The Real Jane Austen

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The Real Jane Austen Page 41

by Paula Byrne


  on Jane’s sense of humour 98

  recollections of Austen family retirement in Bath 160, 165

  Sir Charles Grandison or the Happy Man 141

  Which is the Heroine? 291

  Lefroy, Anne (1749–1804)

  character and description 193–6

  charitable works 195–6

  comment on lashing of naval lad 241

  death of 196

  friendship with Jane 195, 196–7

  miniature portrait of 193

  romantic machinations 175, 178–9

  Lefroy, Benjamin 257

  Lefroy, Charles 260

  Lefroy, Christopher Edward 196

  Lefroy, Revd George 193–4

  Lefroy, Jemima 265

  Lefroy, Julia 265

  Lefroy, Tom 174, 175–7, 185, 195, 318

  Leigh, Chandos, Baron Leigh of the second creation 234

  Leigh, General Charles 92

  Leigh, Edward, 3rd Baron Leigh 228

  Leigh, Edward, 5th Baron Leigh (d.1786) 226–7

  Leigh family 19, 36, 76, 228

  Leigh, Lieutenant-Colonel George 92

  Leigh, Georgiana Augusta 92

  Leigh, James Henry 226, 227, 234

  Leigh, Julia Judith Twiselton 234

  Leigh, Mary 226, 227, 229, 235

  Leigh, Medora 92

  Leigh, Theophilus 83

  Leigh, Revd Thomas (d.1813) 227–8, 233, 234

  Leigh, Sir Thomas 84

  Leigh, Thomas (Elizabethan gentleman) 226

  Leigh, Tom (uncle) 18

  Leigh-Perrot, James (d.1817) 86, 156, 234, 325

  Leigh-Perrot, Mrs Jane Cholmeley

  disliked by Jane 156

  friendship with Maria Edgeworth 86

  heir to estate in Barbados 219

  inherits everything on her husband’s death 325

  and Jane’s romance with Harry Digweed 178

  shoplifting incident 161–3

  visit of Jane, Cassandra and their mother 155

  Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote 78

  Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Prince 302

  Lewes, G.H. 235

  Lewis, M.G., The Monk 80

  libraries 77, 78, 166

  Lindsay, Captain John 214

  Linley, Elizabeth 159

  Liston, John 142

  Littleworth, Anne ‘Nanny’ 256

  Littleworth family 17

  Littleworth, John 256

  Lloyd sisters 94–5, 112

  Loiterer periodical 67–70

  London 153–5, 280, 285, 306

  London riots 42–3, 49–50, 127

  love and marriage 173–90

  Luscombe Castle 316

  Lyceum Theatre 143

  Lyford, Giles King 120

  Lyford, John 174

  Lyme Regis 1–3, 314, 317–18, 320, 322

  Macaulay, Catherine 157

  Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling 66

  Madras (now Chennai) 33

  Mangin, Nicolas 46

  Mansfield, Lord 8, 15, 213–16, 256

  Manydown 139, 175

  Marbeouf, Marquise de 46

  Margate 312–13

  Marie Antoinette 41, 44, 50

  Mary Queen of Scots 61–2, 64

  Maskelyne, Edmund 32

  Maskelyne, Margaret 32, 33

  Matilda (play) 136, 137

  Matthews, Charles 145

  Meadows, Captain John 123

  mental illness 18–19

  Micheldever 15

  Middleton, Charlotte Maria 258–9

  The Midnight Bell (Gothic novel) 269

  Milbanke, Annabella 283

  Military Dictionary 130, 132

  militia 123–31

  miniatures 193

  Minton, Lord 298

  Mitford, Mary Russell 174, 305

  Moira, Lord 132

  Molière 145

  Monk Sherborne 18

  Monro, John 227

  Moore, Dr John, 246, 350

  Moore, General Sir John 246–7, 350

  More, Mrs Hannah 76, 79, 201, 203, 204

  Coelebs in Search of a Wife 201–2

  Morning Chronicle 75

  Morning Herald 314

  Morrell, Deacon 20

  Murray, John 77, 285, 289, 295–6, 299–300, 301, 306, 308

  Murray, Lady Elizabeth 15, 213–14

  Musgrave, Mrs 16

  Namur (ship) 100

  Napoleon Bonaparte 246

  Nash, John 316

  Nelson, Lord 244

  Netley Abbey 245

  New Down 15

  Newnham, Francis 20

  Newton, John, ‘Amazing Grace’ 27

  Nibbs, George 20, 21, 220

  Nibbs, James 220

  Norris, Robert 222–3

  novels 78–82

  epistolary 102, 273–4

