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 boyfriend: Tom Lefroy

In January 1796, Thomas Langlois Lefroy met Jane Austen while he was on a holiday in the south of England, visiting his aunt and uncle Lefroy at Ashe Rectory. They had both just turned 20. That they were taken by one another’s company there can be no doubt; that either fell in love with the other is more a question of debate. Whatever the chemistry, their brief flirtation ultimately led to nothing permanent and they proceeded to get on with their own lives. However, both continued to think of the other in subsequent years. Tom Lefroy recalled their contact many years later and declared that he had been in love with Jane but that it was ‘only a boyish love’. Jane was much more devious in disguising her feelings about Tom. However, a look at the Lefroy circumstances might explain how impossible a relationship between them would be. 

The Lefroy family originated in France. Antoine Lefroy came to England in 1587 from Picardy, a Huguenot fleeing persecution in Catholic France, and settled in Canterbury, Kent. In the early 18th century, Anthony Lefroy, Tom’s grandfather, married into the Langlois family after what Park Honan describes as a joint venture bank crash. Deirdre Le Faye says the Langlois uncles purchased a commission for Anthony-Peter Lefroy, Tom’s father, in the Army in Ireland, and that he married Miss Anne Gardiner in 1765, Tom being born in January 1776, only weeks after the birth of Jane Austen. 

Park Honan’s Austen biography however, quoting Huguenot sources from Colonel J A-P Lefroy, tells a different story – that Anthony-Peter secretly married Anne Gardiner when he was 23 (ie in 1763), fearing that the supporting uncles would not approve such an inauspicious marriage, then ‘married’ her again in 1774 in Limerick Cathedral. At that stage there seem to have been children of the earlier marriage. 

Twenty years later, Tom, a law student, took a break from his studies and came to visit his Hampshire uncle, on whom he was financially dependent, no doubt to assure him that his financial investment was justified. The onus was on Tom to fulfil family expectations that he should pursue a higher status in English society, and marry well. And then he met Jane Austen, clergyman’s daughter. 

Jane and Tom talked, danced and apparently flirted together at Manydown and at Ashe, and we have Jane’s personal account in the first two extant letters to her sister Cassandra. However Jane was not one to reveal plainly just how the contact with Tom really affected her. Tom Lefroy was fair haired, good looking, clever and charming, about to study for the Bar in London. Jane was no doubt attracted. She refers to him in the first of the two letters as a ‘gentleman like, good-looking pleasant young man.’ At the ball at Manydown Park where they met, she and her brothers danced and socialised with the three Bigg sisters and their 15 year old brother Harris Bigg-Wither, whose home it was. 

Jane Austen tells us of how she danced three times with Tom and apparently set tongues wagging, and teases her sister by asking her to ‘imagine everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.’ She tells Cassandra that she will have only one more evening ball to ‘expose’ herself to public gossip over her behaviour with Tom. In fact, she went to three balls that fortnight. Soon Tom was ‘being laughed at about me’ by his aunt and uncle Lefroy, indicating that gossip had begun in the neighbourhood and Tom and Jane were an ‘item’. Jane goes on to say that Tom had ‘grown ashamed of coming to Steventon’ and the last time Jane showed up at Ashe, Tom had ‘run away’. Tom had in fact called at the Rectory after the ball, it being the polite custom for a gentleman to call on the ladies he had danced with, the day after a ball. Tom did, however, bring a ‘chaperone’, his 13 year old cousin, George. Jane laughs away any serious consideration with the comment that Tom had: 

but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat was a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones and therefore wears the same coloured clothes I imagine he did when he was wounded. 

We can see Jane bravely laughing the whole business off, and note that the two must have been discussing what was seen then as a rather scandalous piece of fiction. Tom Jones, with its seductions and unseemly romps, might not be the book you would expect a clergyman’s daughter to have read and appreciated. Jane and Tom must have had very frank discussions. 

A few days later, a friend of Henry Austen, John Warren, who had danced with Jane Austen at the same ball, showed up to give her a portrait of Tom which he, John Warren, had drawn. This reinforces the idea that Tom and Jane were seen as an ‘item’. Meanwhile, at Steventon, the manuscript of Elinor and Marianne was completed – an indication for anyone who might see, that here was Jane’s future, and not a future with Tom or with any of the other young men she knew and admired in the neighbourhood. Marriage with Tom would have seen her disappear into Ireland, probably never to write any more of the tales we treasure.

Tom married Mary Paul three years later. As an heiress she was a ‘suitable’ choice for the furtherance of the family fortunes, and they eventually had nine children. Tom became an MP for Dublin University in 1830 and in 1835 a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. He was appointed Judge in 1841, Chief Justice of Ireland in 1852 and remained in that position until 1866. He was then 90 years old. He had done the family proud.

There was never going to be a future for Tom and Jane. After his visit in 1796, Tom was whisked away by his family. But Jane did not forget him. He came back to Hampshire three years later, in 1799, but seems to have been steered well away from the Austens. In a letter of November 1798, Jane writes that Mrs Lefroy had called but said nothing about her nephew and, she tells Cassandra: 

I was too proud to make any enquiries; but on my father’s afterwards asking where he was, I learnt that he had gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practice! 

Poor Jane, unable to show an interest, had to rely upon her father’s good graces for a word of her former dancing partner. Jane never saw him again that we know of. Her flirtation with Tom had been brief and probably painful. But at least she must have learnt something of vulnerability and parting, of wild joy and enduring heartbreak. 

We women do not forget you, so soon as you forget us ... this is our fate, rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home – quiet, confined. and our feelings prey upon us ... You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. (Anne Elliot, in Persuasion) 

Rodney Pyne 

References: 

• Jane Austen Her Life, Park Honan,1997, pp. 78, 105-106 & note 18.
• Jane Austen’s Letters, edited Deirdre Le Faye, 1995, pp 544-5

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09 March 2008