A mystery lies at the heart of Jane
Austen’s life: why was she sent away to
school at seven? But at the heart of
that mystery lies an unremarked failure of biographical inquiry. Sketches of two quite different houses have
been accepted as Steventon rectory, her childhood home. With such a flaw at the center of Austen
scholarship, how can we know the most basic facts about her home? How can we determine whether it was the
“sufficiently commodious” house Jane Austen’s nephew, James Edward
Austen-Leigh, described in his 1870 Memoir (23)—spacious enough for her
parents, seven siblings, the family’s servants, and her father’s resident
pupils? Or was it so cramped that the
only girls, Jane and Cassandra, had to be sent away to accommodate all those
boys? The Austen daughters’ schooling has
been the indigestible lump in the cheerful family story. It is only now that biographers have begun
to cast a gimlet eye on the “hear no evil, see no evil” tradition of Austen
biography laid down by her family, from her brother Henry’s tribute at her
death through the reminiscences of her nieces and nephews. “It cannot be doubted that her early years
were bright and happy, living, as she did, with indulgent parents, in a cheerful
home,” James Edward wrote (39). Among biographers, David Cecil
represented this tradition at its most fervent in his 1978 A Portrait of
Jane Austen. He wrote, “The Austen
daughters, too, spent most of their childhood and youth at home under the care
of their parents. This was lucky for
them, as it was lucky for their brothers” (32). “Indeed,” he enthused, “home life at Steventon was affectionate,
cheerful, untroubled” (34). Today’s
biographers no longer gloss over the fact that Jane was cast out from the
family home for almost five of her first eleven years. To begin with, she spent the greater
part of her infancy and early childhood boarded with a nurse in the village of
Steventon. Rev. George and Cassandra
Austen made a practice of sending their children to village women from the time
their babies were weaned, at about three months, until about the age of
two. At this point, when the children
were walking, talking, and probably no longer in diapers, they were allowed to
return. Jane’s Victorian nephew, James
Edward, considered this practice “strange” but assured his readers that the
parents paid daily visits to their children (39). As harsh as such treatment may seem
to a modern reader, it was evenhanded; all the Austen children seem to have
been dealt with in that way. The
particular harshness of Jane’s childhood lay in the early age at which she was
sent away to school. No child but Jane
was banished from the family as young as seven. Cassandra, who accompanied her on what would be a tragic venture,
was ten, although by the time she was nine, she had already been away from home
“a good deal” on visits to their cousin, Jane Cooper, in Bath (Le Faye 43;
Lefroy 160). The next youngest to be sent from
the family were Frank and Charles, who embarked on their grueling training at
the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth at twelve. In contrast, James and Henry did not leave for St. John’s
College, Oxford until they were fourteen and seventeen respectively. Edward, whom George and Cassandra allowed to
be adopted by wealthy relatives, Thomas and Catherine Knight, seems to have
begun dividing his time between the two families when he was twelve and was
formally adopted in 1783 at sixteen.
George, suffering from an unspecified mental condition, was sent to live
with caretakers while still a boy. The school that the Austens chose to
send their daughters to was run by a member of their extended family. Mrs. Austen’s sister, Jane, was married to
Rev. Edward Cooper and it was his widowed sister, Ann Cawley, to whom they
entrusted their daughters in 1783. The
Coopers sent their daughter off to join her cousins at the school at
Oxford. Jane Cooper was eleven, four
years older than Jane Austen. Did the family connection in some way counterbalance Jane’s scant seven years in the Austens’ minds? As it was to fall out, the family connection availed them nothing. The treatment the girls received at the hands of Mrs. Cawley brings to mind scenes from Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood. Between the spring when the girls arrived, and the following October, Mrs. Cawley moved her school from Oxford to Southampton, a port city where ships from around the world disgorged sailors—and disease. All three girls fell ill with what was probably typhus fever (Le Faye 45).
What
happened next is incomprehensible. Mrs.
Cawley did not notify the parents, but maintained a silence in the face of this
grave situation. It was older,
courageous Jane Cooper who managed to get word out. The mothers rescued their daughters
and swept them off to their homes. In
Bath, Jane Cooper, Cassandra Austen’s sister, caught the disease herself and
died on October 25 at the age of forty-seven.
