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Jane Austen is one of the most famous figures in all of English literature, and here on the History Extra podcast, we thought she deserved a proper, in depth look at her life and works. So for the next four weeks, Lauren Good will be speaking to Dr. Lizzie Rogers about Austin's life, times and legacy, kicking off with today's first episode.
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We all know Jane Austen as the witty writer from the Georgian period who penned some of our favourite characters from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice to Eleanor Dashwood and Edward Ferrers in Sense and Sensibility. But what was it that inspired the daughter of a rural reverend to write about such things as hi, I'm Lauren Good, and in this first episode of A four part series exploring Jane's life and writing. I'm joined by Dr. Lizzie Rogers to step back into Jane's formative years and explore what her earliest writings tell us about the novelist she would become. Lizzie, thanks so much for joining me today.
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B
Thank you for having me, Lauren.
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A
Before we delve into Jane's childhood, can we take a minute to tease what might be coming up in this series? What makes Jane such a fascinating character?
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B
I think she's so fascinating because she left behind comparatively so little writing. So it's taken a lot of kind of detective work to piece together what happened in her life. And there's so many interesting things that happen. She goes to quite a lot of places, she writes so many interesting things and kind of mapping those onto her life is just. Well, it's very fun and it's very interesting.
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A
I'm so excited to delve into all those parts of her life in this series. Can we start at the very beginning with Jane? Where was she born?
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B
So she was born at Steventon in Hampshire on 16 December 1775, and she's the seventh of eight children. So the Austens are a pretty big family, all living at the rectory where her father is rector of the parish of Deane and of Steventon.
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A
And what did her family life look like?
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B
So it was pretty busy. As I mentioned, she's one of eight children. So seven of those eight children, once they're all born, all live at the rectory. George, her second oldest brother, lives with another local family because he has some kind of disability. And that was what they generally did back then, was they sent to live with a family who could care for them, but they saw him regularly. So there was many brothers? Six brothers, two daughters. So Jane and her sister Cassandra naturally gravitated towards each other. So it would have been a very busy household, I imagine a very noisy household and a very creative household too.
- [04:34]
A
We will cover Jane's relationship with Cassandra as we go on in this series. But were they close from the very beginning?
- [04:41]
B
They were indeed. So when Jane was born, her father wrote a letter that said that she was to be a plaything for her sister and a future. So I think they knew from the very beginning. Maybe it was because they were only two girls, I don't know, but that they would have this incredible bond that we will talk more about because they really were each other's lifelong companions.
- [05:01]
A
What was Jane's relationship like with her other siblings? You mentioned her. One of her brothers had a disability, I suppose she was the closest to Cassandra. But what was that relationship like with the others?
- [05:11]
B
So she must have had really great relationships with all of them. So in her juvenilia, her early writing, she writes a lot of dedications to them all, which is really fascinating. Some of them are really funny. Some of them are kind of more poignant. But she would have had a good relationship with all of them. All her brothers were quite different. I mean, even George, who didn't live with them, she talks about talking on her fingers to him, which we think might be a kind of form of sign language, that she communicated with him. With James, her oldest brother, he ends up taking over at Steventon after her father. So he's kind of the oldest. He goes off to university. He's interested in literature and writing, too. Her brother Edward gets adopted by a wealthy family who's related to the Austens, the Knight family. So we'll find out later on that he actually ends up bringing some stability to the Austen women later on in their lives when they're struggling. But he goes off for four years for a grand tour of Europe, so he spends some time away. Henry's often seen to be her favorite brother. Now, he, by all accounts, is pretty vivacious. He had several different careers. He really helped her get published. And they all, all of them include Frank and Charles as well, who went off into the Navy. They all seemed to kind of really encourage her writing ambitions, but also were pretty creative, too. I mean, one of the things that the Austen children did was they put on and skits and they read aloud in the evening. So it wasn't just Jane who had creative ambition. They would potentially do it in the house or in the barn at Steventon, which would have been a kind of great creative space for them to kind of move things about. It's really hard not to think of Mansfield park for this. When they put on Lovers Vows, that must have been a direct experience that she drew upon, although I'm hoping with less drama at Steventon. And actually, it's believed that the first play that's recorded that they ever put on the Austen siblings at Steventon was when Jane was 7 years old. So I don't know how big a part she played in that, but it's amazing to think she was that young and all these things were going on and her older siblings were kind of pulling her into the fold and enabling that creativity to happen.
