar objects and scenes which had provided the secure foundation of her life to date. It also meant the breaking up of her father’s library, source of so much of her own pleasure and inspiration. Her oldest brother James took over the living, and moved into the rectory with his second wife, Mary – no favourite of Jane Austen’s and not known for her sensitivity to others’ feelings. The Austen parents with Jane and Cassandra removed to Bath in summer 1801 and lived first at 4 Sydney Place, then from October 1804, at 3 Green Park Buildings East. Her father died in January 1805 and the three women moved soon after to 25 Gay St, still in Bath. At this time, the mother of Jane Austen’s friend Martha Lloyd died, and Martha, also unmarried (and the older sister of James’ wife Mary), came to live with the Austens as part of their family circle.¹³

More moves followed: – firstly to lodgings in Trim St, Bath, then, in October of 1806 to Southampton, where they took lodgings with brother Frank and his new bride, Mary Gibson. The women finally moved into a house in Castle Square, Southampton and there they remained for the next two years, until Edward Austen Knight offered them a cottage on another of his estates, at Chawton in Hampshire. This was Jane Austen’s home until her final months in 1817.

11. In 1800 Jane Leigh-Perrot was arrested in Bath for shoplifting, an offence carrying a capital penalty. By all accounts, she was a most unpleasant woman, snobbish, mean, judgmental and humourless, but her husband, James (Jane Austen’s mother’s oldest brother) was so devoted to her that he accompanied her to gaol. Had she been transported – her likely fate if convicted – he would no doubt have accompanied her to New South Wales. She was not convicted however, and it appeared that she had been set up by the shop assistants (perhaps with the intent of blackmail). It must have been an anxious time for all the family until her name was cleared, though rather comical in retrospect, given Jane Leigh-Perrot’s superior airs.

12. Tomalin p.171

13. Martha, though nine years his senior, eventually became the second wife of Jane Austen’s brother Frank, but this was in 1828, long after Jane Austen’s death.

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13 July 2006