Seven-year-old Jane Austen was so ill that she nearly died and was
convalescent for about a year. Mrs. Austen was defensive about her
decision to send newly recovered eight-year-old Jane away to a different school
in the spring of 1785. One of Jane’s
nieces, Anna Austen Lefroy, remembered Mrs. Austen telling her that “Jane was
too young to make her going to school at all necessary, but it was her own
doing; she would go with Cassandra: ‘if Cassandra’s head had been going
to be cut off Jane would have her’s cut off too—’” (Lefroy 160). Abbey School at Reading was run by a
self-styled Mrs. La Tournelle, actually Sarah Hackitt, who had a cork leg and,
in the words of one contemporary, “was only fit for giving out clothes for the
wash, making tea, ordering dinner and, in fact, doing the work of a
housekeeper” (Le Faye 48). It may be,
however, that Austen’s accomplishments—French, some Italian, the ability to
play the pianoforte well and a fine skill with the needle—were acquired from
the teachers Mrs. La Tournelle employed, as Deirdre Le Faye suggests (48). It is also possible that she acquired them
at home, from her parents, brothers, or from special teachers like John Claude
Nattes, employed by her father to teach drawing and painting (Le Faye 47), and
a “music Master” the Austens may have hired (Lefroy 183). It was near her eleventh birthday in
December, 1786, twenty months after she left for Reading, that Jane Austen was
allowed to settle into the bosom of her family for good. She returned home still younger than the age
at which any of her brothers was sent away. Jane’s father had been taking in
young male scholars to prepare them for university since 1773, two years before
her birth. His deep interest in both
the classics and the latest publications attest to the breadth of his
interests. His library was extensive
for a man who was never rich—500 volumes at the time of their move from
Steventon in 1801. Biographers have
commented on Mrs. Austen’s deep involvement in the school, running it like “a
large family” (Tomalin 24). She fed her
young male charges, attended to their clothes, nursed their scrapes and
illnesses, cosseted and chivied them. The Austens do not seem to have been
cold, indifferent parents. Mr. Austen
opened his library to his girls, encouraged Jane’s writing, and worked to find
publishers for her early novels. He
does not seem to have been one of those men who believed that women shouldn’t
use their minds. Why then were the
girls sent away to school for an education that was inferior to that which
their parents could have provided? The likely explanation of the girls’
expulsion from home, offered by present-day biographers, is a simple one: the Austens needed to free up space for
paying scholars (Honan 30; Tomalin 33; Halperin 25). Rev. George Austen was often in debt and never flush. He paid £35 per term, per girl, and received about the same
amount at that time for each student he taught. The math suggests that he was hoping for many more students than
he had daughters.1 Leaving aside questions of the
parents’ motives, the children’s needs and desires and the traditions of their
time and place, this article attempts to approach the problems of the girls’
rough usage by coming at it from an empirical angle. Was space the real problem? Two kinds of information are
required to sketch the answer to this question: how big was Steventon rectory and how many people lived
there? Such beguilingly simple
questions! But like many issues Jane
Austen’s biography raises, the answers prove elusive, despite or perhaps
because of the reams of descriptions and memoirs left by her highly literate
family. THE MYSTERY OF STEVENTON
RECTORY Unlike her residences in Bath,
Chawton, and Winchester, the house Jane Austen grew up in no longer stands and
was razed in the 1820s before the advent of photography. Instead, three drawings that represent it
have been bequeathed to us. But rather
than helping our understanding, they only create confusion. The drawings come from an impeccable
source. They were done, so it has been
agreed, by Anna Austen Lefroy, the oldest child of Jane’s oldest brother,
James. Anna knew the house well. Born to James and Ann Matthew in 1793, she
was two when her mother died and she was sent to live with her grandparents and
aunts, Jane and Cassandra, at Steventon until James remarried in 1797. Then in 1801 the traumatic removal
of Jane’s family from the rectory made way for the arrival of Anna’s. James not only took over his retired
father’s living, but his house and many of the family’s possessions as
well. He moved in with his second wife,
Mary Lloyd Austen, their son, James Edward, and with Anna, then eight (their
second child, Caroline, was born there in 1805). It was Anna’s home until age twenty-one when she married Ben
Lefroy and apparently took her pen and tablet around the neighborhood to record
and bid farewell to the scenes of her youth. While Anna made one sketch of the
back of the rectory which is labeled and dated 1814, she made sketches of the
fronts of two houses. Some biographers
have illustrated Austen’s childhood home with one of these front views, and
some with the other. What baffles is
that they haven’t explained their choice, or even noted that they have made
one, much less defended it. Here are
the sketches of the fronts of the two houses, with the proponents of each. The Two Versions of Steventon Rectory
1) Anna Lefroy’s
sketch of the front of the smaller house with a latticed entryway, courtesy of
the Jane Austen Memorial Trust.2
2) Schematic rendering of Anna Lefroy’s drawing of the front of the larger house.