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A
What sort of plays would they have put on?
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B
So they would have played into some of the things that were in the theatre today, which a lot of them don't survive to us now. I mean, if you're a historian of that period, you'd be able to find these texts, but they're not. A lot of them aren't on the stage now. That first play that they did was called Matilda by a playwright called Dr. Thomas Ra, which I don't think many people would know today. But also they were adapting little bits themselves. Jane wrote a little, kind of a small adaptation of some Samuel Richardson that she really enjoyed. So they were kind of putting their pen to paper and doing it as well and kind of drawing on their favourite novels and text.
- [07:46]
A
Can we also just place the Austens in the social hierarchy? I suppose you mentioned that her dad was a reverend. Where would that place them in terms of social standing?
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B
They occupied a really interesting space, actually, because kind of going back in the generations, particularly her mother's family, the Lees, they had aristocratic connections. One of the Lee family was the Duke and Duchess of Chandos, and actually the first duchess was also called Cassandra. It was a name that passed down through the Lee family. So they were quite proud of these connections, but they themselves sat in what a lot of historians call the pseudo gentry. So they were kind of on the cusp of genteel society. But because of her father's position as rector of the parish, they were afforded a lot of respect, even though they didn't necessarily have a lot of money. But they socialized with a lot of the families in the parish. They were all counted as great friends. So that's why she has this great insight into kind of upper classes and genteel society. And she herself, you know, is a gentleman's daughter, but doesn't necessarily have the money to back it up.
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A
I wonder. It's interesting, her placement being on the cusp. She's allowed to look in.
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B
Yeah. Great observer of everything which I think we see in her novels, like from being very, very young, very much an observer of everybody around her.
- [09:02]
A
So interesting.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That early inspiration, I suppose, of what might come later in her life in terms of Austen's education, what would that have looked like?
- [09:13]
B
So Austen, compared to what we would understand today, had very little formal education, probably about two years in total. So in 1783, she goes to school in Oxford with her sister Cassandra. She's quite young at this point, and actually even her mother recognizes that she's probably a little bit young. But there's a line that's been passed down that she said that if Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane would want it too. So that's why they went to school together. And then this kind of short period at school ends quite tragically. So the woman who ran the school, Mrs. Corley, she moved it to Southampton without telling anybody, which is really interesting. But then there's a typhoid outbreak, so typhus fever. They end up getting really, really ill. Mrs. Austin goes down. They're there also with their cousin, Jane Cooper. Jane Cooper's mother dies from the typhus fever. So they're pulled out of this school, but then they go to school in reading later, 1785-86. So in total about two years. And they would have learned things like reading, writing, arithmetic, kind of some dancing, some needlework, all those things that we kind of know to be accomplished. But then, by comparison, male education wasn't as well developed as we would understand now. But they will get things like classical learning and science very much depended on who was around you, how much education you got. But for women, formal education was not the same as we would understand today.
- [10:31]
A
What was it like at home? Was that learning complemented at Steventon?
- [10:37]
B
Very, very much so. I always like to think of the Austen family as not financially rich, but culturally rich. So one of the things that her father did to earn a little bit of extra money was he took in the sons of the local families as boarders and they would learn with him. So he had his own library and he teach them kind of classical subjects. But importantly, that library was open to all the Austen children. So while the boys would also get kind of this enhanced classical learning, and some of them did go on to university, Jane and Cassandra were allowed to read it with complete abandon. So it meant that this was quite a unique position to be in. I mean, lots of young women grew up with a library, but there was a lot of controversy over what women should and could be reading at the time. Many people thought novels were dangerous, you know, whether they were allowed to read science, you know, all these kinds of things. But Jane was able to kind of go into the library, read whatever she wanted, and surely that would have been a great help to her mind, you know, really helped develop that kind of wit, that curiosity, but also that kind of interest in the world around her. For somebody who we tend to think of didn't travel very far, I think the furthest north she went in England was Staffordshire. She actually had a great knowledge about the world through her family and friends and through her own thirst to learn about it.
