Jane Austen in Perspective: An introduction to Jane Austen

Study Guide
for students

Introduction | The boyfriend: Tom Lefroy | The friend: Mrs Anne Lefroy | The suitor: Harris Bigg-Wither |  The aunt & uncle: the Leigh-Perrots | The best friend: Martha Lloyd | The neighbours: the Digweeeds et al. | The sister: protector or vandal of Austen's legacy | The parents: George & Cassandra Austen 

The people in Jane Austen's life -
The aunt & uncle: the Leigh-Perrots

The Leigh-Perrots were Jane Austen’s mother’s brother and sister-in-law, and so were among the inner circle of relatives with whom the Austens exchanged letters and visits. Jane Austen’s visits to them at their house in Bath gave her the opportunity to observe at first hand the social life there, and thus they helped to provide her with material for her novels. This is the couple Jane Austen referred to in her letters as ‘my Uncle’ and ‘my Aunt’. 

Mr and Mrs Leigh-Perrot, Jane Austen’s aunt and uncle. 
Jane Austen Memorial Trust.

James Leigh, who lived from 1735 to 1817, was Jane’s mother’s older brother by four years. Brother and sister were fond of each other and James acted as a witness to the Austen marriage ceremony at Bath in 1764. James was friendly, hospitable, intelligent, with an enquiring mind, kind and affectionate, easy going, a ready wit, and, like his sister Cassandra, an amusing talker. Unlike her, however, he had the luck to inherit a fortune whilst still in his teens. 

James and Cassandra had a great aunt Ann Leigh, a spinster. When her childless brother Thomas announced his intention of bequeathing her his estate at Northleigh in Oxfordshire, she asked him instead to leave it to their great nephew James Leigh, and leave her merely an annuity of £100. He agreed to do this on condition that his great nephew took on his arms and the name of Perrot. James, then only 14, grew up in the knowledge that he would come into his inheritance of the Northleigh estate when he reached his majority at the age of 21. His sisters were merely left £200 each. When James did take possession of Northleigh, however, he found that it did not suit him, so he demolished it and sold the land to the Duke of Marlborough. He then built for himself instead a new house, Scarlets, at Hare Hatch in the parish of Wargrave, on the Bath Road between Maidenhead and Reading in the county of Berkshire. He did however add the ‘Perrot’ to his name, becoming James Leigh-Perrot. 

In the same year that his sister Cassandra Leigh married George Austen, 1764, he married an heiress from an old Lincolnshire family, the Cholmeleys. Jane Cholmeley, who lived from 1744 to 1836, was the daughter of a barrister who had spent almost all his working life in the West Indies. Jane had been sent to boarding school in England at the age of six from Barbados, where she was born. She was sent to stay with her uncle Sir Montague Cholmeley of Lincolnshire during the holidays. She managed to survive this rather unusual upbringing, and at the age of 21 captivated the newly wealthy James Leigh-Perrot, becoming the mistress of Scarlets, where she and James led a life of leisure and independence. A determined socialiser, Jane boasted of dining with more than 30 families in the area (six more than Mrs Bennet!).

The childless Leigh-Perrots divided their time between their Berkshire house, Scarlets, and Number One The Paragon, Bath, an imposing terraced house with views out over the countryside, which they leased on a permanent basis every winter. They went to Bath for James to take the waters, as he became increasingly afflicted by gout.

Uncle James supported his wife entirely throughout her ordeal, insisting on remaining with her in prison. Aunt Jane conducted herself with dignity and composure at the trial, speaking up for herself before several testimonials as to her character were read out to the court and the jury took only 10 minutes to find her Not Guilty. We will never really know whether Jane Leigh-Perrot was guilty or not. 

Claire Tomalin, who describes Aunt Jane as ‘a tough old bird with a supremely loyal husband’, tells us that after the lace stealing episode the Leigh-Perrots were ‘fully restored to their dull dignity’. The unpleasant circumstances of the trial did not alter their routine of spending half their year in Bath. In 1801, the year after this dramatic episode, the Austens came to live in Bath and the Leigh-Perrots were delighted. They put the Austen family up for a few weeks when they arrived to live in Bath and set about looking for a house to rent. They were described as kind and welcoming. Jane Austen wrote in January 1801: 

This morning brought my Aunt’s reply, and most thoroughly affectionate is its tenor. She thinks with the greatest pleasure of our being settled in Bath; it is an event which will attach her to the place more than anything else could do. 