The original of this sketch was not available for this article, but a later engraving based on it but with significant alterations, and used in the Memoir, is reproduced below (illustration #6). The original sketch can, however, be found in Tomalin (after 76) and Cecil (127) (misidentified as Chawton). The author’s rough sketch is meant to indicate the number and approximate position of the windows, attic dormers, door, chimney, and sweep as a means of comparison with the smaller house. The broken roof line reproduces the effects of obscuring trees in Lefroy’s drawing.
THE BACK VIEW Let us begin our study of Anna’s
drawings of the parsonage with the one about which there seems to be universal
agreement. Austen’s biographers concur
that Lefroy’s drawing labeled “Back [Front—(crossed out)] of Steventon
Rectory,” and dated “1814” is exactly what it says it is.
3) The back view of Steventon
rectory, courtesy of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust. Steventon rectory faced north, and the back, or southern, façade
reveals a house about twice as wide as deep, with two rear wings projecting
from it forming a rough U-shape.
Between the wings we can see a narrow portion of the back of the main
structure where apparently a door gives onto a path that emerges and curves to
the west (left). Differences between the wings
suggest their having been built at different times. That on the southwest (left) corner is significantly larger with
a gabled roof; the wing on the southeast (right) is neither as deep nor as high
and has a hipped roof. Neither wing is
as tall as the original house, and the southeast wing appears to have an
especially shallow attic. The attics in
both wings appear to be quite low and raise the question whether they
communicate with the attic of the main part of the house. Neither of the added attics appears to have windows. A large chimney, partly hidden,
rises from the front slope of the hipped roof; altogether there are five
chimneys. The windows have small panes
and it is hard to determine whether they are casement or sash although a slight
curve on the bottom of the second story window in the southeast (right) wing
suggests a bow window. On the east
(right) side of the house a cleared area can be glimpsed, and beyond that, a
fence. ASSESSING THE ACCURACY OF ANNA’S DRAWINGS Is there any easy way to eliminate
either of Lefroy’s drawings of the front of the house? Were her eye and hand reliable? She left many sketches behind by which to
judge her, in addition to the three that have been associated with Steventon
rectory. These include a view of
cottages labeled “Steventon” (Cecil 22; Tomalin after 76), “Old Church at
Deane” (Cecil 57), “Chawton Church” (Cecil 194) and Steventon (mislabeled
Chawton) Manor House (Cecil 159). Since so many of the buildings she
sketched have been lost, comparisons between her renderings and the real thing
are hard to find. But one interesting
comparison is possible. Her drawing of
Chawton Church, which can be found in Cecil (194) and online at
http://www.janeaustensoci.freeuk.com/pages/janeausten3.htm, agrees with a
painting of it done about the same time (1809) by an anonymous artist and
reproduced by both Cecil (unnumbered page after 128) and Nicolson (175). There is a striking and convincing
resemblance and what differences there are might be explained by the painter’s
and not Anna’s inadequacies. Support for Anna’s renderings of the
rectory comes from two sources. The
first is an 1821 plan of the Glebe land at Steventon. It shows the house, outbuildings, yard, fields and lane
surrounding it.
4) 1821 Plan of the Glebe Land at
Steventon, detail, courtesy of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust. We see a house set back by about the
distance of its width from a road which, perhaps about two more widths to the
east, meets another lane that runs south (here, right) up a slope to Rev.
Austen’s church, St. Nicholas. Two additions to the southern (back)
façade form the U Anna depicted, although it appears shallower. Small projections off the southwest (left)
wing do not agree with Anna’s sketch perhaps because they were added later, she
neglected to render them, her bushes hide them, or the map itself is in
error. Outbuildings surround an open
space marked “yard” to the west (left) of the house in the direction of the
path Anna illustrated. In further support for Anna’s sketch
is a 1696 description of the house from the Diocesan Records, Winchester,
Hampshire as “consisting of two Bays of building, outletted at the West end,
and part of the South side over the Cellar” (Tucker 1983, 29). The other wing, the southeastern, presumably
was added between 1696 and 1814. In addition to Anna’s drawings are family reminiscences of Austen’s home. At the time James Edward was writing his Memoir in 1870, Anna (the artist), their sister Caroline Austen Craven, and Catherine Austen Hubback, Frank’s daughter, contributed their recollections. In a letter from Anna to James Edward, written probably in 1869, she recalled:
On the west side was a garden tool
house. On the south a door communicated
with the back yard—not far from the
granary—another door opened into the larger garden, in the east wall, I think. I remember this sunny cucumber garden well—its frames, and also
its abundance of pot-herbs, marigolds, etc.—Oh! me! we never saw the like again. (Le Faye 18).