  Gothic 42, 49, 71, 84–5, 149, 221

  Old Smoaker 314

  O’Neill, Eliza 144, 145

  opium 34, 37, 39, 251

  Orme, Edward, An Essay on Transparent Prints and transparencies in General 9

  Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl 87

  Oxford 23, 41

  Oxfordshire Militia 124–8

  Palmer family 101

  Pantheon (Oxford Street) 143

  Papillon, Mr 183

  Parish, Sam 127

  Pasley, Charles, An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire 218

  T. Payne, publishers 75

  Pearson, Mary 129

  Perseverance (ship) 239

  Phoenix (frigate) 239

  Pierpont Morgan Library (New York) 271

  Pinnock, Mary 220

  Pinny 1

  Pitt the Younger, William 126

  The Poetical Register and Repository of Fugitive Poetry 194

  Pope, Jane 142

  Popham, Sir Home 246

  Portsdown Lodge (Portsmouth) 251

  Portsmouth 248–9, 251

  Portsmouth, Lord 20, 21

  Powlett, Charles 175, 177–8

  Prince Regent 297–301

  profiles 9–10, 13–14

  Prowting, Catherine 294

  Quarterly Review 203–4, 301

  Quincy, Miss Susan 4–5, 6

  Radcliffe, Mrs Ann 76, 79

  The Italian 270

  The Mysteries of Udolpho 270

  Ravenshaw, Right Hon. Lord 137

  Reading 23–4

  Reading Mercury 67, 135

  Red Rover (stage-coach) 116

  religion 198–210

  Repton, Humphry 76, 213, 226, 233, 316

  The Retreat 19

  Richardson, Samuel 64, 141

  Clarissa 79, 81

  Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded 56, 81

  Sir Charles Grandison 81, 306

  Rosings Park 235

  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 265

  La Nouvelle Héloïse 66

  Social Contract 66

  Rowling 235

  Royal Mail 111–12, 116

  Royal Navy 6, 63, 239–44, 249, 250

  St Albans (ship) 246

  St John’s College, Oxford 66, 67

  St Michael, Caerhays 91–2

  St Nicholas’s, Steventon 173–4

  St Swithin’s, Bath 197

  Scarlets 235

  Scott, Sir Walter 9, 87, 89, 301–2

  The Antiquary 292

  seaside resorts 1–2, 311–24, 328–9

  sensibility (or sentimentalism), cult of 65–6

  Sevenoaks 16

  Seymour, William 183, 270, 271

  Shadwell, Thomas, The Libertine 145

  Shakespeare, William

  Henry IV Part One 298

  King John 143

  The Merchant of Venice 144, 146

  Richard III 144

  Sharp, Anne 140, 209, 260

  shawls 29–30

  Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 158–9, 282–3, 284

  School for Scandal 139, 142

&nbs
p; The Rivals 78, 137

  Sherlock, Bishop Thomas 205

  Shirreff, Miss 283, 284

  shopping 153–9, 161–3, 280, 306

  Siddons, Sarah 76, 143–4

  Sidmouth 1, 180, 315–16

  silhouettes see profiles

  slavery 7, 8, 27, 72, 215–23, 222–3

  Smollett, Tobias, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker 311–12

  Somersett, James 215–16, 219

  Sotherton Court 231–2, 235

  Southampton 23, 77, 93, 110, 116, 125, 136, 155, 226, 245

  Staël, Madame de 296

  Stanier Clarke, Revd James see Clarke, Revd James Stanier

  Stapleton Prison (Bristol) 125

  Stephens, Catherine 146

  Sterne, Laurence, Sentimental Journey 66

  Steventon 1, 6, 14, 20, 22, 41–2, 43–4, 45, 135, 137–9, 195, 200, 219, 220

  Steventon Manor House 173, 178

  Stoneleigh Abbey (Warwickshire) 110, 183, 225, 226–35, 235

  Strachey, Jenny 36

  Stuart, Frank 20

  Surrey Regiment 124

  Sutherland, Kathryn 295

  Taylor, Edward 175

  Teignmouth 1, 315, 316

  Tenby 315

  Terry, Daniel 145

  Theatre Royal (Bath) 142, 146

  Theatre Royal (Covent Garden) 141, 142, 143, 144–5, 146

  Theatre Royal (Drury Lane) 141, 142

  theatricals and theatre-going 119, 136–50, 194, 219, 274

  Tilson, Frances 185

  The Times 246–7

  Times (stage-coach) 116

  transparencies 9

  travel and transport 109–21, 268

  Trevanion, Charlotte Hosier 91–2, 93

  Trevanion, Georgiana 91

