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Jane Austen Society of Australia

Education

Jane Austen had little formal schooling. At the young age of seven, in 1783, she was sent with Cassandra to school at Oxford, accompanying their cousin Jane Cooper (daughter of their mother’s only sister, also Jane Cooper). Initially it was only Cassandra, closer in age to her cousin, who was to go, but Jane Austen joined her, probably because she hated to be separated from her sister. The school moved to the port of Southampton, where all the girls fell ill of an infectious fever, possibly typhus. Although the illness threatened their lives, all the children survived, but Aunt Jane Cooper, who with Mrs Austen had gone to the port to nurse their girls, did not; she died of the disease, aged 47.⁴ This period of schooling had lasted a few months only, and Jane Austen’s only other schooling was a further year or so – to the end of 1786 – at a school in Reading, again with Cassandra, when she was aged between nine and eleven. The school was conducted by an eccentric woman with a cork leg and a passion for the theatre which expressed itself in the curriculum, since the pupils put on performances of plays. She also ensured they were taught some spelling, needlework and French, along with dancing and probably piano.

The Abbey School, Reading

Jane Austen’s education depended largely, then, on her immediate family which was a literate and a literary one. All were great novel readers, James, ten years older than Jane, being considered the writer of the family. He wrote poetry, and also the prologues and epilogues for the theatricals which were a popular Austen family entertainment and part of Jane’s childhood experience from a very young age. Between December 1787 and the winter of 1788, for example, no fewer than six amateur theatrical productions were staged at Steventon (in the barn in summer or the family living room in winter). In January 1789 James began publishing The Loiterer at Oxford, where he was studying, a journal which he thereafter produced weekly over the next 14 months until he left to take up his first curacy, and for which he and his brother Henry contributed poetry and essays.

Jane Austen also entertained the family, by reading to them her own compositions; many of her juvenile works are dedicated to family members, and some were written for the amusement of her youngest brother, Charles. Her brother Henry later recalled that ‘her reading was very extensive in history and belles lettres; her memory extremely tenacious’, and that her favourite ‘moral writers’ were Dr Johnson in prose and Cowper in verse.⁵ She read Henry Fielding and Sterne, but preferred Samuel Richardson, and one of her favourite works was his Sir Charles Grandison, which she apparently knew almost by heart. Shakespeare was undoubtedly part of her education, and she read popular women novelists of the day such as Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith. She was obviously familiar with the Gothic novels she burlesques in Northanger Abbey, as well as with the ‘sentimental’ novels popular in her youth, which she sends up mercilessly in her juvenilia and whose dominant theme – the relative merits of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ she explored seriously in her first published novel. Jane was undoubtedly much encouraged by her father; it was in his library that she found her reading matter, and it was he who made the first attempt to get her published, in 1803; but her mother also wrote occasional and often funny verse, particularly for pupils at the school. Jane Austen could apparently read French with ease, understood some Latin, and also a little Italian, the latter through the music and singing lessons which were part of her studies. She enjoyed music and played the pianoforte – probably rather better than Elizabeth Bennet did. Her adult life focussed on the domestic life of the household, on the inexhaustible interest created by events in the lives of family members, and on visits to them and to close friends not far from home: like the Lloyds who came to live at nearby Deane parsonage, and the three Bigg sisters at the substantial nearby estate of Manydown. Another close friend, though quite a bit older, was Mrs Anne Lefroy, known as Madam Lefroy, who lived with her family in the rectory at the nearby village of Ashe, but who in 1804, in a great blow to Jane Austen, was killed when thrown from a horse.

And of course, as an integral part of her life from a young age, Jane Austen wrote: not, as is sometimes asserted, in secret, for her family were well aware of her occupation, but certainly guarding her privacy and treasuring time to herself that would allow her to write uninterrupted.

4. Her daughter Jane was to die even more prematurely, when she was thrown from a gig in a road accident at the age of 27 in 1798.
5. Family Record p.54

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03 July 2009