In a modern photograph of the now empty field in which stood Jane Austen’s childhood home, a pump enclosed by a low fence can be discerned (Nicolson 22-23).
This is the sole remaining item dating from Austen’s time. It likely stood near or within the cucumber
garden on the east side of the house.
5) Photograph of the site of
Steventon Rectory (detail), showing a pump, the only remaining object from Jane
Austen’s time. Nicolson (22-23),
courtesy of Stephen Colover. THE FRONT Now we come to the two front views. They are similar, with doors and windows disposed along a central axis. Differences, however, abound:
The
Chimney A huge chimney towers over both the
back view of the house and the front view of the smaller house. It seems to have been a central chimney
serving more than one fireplace. But in
Anna’s sketch of the larger house, this commanding chimney has disappeared,
unless simply obscured by her persistent foliage. Instead, a tall chimney stands on the far east (left) end of the
roof. Not only does this chimney not
appear in the back view, but its location suggests a matching chimney serving
the other side of the house which is not present in the back view either. The subject of the chimney
regrettably introduces yet another rendering of Steventon rectory that we are
obliged to consider. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir
is illustrated by a wood engraving that was made from Anna’s sketch of the
larger house.4
6) Wood engraving of Steventon
Rectory from James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir (22). By permission of Oxford University Press. It wasn’t a simple translation of a scene from one medium to another,
however, because substantial changes were made. Where all was impressionistic haze in the sketch is now
hard-edged assertiveness. The chief difference between Anna’s drawing and the later woodcut of the larger house is the sudden addition of the central chimney. Not just any chimney, but an emphatic and imposing one that vehemently exaggerated the two renderings of a central chimney in the front view of the smaller house, and in the back view. In those views, Anna showed it centered, although possibly a hair to the west of exact center. But the phallic chimney in the woodcut is far off center to the west, midway between the middle and the west attic windows. The
Fence Amid contradictory views, failed
correspondences and bewildering details, one piece of evidence stands
refreshingly clear—the fence that in the sketch of the smaller house separates
it from the road. It is a distinctive
fence, divided into sections about six feet long. A horizontal rail runs equidistant between a top rail and the
ground; below this middle rail stand evenly spaced pickets. On the east (left) side of the house it is
broken by a gate (set in double posts) which has vertical pickets between the
middle and top rails, as well. Beyond
the gate is an open space which presumably is a drive. In Anna’s drawing of the back view,
the clearing is distinct. And beyond
it—that very fence and gate. This
drawing clearly shows the same distinguishing arrangement of pickets on the
fence, and the gate with its double posts and pickets above the middle rail.
7) Detail of the fence and gate
from Anna Lefroy’s sketch of the front of the smaller house.
8) Detail of the fence and gate
from Anna Lefroy’s 1814 sketch of the back of Steventon Rectory. The
Sweep Before the larger house is a drive culminating in a spacious sweep for
carriages to turn around. No such drive
leads to the smaller house which is closely bordered by the road. Although neither sketch perfectly accords
with the glebe map of 1821, the sketch of the smaller house is the better
fit. In that sketch, a road parallels
the front of the house as does the drive that branches from the main road on
the map. What the glebe map doesn’t
show is a looping sweep. Austen-Leigh firmly asserts the
presence of a long carriage drive.
“North of the house, the road from Deane to Popham Lane ran at a
sufficient distance from the front to allow a carriage drive, through turf and
trees” (Memoir 23). Jane Austen herself would seem to
clinch the matter. She wrote to
Cassandra in November, 1800 about a great storm that felled trees on the
property. “—I was sitting alone in the
dining room, when an odd kind of crash startled me—in a moment afterwards it
was repeated; I then went to the window, which I reached just in time to see
the last of our two highly valued Elms descend into the Sweep!!!!!” (8-9 November 1800). If the presence of the fence in the
drawing of the back view, and in the drawing of the front of the smaller house,
would seem to determine that the smaller house must indeed be the rectory, then
the presence of the sweep in James Edward’s reminiscences and Austen’s own
words would seem to settle the matter in favor of the larger house. One way to resolve this dilemma is to
proceed into the house itself and discover the location of the dining room from
which Austen saw the tree fall. INSIDE THE HOUSE James Edward tells us that the sweep was in front of the house, but Austen herself says only that it was visible from the dining room window. Where was the dining room? Downstairs Austen’s niece, Catherine Austen
Hubback, never saw the rectory, but left this description apparently gleaned
from the reminiscences of her father, Frank, and others. “The Parsonage consisted of three rooms in
front on the ground floor—the best parlour, the common parlour and the kitchen;
behind these were Mr. Austen’s study, the back kitchen, and the stairs” (Le
Faye 17). Anna, who lived at Steventon until she was twenty-one, wrote,
The lower bow window [in back],
looking so cheerfully into the sunny garden, up the middle grass walk bordered with strawberry
beds, to the sundial, belonged to my Grand Father’s study; his own exclusive property,
& safe from the bustle of all household cares. The Dining or common sitting room looked to the
front, & was lighted by two casement windows; on the same side, the principal door of the
house opened into a parlour of smaller size.