  Trevanion, Henry 92

  Trevanion, John Purcell 91

  Trevanion, Marie-Violette 92

  Tuke, William 19

  Twiselton, Elizabeth, Dowager Lady Saye and Sele 231

  Twiselton, Mary-Cassandra 169

  Up Lyme 1

  Vanderstegen, William 20, 21

  Vermeer 9

  von la Roche, Sophie 155

  The Vyne (Hampshire) 235

  Wallop, John Charles, Lord Lymington 20–1

  Walter family 219

  Walter, Philadelphia ‘Phylly’

  comment on George Austen’s mental defects 45

  comment on theatricals at Steventon 137–8

  dislike for Jane 44

  learns of Eliza’s dissipated life 41

  preserves Eliza de Feuillide’s letters 219–20

  receives of Henry Austen 129

  Walter, Susannah 220

  Walter, William 219

  Walter, William Hampson 219

  Wargrave (Berkshire) 137

  Warren, John 20, 174, 175

  Wellings, William 13

  West, Benjamin, Christ Rejected 199

  West Indies 21, 220

  West, Jane 87, 88

  Weymouth 313, 317, 320

  Whately, Richard, Archbishop of Dublin 203–4

  Wigget, Caroline 15

  Wilberforce, William 201

  Williams, Captain Sir Thomas 100, 237

  Willis, Dr Francis 19, 227

  Winchester 6, 120–1, 209

  Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 124

  Wood, John 167, 168

  Woolf, Virginia 54–5

  Wordsworth, William 26, 55, 265

  Worthing 225–6

  writing boxes 267–8, 269, 287

  Yalden, Mr 117

  Zoffany, Johann 213

  Zong (slaving vessel) 216, 218

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of this biography would not have been possible without the work of other Jane Austen scholars, past and present. Many local debts are acknowledged in the endnotes. I owe most to the editions of Jane Austen’s letters by Lord Brabourne (1884), R. W. Chapman (1932 and 1952) and Deirdre Le Faye (1995 and 2011), and to A Family Record by Richard and William Austen-Leigh (1913) and its revision by Le Faye (1989). Deirdre Le Faye’s extraordinarily detailed A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family (2006) has been my constant companion. It is now the definitive day-to-day record of the life of Austen, and perhaps the book that makes unnecessary any further chronological cradle-to-grave biography. Barring a miracle such as the discovery of a cache of lost letters, if future biographers are to say anything new they will have to be innovative in their methods, as I have tried to be here. But innovation often has a way of looking back as well as forward, and so it has been for me: I have drawn particular inspiration from Constance Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Homes and her Friends (1902), which was based on a pilgrimage to the places where Austen lived and which included illustrations by Constance’s sister, Ellen: this created a pioneering combination of ‘footsteps’ (a technique I already knew from Richard Holmes, the living biographer whom I most admire) and ‘things’ (among Ellen Hill’s sketches are the steps on the Cobb and Jane Austen’s ivory cup and ball).

  The other innovation that has been of enormous assistance in my research is the internet: what previous biographer has had access at the click of a mouse to the full text of, say, the novels of Jane Austen’s cousins or the now obscure books mentioned in her letters? Constance Hill’s first chapter was called ‘An Arrival in Austen-land’: a hundred years later, Austen-land is a teeming virtual world of online journals and blogs where remarkably fresh scholarship co-exists with unashamedly ‘Janeite’ sentiment: my special thanks to pemberley.com, austenprose.com, austenonly.com and many more.

  Back in the world visited by Constance Hill, I have had enormous help from Louise West and all the staff at Jane Austen’s House Museum.