In 1806 James Leigh-Perrot became a possible beneficiary, along with a cousin, Thomas Leigh, and others, of the great estate of Stoneleigh Abbey, in Warwickshire. However he was so much attached to Scarlets that he decided to relinquish his place in the disputed succession and after much negotiation in London, he received £20,000 raised by a mortgage on Stoneleigh Abbey, plus a further £4,000 and an annuity of £2,000 payable to himself or his widow for life. Aunt Jane lived to be over 90 so they did very well out of that legacy, and her niece Jane, understandably somewhat aggrieved at her wealthy relatives coming into yet more money, referred to her aunt in a letter to her brother Frank, of July 1813, as ‘Poor Mrs Leigh-Perrot who would now have been Mistress of Stoneleigh had there been none of that vile compromise’. 

On 28 March 1817, James died peacefully at the age of 82. Jane Austen, already sick herself by this time, insisted she was well enough to allow her sister Cassandra, who had been caring for her, to travel to Berkshire to support their Aunt Jane in her grief, and so her sister duly arrived at Scarlets the next day. James, Mary and Francis also went to Berkshire to attend their uncle’s funeral and Uncle James was buried in Wargrave Churchyard. 

Jane did feel pity for her widowed aunt. In a letter to her brother Charles, Jane wrote: 

My Aunt felt the value of Cassandra’s company so fully, and was so very kind to her, and is, poor Woman! so miserable at present (for her affliction has very much increased since the first) that we feel more regard for her than we ever did before. (Letter # 157) 

The fact that her brother and sister-in-law were childless had encouraged Mrs Austen to hope that they would make her children their heirs, but despite several generous gifts from James Leigh-Perrot, his Will when he died in 1817 left everything to his wife, stipulating only for £1,000 each to the children of his sister Cassandra Austen after his wife’s death, at which stage James Austen, Cassandra’s eldest son, would also receive $24,000. His sister, Mrs Austen, was not even mentioned in his Will! 

Uncle James’s Will had been the last hope of the Austens for an upturn in their financial fortunes, and they were all therefore very much disappointed. Jane in particular was stunned by this news and suffered a relapse of her illness. In the same letter to Charles she wrote: 

I am ashamed to say that the shock of my uncle’s will brought on a relapse … My mother has borne the forgetfulness ... extremely well – her expectations for herself were never beyond the extreme of moderation – she heartily wishes that her younger children had more, and all her children something immediately. 

Mrs Austen herself said philosophically that ‘I expect he thought that I … would be likely to die first’. Jane was in no state to take the shock so well. She felt so ill and upset that she wrote to Cassandra begging her to return at once. Her sister did so and Jane then immediately felt guilty at having acted unreasonably: ‘I am the only one of the legatees who has been so silly’, she wrote apologetically to Charles, ‘but a weak body must excuse weak nerves’. 

A few months after her uncle’s death, Jane Austen herself died, but her Aunt Jane lived on for another 20 years, dying just before the start of the Victorian era. Her nephew James Austen, the expected heir, had himself died in December 1819, long before his aunt. She then showed her inconsistent generosity by offering his mother, her sister-in-law, an annuity of £100 as compensation for the loss of income which she knew Mrs Austen would suffer on the death of her son. This offer was most gratefully accepted. 

It was eventually James’ son, Edward, Jane Austen’s nephew, who finally benefited from the Leigh-Perrot relationship. When Edward obtained his degree from Oxford Aunt Jane made him a generous allowance of £300 per year and from then on regarded him as her heir. Edward wanted to be ordained, but Aunt Jane (Mary Crawford-like) disapproved of his choice of profession and she hoped that her allowance would enable him to live as a gentleman without going into the Church. Edward did take Holy Orders however, but then found favour with his Great Aunt by marrying well. His chosen bride was an Emma Smith of the Chute family who owned The Vyne, the Hampshire house often visited by Jane Austen. 

On her death in November 1836 Edward inherited sufficient capital to produce an annual income of £500-600, as well as the £24,000 bequeathed to his own father by James Leigh-Perrot. His family settled into Scarlets, and took the arms and name of Leigh in addition to his own. He thus became the James Edward Austen-Leigh, as we know him today, who produced, much later in the century, the Memoir of Jane Austen which was her first ‘biography’. 

Jane would have been pleased to know that in the end her aunt kept the Leigh-Perrot fortune in the Austen family. 

Catherine Barker 

References: 

• Jane Austen’s Family – Through Five Generations, Maggie Lane

• Jane Austen: A Family Record, Deirdre Le Faye 

• Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin 

• Jane Austen’s Letters, Edited by Deirdre Le Faye

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10 April 2007