Visitors, it may be presumed, were few and rare; but
not a whit the less welcome would they have been to my Grand Mother on account of their
finding her seated in this very entrance parlour, busily engaged with her needle, in making or repairing (Le Faye 18).
We probably know on which side of
the house the kitchen lay. The 1697
description of the property notes that the original house had been “outletted
at the West end, and part of the South side over the Cellar” (Tucker 1983,
29). A kitchen would probably have been
built over a cellar for the convenient storage of foodstuffs. The southwest wing is also dominated by a broad
fireplace and tall chimney, suggesting that it was used for cooking, roasting,
and baking. A kitchen on that side of
the house would also be near the outbuildings which we know included not only
the granary, but a dairy, hen house, stables, and other farm buildings. The glebe map and Anna’s footpath both
indicate that these buildings lay to the west of the house. With these fixed points, it is
possible to devise a room plan for the downstairs. This plan isn’t meant to indicate size, but to suggest the
relationship of the rooms to each other.
9) The probable arrangement of
the downstairs rooms at Steventon. Jane Austen was sitting in the
eastern room, the dining room, also called the parlor, when the violent storm
felled the elm tree. This room,
according to Anna, looked to the front and had two windows; these windows might
both have been in the front, or one in the front (north) and one in the east
side overlooking the garden. The sweep
may have been in front of the house, as shown in the drawing of the larger
house and the woodcut based on it. But
it is also possible that the sweep may have been that cleared space to the east
of the house that appears in Anna’s drawings of both the back and the front of
the smaller house. Upstairs According to Catherine Austen
Hubback, the rectory also contained “seven bedrooms, and three attics. The rooms were low-pitched, but not
otherwise bad, and compared with the usual stile of such buildings, it might be
considered a very good house” (Austen-Leigh, William, 17). How large these bedrooms were is
open to conjecture. Anna noted that the bedroom that Jane and Cassandra had
always used was smaller than a room later given to them for an adjoining
drawing room (Le Faye 69). Jane,
visiting Bath in 1799, described to Cassandra a room in a sarcastic vein that
undercuts the description of their bedroom at home, “we have two very nice
sized rooms, with dirty Quilts & everything comfortable. I have the outward & larger apartment,
as I ought to have; which is quite as large as our bed room at home, & my
Mother’s is not materially less” (17 May 1799). One pleasing side note to the
investigation of the size of the rectory is discovering the apparent location
of the bedroom that Jane and Cassandra shared.
It appears to have been on the eastern side of the house. The source of this is Anna, who remembered
that after their brothers had grown up and gone, and they were young women,
“one of the Bed chambers, that5 over the Dining room, was plainly
fitted up, & converted into a sort of Drawing room. . . . This room, the
Dressing room, as they were pleased to call it, communicated with one of
smaller size where my two Aunts slept” (Le Faye 69). She recalled that a press stood with its back to the wall that
adjoined the bedroom, and opposite the fireplace. On one wall, two windows enclosed a looking-glass, beneath which
was a table containing “2 Tonbridge-ware work boxes” (Le Faye 69). This transformation probably took
place in December 1798, just before Jane turned twenty-three when she wrote
Cassandra, “We live entirely in the dressing-room now, which I like very much;
I always feel so much more elegant in it than in the parlour” (1-2 December
1798). Because we cannot know in which
direction the rooms were laid out, we can’t determine which side the windows
were on, and they are marked in italics for that reason. They were on one side or the other. As in the other sketch, only the
relationships are indicated; size and proportion are unknown.
10) The probable arrangement of the
dressing room and bedroom of Jane and Cassandra Austen at Steventon. Theirs was not the only sitting room
apparently converted from a bedroom, because Austen wrote that there were four
sitting rooms in the house (14-16 January 1801). If one counts the two
downstairs parlors and the sisters’ drawing room, it suggests that her parents
may have made a room for themselves perhaps adjoining their bedroom which
contained “such a bed” that they took it to Bath rather than fail to find its
equal there (3-5 January 1801). Two sitting/bedroom suites would
account for four bedrooms. Austen notes
a possible fifth when she wrote to Cassandra about the “best bed-room” (3-5
January 1801), which may have been reserved for company. A closer accounting of bedrooms isn’t
possible from an enumeration of beds.
