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  immediately. Jane nearly died. She recovered with her mother's nursing, but Mrs. Cooper, who took her daughter away, and went back to Bath with her, had caught the infection, and shortly after died herself.

  This severe early illness does not seem to have made the Austens unduly anxious about their younger daughter, and quite soon another boarding school experiment was tried, this time with much more success. The Abbey School at Reading where Jane and Cassandra

  were sent was kept by an elderly lady called Mrs. Latournelle. It was a simple sort of place, and Mrs. Sherwood, who went to the Abbey School about five years later than the Austens, has left a vivid account of it in her autobiography.

  Mrs. Latournelle was far removed from the severity of Mrs. Cawley.

  It was true that her cap and neckerchief were always starched and spotless, that her parlor was hung round with pictures of urns and weeping willows embroidered in chenille; but she was at the same time stout and very active, although she had a cork leg, and Mrs.

  Sherwood

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  estimated her capacity as fit for nothing but giving out clothes for the wash, ordering dinner and making tea. She added that so far as she could remember, Mrs. Latournelle's conversation was never so fluent as upon the topic of plays and play-acting, green-room anecdotes and the private lives of actors.

  The school buildings were romantic, formed in part as they were of the old gatehouse of the Abbey, and surrounded by a spacious, shady garden, very delightful to the girls on hot summer evenings. The régime was easy-going in the extreme. Provided the girls appeared in the tutor's study for a few hours each morning, they could spend the rest of the day gossiping in the turrets, lounging in the garden or out of the window above the gateway, quite undeterred by the jovial old lady of the cork leg. At the same time the domestic arrangements were admirably clean and comfortable. Altogether it seems to have been a school in a thousand.

  The Austens' stay, however, was not a lengthy one. When Jane was nine they returned home, and from that time they never left it. Mr.

  Austen had sent his daughters away for the benefit of a young lady's education, and they may indeed have "scrambled themselves" into the rudiments of one, for if Mrs. Latournelle did not arduously promote a girl's education, at least she did not, like some

  schoolmistresses, go out of her way to obstruct it; but there can be no doubt that Jane Austen's real education was pined in the years between nine and sixteen which she spent under her father's care.

  When Henry Austen prefixed a short biographical notice of his sister to the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, he dwelt on what the Rector had done for his brilliant child. "Being not only a profound scholar, but possesssing a most exquisite taste in every species of literature, it is not wonderful that his daughter

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  Jane should at a very early age have become sensible to the charms of style and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language."

  Whether she joined her brothers' lessons in the Rector's study, or whether Mr. Austen gave her what time he could spare apart from them, we do not know. His attention was not now so fully occupied by his sons. James, who was twelve years older than Jane, had

  already obtained an Oxford degree and was a Fellow of St. John's.

  He was the most scholarly of all the brothers, and Jane very much admired his gifts; he was the least lively of the family, with a thin face and dark melancholy eyes; very much in sympathy with the

  dawning Romantic Revival, and fond of Cowper's poetry. The

  second brother, Edward, had been removed from the family circle by what was, from a worldly point of view, a stroke of fantastical good fortune. A distant connection of Mr. Austen's, Mr. Thomas Knight of Chawton House in Hampshire and Godmersham Park in Kent, had

  no children of his own. His family had always been kindly disposed to the Austens and he and his wife had taken a great fancy to Edward and often had him for visits at Chawton or Godmersham, so much so that Mr. Austen began at last to protest and say Edward was getting too far behind with his Latin grammar; but Mrs. Austen said: "I think, my dear, you had better oblige your cousins and let the child go"; and in due course Mr. Knight adopted Edward and made him the heir to his property. The impression given by Edward's portrait is not that of a clever man, but of an eminently sound and capable one.

  Mr. and Mrs. Knight chose the one among the Austen boys most

  suited to the career of a country gentleman; they brought him up with that end perpetually in view, and instead of putting him to the University, as his father would probably have

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  done, they sent him to make the Grand Tour; thus he was abroad when his sisters came home from Reading.

  Widely different from James or Edward, was the eldest brother now living at home, Henry, the handsomest, most fascinating, least stable of all the family. Henry inherited his father's bright hazel eyes, and the gaiety and good humor which were family characteristics were concentrated in him with an effect of positive brilliance. He was not profound, but he learned so readily, and executed everything he did with such elegance and dash, that his father's affection for him somewhat overpowered his judgment, and he thought Henry the

  cleverest of all his children. High spirits and a flow of stimulating conversation made him a delight in a household where the inmates were all prepared to enjoy each other's company, and though people not under the spell of his immediate presence, and writing of him a generation or so later, could point out his weaknesses--how, unlike his brothers, he could not decide on a career and pursue it without looking back, but was first a soldier, then a banker and last a clergyman; how he made a marriage that was not to the family's taste; and that when he wrote on a serious subject his sense of humor could not save him from being pompous and jejune--nonetheless, he has an infinite claim on our attention and gratitude; he was Jane Austen's favorite brother, and it was he who left the short but invaluable account of her.

