Out & About July 2017

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historians now call “spinster clusters” – little
gangs of companions, cousins, sisters and
best friends. With their meagre resources
pooled together they would have been able to
buy a house and live a reasonable life.
Because Cassandra didn’t marry, Jane didn’t
have to. They had a rich brother who eventually
gave them a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire.
Jane and Cassandra lived there with Jane’s
best friend, Martha Lloyd (the
sister of Eliza Fowle, the vicar’s wife in
Kintbury) and Jane’s mother, who sat on the
sofa, old and toothless.
By all accounts, they lived together in complete
happiness. Cassandra and Martha ran the
house. It was Jane’s job to make breakfast,
after which she sat at her little table and wrote.
She was at Chawton from 1808 until 1817,
when she died, and in that time she had five
novels published.
Jane Austen’s fame was posthumous.
Can you explain why?
GH: Actually, Jane Austen’s novels were
growing in popularity while she was still alive.
Her books were quite famous, even reviewed
by the celebrated author Sir Walter Scott.
Pride and Prejudice and Emma were
especially well-known.
The reason that she herself was not widely
known is that she published her books
anonymously, simply ‘By a lady’.
The fly in the ointment came when one of her
brothers, Henry, a banker and the most worldly
of the Austen boys, gave her secret away.
Dazzled by celebrity, he just couldn’t resist
bragging to people about his talented sister.
The secret trickled down until it reached the
ears of the physician to the Prince of Wales,
hence the reason that Jane had to dedicate
Emma to the Prince of Wales.
Jane really did closely guard her secret identity.
Even her nieces and nephews, and fellow
villagers had no idea. Rather charmingly, Jane,
as an act of good will, read Pride and Prejudice
to an elderly blind neighbour, Miss Mary Benn,
who had no idea that author and narrator were
one and the same.
Jane was very young when she died. Can
you tell us what happened?
GH: She died in Winchester, which is where
Cassandra had taken her to be treated by a
celebrated doctor.
It is believed that she probably had Addison’s
Disease, which affects the kidneys. She died
in her sister’s arms, at just 41 years of age, on
July 18, 1817.
The rest of her family lived long lives; two
brothers continued well into their 90s.
She was laid to rest in Winchester Cathedral.
In the summer of 1816, the year before Jane
died, the sisters went to Cheltenham to take
the waters, and, as they always did en route to
Bath or Cheltenham, they stopped in Kintbury
to visit the Fowles.
One of the daughters of the house, Mary-Jane,
remembers that Jane wandered around looking
at everything in a very particular way, as if she
knew that she would not see these treasured
things again. That was the last time she was
there.
However, Cassandra kept visiting her dear
Jane Austen
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