The only mention of their number is in 1801 when Jane wrote to Cassandra
that they were taking six beds with them to Bath: their parents’, “our own two, the best for a spare one, & two
for servants” (3-5 January 1801). Other
beds, apparently, were being left for James’s family. Having accounted for four or five
bedrooms, we cannot be certain that Hubback was correct in her reference to
seven. She never saw the house, and in
one case her account is open to question.
She noted that the rooms were low-pitched, yet Mr. Austen owned a book
case that was eight feet by eight feet.
A ceiling that is at least eight feet high doesn’t seem low-pitched,
except, perhaps, to the daughter of an admiral who may have been accustomed to
loftier ceilings. The
Attics Hubback was correct in that there
were three attics; we can see them in the sketch Anna made of the back of the
rectory. From this sketch it seems
possible that the attics in the additions did not communicate with that in the
front part of the house, although it is also possible that low doors were built
through. Since Hubback mentioned only
one stairway, it is possible that ladders were used to get from the second
story up to the attics in the two wings.
Because there are no windows in the attics over these wings, they may
have been used for storage rather than sleeping. At Chawton the garrets were planned for “Storeplaces” and
quarters for a manservant (20 November 1808). Tomalin suggests that the resident
pupils probably lived in the attics (23).
But if so, then where did the servants live? WHICH HOUSE? It was one house or the other. Perhaps some new discovery will unassailably
point the way to a certain choice; until then we have to use our best judgment.
The arguments favor the smaller house
and vary from empirical to impressionistic.
The appearance of the same distinctive fence in front of the smaller
house and in the back view has to be paramount. The chimney that dominates the smaller house and the back view is
missing in the drawing of the larger house, although it may simply be hidden by
an overhanging tree. Also important is the tone of apology Jane’s descendents take in describing the rectory. Anna, writing of the dressing room remembered “its scanty furniture and cheaply papered walls” (Le Faye 69). James Edward, who lived in the house with his own family, noted that,
the rooms were finished with less
elegance than would now be found in the most ordinary dwellings. No cornice marked the junction of wall and ceiling; while the
beams which supported the upper floors projected
into the rooms below in all their naked simplicity, covered only by a coat of paint or
whitewash: accordingly, it has since
been considered unworthy of being the Rectory house of a family living (23).
The smaller, humbler house required
a cozy but ungracious latticed entryway to protect the occupants of the parlor
directly within from wind, rain, and cold.
In fact, if one strips away the second story and adds thatching, it
bears a powerful resemblance to Anna’s sketch of the rustic cottages that made up
the village of Steventon, with their protected doors, attic dormers and
proximity to the road. James Edward
himself makes this point, “It may be that the contrast between the parsonage
house and the best class of cottages was not quite so extreme then as it would
be now” (39). The sketch of the Steventon cottages can be found in Cecil (22)
and Tomalin (after 76). The main argument in favor of the
larger house is the obvious one that James Edward chose it to illustrate the
rectory in his Memoir, with the presumed agreement of his sisters,
Caroline and Anna. All three grew up in
the house and knew it better than any other of Jane’s descendants. But finally, it is the fence that
persuades that it was the smaller house.
The fact that the same fence appears in Anna’s sketches of the back of
the rectory and the front of the smaller house overrides everything else. It is hard to overlook such a precise match
of an apparently unimportant detail.
Furthermore, Anna drew it in person, when it was there before her eyes
in 1814. Her memories, and those of
Caroline and James Edward, were more than forty-five years old by the time the Memoir
was written. Of her Aunt Jane, she
admitted, “my reminiscences are few; surprisingly so, considering how much I
saw of her in childhood, & how much intercourse we had in later years”
(Lefroy 157). It seems sensible to go
with the contemporary depiction: the
sketch of the smaller house. THE IDENTITY OF THE LARGER HOUSE How do we account for Anna’s sketch of the larger house? If it wasn’t Steventon rectory, do we just
dismiss it as the “not-Steventon-rectory” drawing? The subjects of all the drawings she made have been identified
and all seem to have been some place with which she was intimately
familiar. Why not, then, the larger
house? Martha Lloyd, the widow of Rev.
