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Jane Austen Society of Australia

Her illness and death

Jane Austen's grave at Winchester Cathedral Jane Austen must have had a robust constitution for she survived what was probably typhus as a seven year old and as an adult was rarely ill. All of her siblings, with the exception of James who died at 54, lived into old age. The reason generally given for Jane Austen’s early death is that she developed a condition which though now known as Addison’s disease was unnamed and little understood at the time. The disease affects the adrenal glands, through tubercular infection and causes loss of function, weight loss, gastric disturbance, debilitating weakness and finally death. Another symptom – or perhaps more accurately one of its signs – is changes in the pigmentation of the skin resulting in patches of brown or black alternating with the whiteness of vitiligo.¹⁶ Claire Tomalin in her recent biography disputes the Addison’s diagnosis – partly on the grounds that Jane Austen did not appear to manifest this sign - and suggests that her illness may rather have been a form of cancer like Hodgkin’s disease, which causes the sort of fevers and progressive weakening that Jane Austen apparently suffered from, and which leads ultimately to death. It is impossible to say with certainty just what she suffered from, although it can be said with certainty that there was probably nothing that could have been done at the time to halt the progress of the disease.

Jane Austen died in the dawn of Friday, 18 July 1817, her head cradled on a pillow on Cassandra’s lap; her sister had kept a vigil by her bedside for most of the night. She is buried in the cathedral at Winchester, where she died; she had travelled in her last weeks to that town for medical treatment. Cassandra wrote afterwards:

She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow. I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.¹⁷

Her gravestone in Winchester Cathedral carries no mention of her works.