Jane Austen Society of Australia

Jane Austen in Perspective
Introduction | Her family | Education | The Siblings & Cousin Eliza | After Steventon | What was she like? | Her illness and death | Her times: a brief background | Her works | Was she a legend in her lifetime? | In conclusion | Further reading

What was she like? 

We have only two sketches of Jane Austen, both done by her sister Cassandra. One is a back view, where she is seated on a riverbank. The other is the one and only portrait which appears wherever one is required, and which is not considered – from comments by other family members – to be a particularly good likeness. 

Her nephew, James Austen-Leigh, in his memoir of his aunt, describes her as... 

in person very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close around her face.¹⁴ 

According to James, Cassandra was considered more ‘regularly handsome’, but Jane’s countenance ‘had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders’. Perhaps this was because, from the accounts of several family members, there was never far from the surface in Jane Austen a sense of fun which seized every opportunity to express itself in wit, puns, nonsensical flights of fancy and comic verse and stories. James in his Memoir notes the similarity of her turn of mind to that of her great-uncle, the Master of Balliol (her mother’s uncle Theophilus), whose wit was legendary. James pays her the great compliment of saying that she was attractive not because of what she knew but what she was.

Children seemed to find her fascinating, one of her nieces recalling that ... as a very little girl I was always creeping up to aunt Jane and following her whenever I could, in the house and out of it. I might not have remembered this but for the recollection of my mother’s telling me privately, that I must not be troublesome to my aunt. Her first charm to children was her great sweetness of manner. She seemed to love you and you loved her in return. This, as well as I can now recollect, was what I felt in my early days, before I was old enough to be amused by her cleverness. But soon came the delight of her playful talk.¹⁵ I will not attempt here to describe what she was ‘really like’: we will all have our own ideas about this, but here is where her letters are particularly valuable – for a glimpse of her personality apart from what we might deduce from her written works. There is an excellent recent work, Jane Austen’s Letters, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye in 1995, in the JASA library.

14. Austen-Leigh Memoir, p.77
15. ibid. p.80

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13 July 2006