Noyes Lloyd rented Deane parsonage from Rev. Austen in 1789. Deane was within walking distance of the
Steventon rectory, and the Lloyd daughters, Martha and Mary, became good
friends of Cassandra and Jane. In 1792,
the Lloyds moved to Ibthorpe, less than twenty miles away. After the death of his first wife and Anna’s
mother, James married Mary Lloyd in January, 1797 and the Lloyds of Ibthorpe
became Anna’s new family. Following the
deaths of Rev. Austen and Mrs. Lloyd in 1805, Martha moved in with Mrs. Austen,
Jane and Cassandra; eventually she married Frank Austen in 1828. It is plausible that the larger
house Anna sketched might have been that of her step-mother’s family, the
Lloyds, and that the house was Ibthorpe.
11) Photograph of Ibthorpe
House from Nicolson, courtesy of Stephen Colover. Ibthorpe still stands, and the photograph above shows that like the
larger house that Anna drew, it has a hipped roof, three attic windows, five
upstairs windows, and two on either side of the front door. It has no central chimney, but rather end
chimneys, the left one of which Anna depicted.
A spacious yard allows room for a sweep. Small details don’t correspond:
the relation of the chimneys to the roof, the shape of the dormers and
the recessed front door. Let us imagine that this is the
correct supposition: the larger house
is Ibthorpe and the smaller, the rectory.
Why then did the larger house find its way into Edward’s 1870 Memoir when
he as well as Anna and Caroline well knew that it was the wrong house? One hint comes from the difference
between Anna’s original sketch of the larger house, and the woodcut that was
based on it. One is modest and engulfed
in foliage, the other is forceful and imposing. In the woodcut, the foliage had been pruned away to reveal a
triumphant chimney—the same chimney that appeared in Anna’s sketch of the back
of the house and the most prominent feature that they knew they would have to
include. Is it possible that the family
offered this more imposing house knowing it was not the rectory? There is something in the psychology of
Jane’s family and some subsequent biographers that required them to pretty up
much of her life. In this vein, she had
the happiest life in England’s happiest time—a reductive view challenged by
more recent biographers. The strongest proof of their
willingness to alter reality to prettify her life comes from her very
portrait. Cassandra painted a
watercolor portrait of Jane that shows a strong face unrelieved by the trouble
of a pleasant smile and her arms crossed almost truculently. The steel engraving of Jane in the Memoir,
however, has been doctored and what was an interesting and almost challenging
visage has become sweet, demure and characterless. Anna considered Cassandra’s
watercolor to be “hideously unlike” her aunt’s true appearance (Le Faye
75). But Cassandra was the family’s
artist. She left behind portraits of
the royals who were featured in Jane’s “History of England,” a painting of Jane
seated outside in a billowing blue gown and a lovely portrait of her niece,
Fanny Knight Knatchbull. So the family altered Cassandra’s
“hideously unlike” portrait and substituted their view of what Jane should have
looked like. It is not hard to believe
that a family that would do this to her face, would be more than willing to do
it to her house. The two portraits may
be found in almost all the biographies and online: The watercolor of Jane by Cassandra at: http://www.Janeaustensoci.freeuk.com/pages/janeausten1.htm. The steel engraving that appeared in the Memoir,
at: http://www.ashton-dennis.org/JANEPICT.JPG. SERVANTS, SONS AND STUDENTS How many people lived in this small
house? Three groups need to be counted,
the Austens’ servants, sons and students. Servants To understand how many servants may
have lived with the family at Steventon, it’s instructive to look at how many
servants they kept after Mr. Austen resigned and the family lived in straitened
circumstances. The Austens kept a fairly constant
ratio of one live-in servant per family member after they moved from Steventon
to Bath. Only a handful of letters
remain from the Bath period when Jane Austen fell silent. But on vacation in Lyme Regis in 1804, Jane
and her parents (Cassandra was at Godmersham with the Knights) took off with
four servants in tow: Molly, Jenny, a
cook, and a manservant named James, whom she praised to Cassandra. “My Mother’s shoes were never so well
blacked before, & our plate never looked so clean” (14 September 1804). Rev. Austen died in Bath in 1805,
and two years later, Mrs. Austen, Cassandra, and Jane moved with Martha Lloyd
to Southampton. In 1807 Austen made
mention of three maidservants: Molly,
Jenny and Phebe (7-8 January 1807).