- [11:50]
A
So it would have been quite a rarity for a young woman in the Georgian period to get Such an access to her father's library?
- [11:58]
B
I think so. I mean, there would have been plenty of libraries in young women's houses. But whether their family would have happily let them go in there, also whether they had the ambition to do it, you know, it's very, very different to how we understand it now. Although, you know, as we think about banning books, that's a relatively recent thing still. That's all something that people really thought some books were dangerous, you know, particularly in relation to gender. So I think she had a really interesting position where she was allowed to whatever she wanted if she could get her hands on it.
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A
Even in a household where the daughters were encouraged to fulfill their interest in the world, how differently would the sons and daughters have been treated in the Austen family?
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B
So the sons definitely had different opportunities to Jane and Cassandra. I mean, a couple of them went up to university, so they were able to get a degree. That wouldn't have been a possibility until kind of the later 19th century for women to do formally. I mean, although in Europe there were some women kind of getting degrees and even doctoral degrees, it was a real, real kind of one off situation when that happened. So they couldn't get to that level of formality of education. But also their brother Edward, because he'd been adopted by their wealthier knight relatives, he was able to spend four years doing a grand tour of Europe. So although the Austen family sit in this kind of fringes of the gentry, Edwards got a full passport in. So he goes and does this kind of young man's finishing school. He does the grand tour, he spends a year in Dresden, spends three more years traveling around. So he gets to take in all the art, the culture. Must have been really interesting, I think, as the other Austen siblings, to see this happening. I wonder if there would have been any jealousy, but also just the excitement at what he was seeing and what he could share with the rest of them too. But that wasn't something that Jane and Cassandra could really aspire to. There was no money for that to happen. A woman with more money and a family inclined to take her traveling would have been able to, but for them, it wasn't a possibility.
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A
This is speculative, but given Jane's personality, do you think there would have been some envy there of her brothers doing these incredible things?
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B
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A
On to Jane's early writing, I just want to take a moment to say that if you do have any more questions like this on what life was like for people in the Regency period, Lizzie has led a wonderful Academy course on exactly this, which you can watch on historyextra.com there's a link to this in my beyond the Podcast picks in the description below. So Lizzie, can we talk a little bit about Jane's early writing? You mentioned the Juvenilia earlier on. Do we know when Austin decided to start taking writing seriously?
- [16:20]
B
So she begins what is in the juvenileia, which is in three volumes that she copied into three notebooks herself. She begins that pretty much as soon as she comes back from boarding school in Reading, which is at the end of 1786. So she's around 11 years old at this point, which when you think of that now that's kind of the same age as we would go to high school, really, really young. And she's writing these really interesting little things. And the Juvenilia covers about seven years, roughly just before she turns 18 is when she kind of finishes it. And there's all sorts of fun stories in there, some really great dramatic ones. She loves kind of drunk characters. There's a great bit of a woman who is kind of shut in a cell. And she's like, how am I gonna get my children out? And she kind of chucks them out the window and follows them. Really, really interesting, really funny. But you can see the seeds of what will become kind of her. I don't even wanna say later, talent, because she clearly shows promise and talent right from the beginning. But she also shows that she's reading a lot and she's parodying a lot of the things that she's picking up on. So one of the really common things for people to read back then was the history and kind of know about the history of England. That was deemed an important thing for girls to know. And she writes with Cassandra, who illustrates it. Cassandra's a very talented watercolor artist. She writes a history of England and she subtitles it by a partial prejudiced and ignorant historian, which I think is great. And she writes this irreverent little descriptions from Henry iv. And, you know, Cassandra does these little illustrations of the different kings and queens. And they're said to be modeled on some of their family members. But all of these things kind of come together and show that she was like testing different plots. As I mentioned earlier, she was dedicating them to family members. And whether that means that she saw them as published one day or she kind of aspired to be published and had those dedications at the beginning. My favorite one is she wrote a short story. It's in 12 chapters, but each chapter is about two or three sentences long. And it's called the Beautiful Cassandra. And it's dedicated to Cassandra