  Professor Kathryn Sutherland has been generous with both warm friendship and exemplary scholarship, and since my arrival in Oxford I have been lucky enough to enter a sisterly circle of Austen scholars, including Fiona Stafford, Mary Favret, Freya Johnston and Nicola Trott. My thanks to Kelvin Everest and Edward Burns for their help with my early thoughts on Austen when I was at the University of Liverpool, and to the great Austen scholar Claudia L. Johnson, who has been a valued supporter ever since she examined my doctorate.

  The jury remains out on the plumbago drawing of ‘Miss Jane Austin’, but thanks to the research that went into the television documentary ‘Jane Austen: The Unseen Portrait?’ we can be sure that it is authentic to the Regency period, and for this I am deeply grateful to Liz Hartford, Neil Crombie, all the team at Seneca Productions and all the expert contributors, especially Roy Davids, Hilary Davidson of the Museum of London and Nicholas Eastaugh of Art Access and Research; also to Janice Hadlow and Mark Bell at BBC2.

  For particular help with the sourcing of images, my thanks to Mette Korsholm of the David Collection, Copenhagen; Marcie Knowles, lace collector in Alabama; David Rymill and Nicola Pink at the Hampshire Record Office; Marilyn Palmeri at the Morgan Library, New York; Sara Denham and Emma Rutherford at Philip Mould and Company; Daniel Bell at the Royal Collection; Beverley Green at the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton; Bernard Robinson and Kevin Tobin at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock; Katherine Marshall at Sotheby’s; Paula Cornwell and Gretchen Ames at Stoneleigh Abbey; Olivia Stroud at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Bob Bearman drew my attention to the importance of the Stoneleigh archive in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office in Stratford-upon-Avon and David McClay, Curator of the John Murray Archive, was generous with his time. Richard Ovenden provided wonderful support from the Bodleian Library. Claire Johnstone of Mansfield College, Oxford, checked and corrected references for me at amazing speed, despite being in the process of moving house.

  For the opportunity to try out material in advance of publication, I am grateful to James Runcie of the Bath Literature Festival, Vicky Bennett of the Chipping Campden Literature Festival and Tim Hipperson and Juliette Coles of Oundle School.

  At HarperPress, Arabella P
ike is the best of all possible commissioning editors – massively enthusiastic in her support for my books but also rigorous and imaginative in her line-by-line editing. The same goes for her counterpart, Terry Karten in New York. Kate Tolley saw the book through the press in record time, an achievement all the more remarkable because of the number of illustrations, and Peter James was an amazing copy editor, making invaluable suggestions and saving me from crass errors.

  As the life of Jane Austen shows, it has never been easy for a woman to earn her living by the pen, but in our own very difficult time for the economics of authorship no professional biographer could wish for better agents than Andrew Wylie and Sarah Chalfant.

  Tom Bate took superb photographs of both documents and places. Following in Jane Austen’s footsteps with him, and on other occasions with my parents Tim and Clare Byrne, has been one of the great pleasures of the research. My niece Sarah Bate helped with references. Many thanks to Agnieszka Kuzminska, without whose hard work and help with the children I would have been lost. Ecclesiastical minutiae were furnished by my dear friends the Reverends Matthew Catterick and Paul Edmondson.

  During the hectic process of completing the book in time for the bicentenary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, while also settling three children into new schools and taking on the busy role of ‘Mrs Provost’, my sanity was preserved by Northwick Park (where Warren Hastings came over from Daylesford to visit) and by all my friends there, especially Betina Goodall, Fiona Laidlaw and Katy Whyard.

  Above all, my deepest gratitude is reserved for my dearest husband Jonathan Bate. I could not have written this book without his faith, love and support. I am thankful to have him in my life.

  About the Author

  PAULA BYRNE’S first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, was shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize and has been described by Paul Johnson as “the best book on Jane Austen.” Her second, Perdita, was a much-praised biography of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary Robinson; and her third book, Mad World, was a highly acclaimed and brilliantly original biography of Evelyn Waugh. In 2011 Paula Byrne made a BBC documentary about her discovery of a portrait of Jane Austen, thought by many experts to be the only professional portrait of the novelist painted from life. She is married to the critic and biographer Jonathan Bate and lives in Oxford.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Paula Byrne

  Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson

  Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

  Copyright

 

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