The next letter acknowledges the assistance of a Mrs. Hall, in moving
in, and the addition of a gardener, Choles (8-9 February 1807), who was with
them until they fired him for drunkenness and replaced him with Thomas Carter
(30 January 1809). At Chawton, Austen’s home from 1809
until her death in 1817, at least two maidservants made their home with
them: Sally, who seems to have stayed
with them at least five years (29-30 November 1812; 23 January 1817), and Betsy
(29 January 1813). In addition, they
kept a cook and a new manservant, Browning (9 February 1813). Often during these years, Cassandra was at
Godmersham and Jane began making extended visits to her brother Henry in
London. It is not surprising, knowing how
many servants the Austens kept in their lean years, to learn that they employed
many more at Steventon. In October,
1798, Jane and her parents returned from a visit to Godmersham and Jane wrote
Cassandra, who stayed on, about the happenings at Steventon. Within the period of a little more than a
month, for a family that now included only their parents and the two of them, Austen
enumerated nine household servants:
Nancy Hilliard, Molly, Dame Bushell (a washerwoman whom John Steeven’s
wife was to replace) and Dame Staples who was acting as maidservant in the
absence of any other (27-28 October 1798).
In mid-November Nanny Hilliard’s illness necessitated the hiring of two
charwomen and Nanny Littleworth dressed Jane’s hair (25 November 1798). Soon a new maid was hired who, in addition
to cooking and sewing, was to be trained to work in the dairy (1-2 December
1798). It is impossible to know which
servants had quarters in the parsonage.
Because Nanny Hilliard had her child with her while the family was away,
it is possible that she did (27-28 October 1798), as well as Molly, Nanny Littleworth,
and the new maid. It is likely that the
women who did the washing and cleaning lived out and almost certain that John
Bond, her father’s bailiff, and the male laborers who worked the farm and
tended to the livestock did as well. Even though some servants did not
live in, they may regularly have spent nights at the parsonage when
circumstances warranted. Mrs. Austen’s
ill health, preparations for a visit or trip, days of washing and ironing
clothes, preserving and canning food—all these events may have been reason for
any of their women servants to stay over in beds and rooms that were maintained
for them. These same quarters may have
also housed temporary tutors: those
music, painting, and dancing instructors who made their ways through villages
at the time. In 1798 as many as nine servants saw
to the needs of four adults, three of whom were women who bore many household
responsibilities themselves. However,
when the house was filled with the Austen’s five sons (six until George was
moved to his caretakers’ home) and Rev. Austen’s teenage students, many more
servants would have been required and pupils’ tuitions would have helped pay
for them. The cooking, cleaning, and
laundering alone would have been daunting.
When the younger children returned from their village nannies, some of
the nannies, perhaps Hilliard and Littleworth, came with them as Jane’s poem to
Frank attests (26 July 1809). How many servants did the Austens
employ at the time Jane was sent away to school in 1783? Enough to fill the attics. Sons With the attics filled by servants,
how many people occupied the bedrooms? One hint of the number that could
squeeze into the rectory, albeit for a brief period, is given by Mrs. Austen
when she enumerated the thirteen present for Christmas celebrations in
1786: herself and Rev. Austen; five of
their children; Mr. Austen’s sister, Philadelphia Hancock; Hancock’s daughter,
Eliza de Feuillide and her young son with his French maid, and the two
motherless Cooper children (Le Faye 54).
In addition, there would have been the Steventon servants. Jane and Edward Cooper paid long
visits to Steventon at other times as well, according to James Edward’s Memoir
(27). They had lost their mother in
1783 and their father died in 1792, the year Jane Cooper was married from
Steventon. The Austen children were born over a
span of fourteen years and James, the oldest, left for Oxford the year Charles,
the youngest was born. James was born
February 13, 1765 and left for Oxford at fourteen in 1779. George, born August 26, 1766, was established
in his own household while still a child.
Edward, born October 7, 1767, began to make extended visits to the
Knights after 1779 at about the age of twelve and was adopted by them in 1783
at the age of sixteen. Henry, born June
8, 1771, did not leave home until 1788, when he went to Oxford at seventeen. Cassandra, born January 9, 1773, had
been making visits to her aunt and uncle, the Coopers, in Bath by the summer of
1782 when she was nine; she left for school with Jane in 1783 when she was
ten. Frank, born April 23, 1774, left
for the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth at twelve, in 1786. Jane, born December 16, 1775, went to school
in 1783 at the age of seven, returned to recover from her illness for one year,
and resumed school from 1785 to 1786.
Charles, born June 23, 1779, left for the Portsmouth facility at twelve
in 1791. The following table shows which
children were at home from the time Jane was born in 1775, through 1791 after
which the only children left at home were the girls, Cassandra, eighteen, and
Jane, fifteen. 12) Number of Austen Children at Home, 1775-1791
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