and she calls it. In it she begins, madam, you are a phoenix. Which I think is such a lovely thing to say to somebody. And that's the dedication and the story's brilliant. It's about a young woman called Cassandra. It's almost the 18th century equivalent of Ferris Bueller's Day off. Because Cassandra is the daughter of a milliner. She falls in love with a bonnet and she absconds for the day with this bonnet. And she goes and eats some pastry. She can't pay for it, so she punches the pastry cook and like leaves the cafe. She gets in a coach and she decides she wants to ride out of London and she just rides straight back. She runs into a viscount. It's very quick reading, but it's very fun reading. I love it. I find it so entertaining. And just this idea of her trying different elements of plot and kind of observing character as well. You know, she had all these Siblings around her, all these family friends. And she kind of testing all these little bits and pieces and putting them into these stories. She's also experimenting with types of writing. So I mentioned that she wrote the history, but she also. She writes novels in letters. Now, this was a very common kind of form of writing back then for novels. Really, really popular format. And she writes a couple of pieces like this one's called Lesley Castle. And her wit in that is so good because there's these letters from the two Lesley daughters to a friend. And they discover that their father, who was not at Lesley Castle with them, has married, and their friend knows the woman in question. And they're all sending letters between each other through this friend saying, oh, I'm not sure how I feel about this woman, or I don't think she's as attractive as people say, and all these things. And it's just so clever and funny, them trying to, like, bat off all these bits of story. And they're quite long, you know, for somebody who is in their teens writing these. I mean, I'd be ashamed if my teenage writings ever were published in a format. But Janes are so clever, they're so funny, they're shocking, they're a joy to look at. And they are really different to her novels. But it's so lovely to see that development. It's the same as if you see, you know, a really great painting and you see all the artist sketches that come before it. I think it's that kind of thing. You're seeing this trajectory of her writing and. Yeah, I just love it.
- [20:23]
A
There are also two other books, my writings, saying there's love and Friendship and Lady Susan. What were those books?
- [20:32]
B
So I really think in these books is where you start to see these kind of plot elements develop, both in Love and Friendship. And Lady Susan, you get this kind of idea of relationships, of family, of friendship, particularly between women. Both of them are incredibly entertaining to read. I mean, Lady Susan's deliciously wicked is how I would put it. She's this kind of very manipulative mother who is a fortune hunter and. And although it's really comical, it's again, a novel. In Letters, she's really showing her awareness and kind of satirizing this need to marry well for security and kind of what that can turn into if you're really cutthroat and hungry with it. And I just think it just shows this kind of her brain working through these plot points that then become these really mature novels that, although maybe less kind of salacious in how they're written, they really approach those same subject themes, one she would have been incredibly aware of in her own life, and the women around her would have been, too.
- [21:33]
A
We talked a little bit earlier about her being on the cusp of society and being able to see in. But how do you think that the daughter of a rural reverend, she is at this stage quite separate from the world, is writing about these incredible things?
- [21:48]
B
It's so interesting. So she is quite separate from the world. I mean, Steventon, I went myself the first time about a year ago. It's beautiful, like, absolutely stunning. Lovely rural location. And, you know, it's close to Basingstokes, not that far from Winchester, not that far from Chawton, but it's very rural. But she spent a lot of time traveling and staying with family and friends. She'd spend time in London. Her brothers got married, she would go stay with them. But also she had family members that were connected to the wider world. So her paternal aunt went off to India and she married there. And so her cousin Eliza, she's born in India, she comes in like she's kind of this almost exotic bird because she's lived so far away, and she has kind of all these interesting stories to tell. She then goes and lives in France. She marries a French Comte, and then he loses his life in the French Revolution. So although she has what people. And this is just one example, although she has what people see as this very small rural existence, she actually is connected to the wider world in really interesting ways that a lot of historians have talked about before. Two of her brothers are in the Navy. I mean, they kind of go off all around the world. She writes a lot about the Navy in her novels, shows she's intimately acquainted with that, and she's hungry for knowledge about all these places and learning about them. She's kind of not blocked off, even though, on the face of it, she lives this small existence.
- [23:10]
A
We've talked a bit about Jane and Cassandra using the library and being quite worldly wise at this point. But how unusual would it have been for a young woman like Jane to be writing with such ambition like this in her teenage years?
- [23:25]
B
That's a really interesting question. So when I look at the Austen family, I always think for them, writing was. It was something they did as entertainment. It was something they did to spend time together. I think they clearly saw something in her. All of her siblings were very supportive of her writing ambition from an early age. And going back to that, copying the juvenilia into three notebooks and they all have these little dedications. You read them and you think, gosh, they're really envisioned as published works. Whether she did or whether it was done as a joke, seen as she had a great sense of humour. But it's hard not to read that and look at it and think she was quite special. And she was doing something from a very early age that she wanted to do something with writing, that writing was really important to her and storytelling and entertaining her family. I mean, she would read them aloud to her family members, they would comment on them. Even when you read her later letters, she talks a lot about them, reading bits of them, allowing them or like their comments on them. She loves to hear people's feedback. And I think she was clearly very ambitious about storytelling and making people laugh and making people think and putting all those skills of observation down onto paper.
- [24:42]
A
Clearly, her family saw this talent in her. But do you think she was ever viewed as out of the ordinary and a bit odd for wanting to have these big writing dreams?
- [24:53]
B
That's a really, really interesting question because, you know, a lot is made of the fact she publishes anonymously later in life. And, you know, some women around this time did publish using their names, and she was a big fan of Frances Burney, for example, who did publish under her own name. And whether she looked to these other women writers and she thought, oh, maybe that's something I could do. And whether her family saw the same thing when she was this young, I think is a really interesting question. It's one of those. That's the gift of retrospect and hindsight is, you know, when you look at a friend or a family member who's achieved something great, and you think, oh, those seeds were sown so early on. Like, you could see it from the beginning. And whether they saw that as they went through, I think would be really interesting to know.
- [25:36]
A
It's clear that her writing shows us a lot about what Jane was like in these earlier years. But do we have any earlier letters or diaries that give us any insight into her personality?
- [25:47]
B
So her letters start, or I should say her surviving letters start, when she's about 20 years old. There may not have been that many from before because a lot of them are written to Cassandra, and they probably would have been together a lot of that time. But before that, we don't have too much. It's all kind of from other family members and friends who tell us about her, about kind of how she looked, what the Austen sisters were like and things like that. So they start when she's 20, which I think is a really interesting age to begin because she's a young woman, she's an adult now. You know, she's put the juvenilia behind her. She's moving on to actually penning what we would now recognize as the novels. Early drafts of them, the contents of the letters, especially the first ones, they mention Tom Lefroy, which I know we will talk about more. But they really kind of present a new Jane, a Jane who is an adult who is interested in the world around her, potentially marriage, friendship, all those things. So it's funny looking at those and actually what we have from earlier on is just her fictional writing. So we can kind of guess to her interests in what she was doing and what she was chatting about, but we don't really get her real written down thoughts until later.
- [26:54]
A
And we'll start the next episode when she is 20. And there is this fleeting romance with Tom Lefroy. But finally, Lizzie, reflecting on Jane's upbringing in her earlier years. How would you describe her at this point of her life?
- [27:09]
B
I think she was a young woman who was brimming with creativity. It's almost like she, you know, she's ready to kind of explode like a firework with all these things, you know, for her circumstances. She's given the best upbringing possible to think about writing. She's basically left not left to her own devices, but she's allowed to do pretty much whatever she wants with it. She can write away that her family are receiving it really well. They encourage her. They don't view it as something, you know, they buy her these notebooks to copy these things into. Her father later buys her a writing desk. It's all these kind of little things that seem very small gestures but actually all build together for this young woman to kind of be poised to think, oh, writing's my thing and I'm gonna keep pursuing it for the rest of my life. And I think going back to these early years, you can just see it all fizzing and I think it's really exciting thinking about what comes next. Next.
- [28:03]
A
That was Dr. Lizzie Rogers speaking to me. Lauren Good. Lizzie is an historian of the 18th and early 19th centuries. If you want to go beyond the podcast and find out more about Jane Austen, her works and the Regency period she wrote in, I've compiled some essential reading, listening and viewing from the History Extra and BBC History magazine archive to deeper your understanding. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode.
- [28:39]
B
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