  The two youngest brothers were also at home, though Francis, a year older than Jane, was soon, at the age of twelve, to enter the Naval Academy at Portsmouth. Francis, as might be expected of the infant horse-dealer, was a "selfcontained" child, and remarkably clever with his hands. When he grew up he made toys for his children

  which were

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  carefully handed down to generations of descendants. He had a mop of curly hair, and when he had been told to keep out of a room which he wanted to enter, the door would gradually open and the curls would make their appearance. He was resolute and dauntless in the pursuit of his own way, and never frightened of anything, except the sudden braying of a donkey.

  The baby, Charles, was very much the property and plaything of his little sisters; when he was a man he was still to Cassandra and Jane

  "our own little brother." It was a very full and well-balanced family life for Jane; parents differing widely but perfectly in sympathy, older brothers to amuse and interest her, a younger brother to take care of, and, more important than all the rest, a sister.

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  2

  BESIDES THE immediate family, there was a relation who, from

  Jane's seventh year or so onward, occupied a most important place in the Austens' attention; whose cleverness, elegance and fashion made her fascinating to Jane as the latter grew up. Jane was very early able to be amused by people's unconscious humor, but she also delighted in positive wit and sparkle, and her father's niece, Eliza Hancock, besides commanding her admiration and affection, is one of the very few people who are pointed out as having inspired a character in one of Jane Austen's novels.

  Eliza, or Betsy as she was called at first, was the child of Mr.

  Austen's sister Philadelphia and a Dr. Hancock who was known to the great Warren Hastings. Betsy was born in India; she was small, very pretty, with a brown complexion and large black eyes, and like many Anglo-Indian children she grew up imperious and spoiled,

  w
ith a conviction of her own importance that even the Austen good sense could never entirely subdue. Her mother doted on her; and it was to her mother's friendship with a Mrs. Buchanan that Betsy owed a piece of remarkable good fortune. Mrs. Buchanan, the

  widow of an officer who had perished in the Black Hole, became Warren Hastings' first wife, and when,

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  a few years later, she died at the birth of a daughter, leaving a boy of three years old, Hastings, anxious to send his son away from the baneful effects of the Indian climate, was only too thankful to hear of Mrs. Hancock's brother, the Rev. George Austen, as a guardian for little George. The latter thus became one of Mr. Austen's earliest pupils, though, as he was little more than a baby, he was more in Mrs. Austen's care than the Rector's; and when he died at the age of six of "a putrid sore throat," Mrs. Austen was almost as much in grief as if he had been a child of her own. In the meantime, the Governor-General, a domestic man and very fond of children, was grateful for the kindness which Mrs. Hancock showed him in his misery, and when her own daughter was born he stood godfather to the baby and gave her the name he had meant to give his own.

  It was Dr. Hancock's intention to make a comfortable fortune and come home to spend it; but when he had settled in England, he found that his means were less adequate than he had thought, and that he himself was obliged to go out to India once more and rebuild his fortune. Left in England, Mrs. Hancock relied completely on her brother's protection and advice, and Betsy quite fell in love with her handsome, kindly uncle. Mr. Austen, with his fondness for

  intelligent and lively children, was less critical in his affection than Mrs. Austen was likely to be, and was perhaps more agreeable to Miss Betsy as an uncle than Mrs. Austen as an aunt.

  Before he could return to his family, Dr. Hancock died in India, leaving his affairs in a much-embarrassed state, but the generosity of Warren Hastings came to the relief of his goddaughter and her

  mother. He settled ten thousand pounds upon them.

  Having lost her husband, and being at the same time comfortably provided for, Mrs. Hancock now had nothing

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  in the world to think of but giving Betsy every advantage and every pleasure that she could possibly obtain for her. She decided that her education should be finished abroad, and in 1780, when Jane was a child of five, Betsy, now known as Eliza, moved with her mother to Paris.

  The first mutterings of the Revolution could be heard by those who had ears to hear, but such people did not include Mrs. Hancock and her gay, excitable, pretty daughter. Within the narrow sphere of Parisian society it was possible to be as elegant, as dissipated, as self-centered, as blind and deaf, as seems scarcely credible to those living in a later age, to whom, on looking back, nine years seems but a moment in time before the avalanche of that gigantic disruption.

  To the eager debutante the social structure in which she moved seemed as solid, as important, as immovable, as the palace of

  Versailles; in salons and in parks, at fêtes champêtres, at before-breakfast concerts and at midnight balls, life passed from day to day in as small a circle, with as heightened a brilliance, as if it were the reflection in a convex mirror.

  In the midst of her distractions, Eliza did not forget her Steventon relations; she had a miniature painted for her uncle, which showed her with her face narrow and largeeyed, beneath a very full coiffure, lightly powdered, and wearing a white dress trimmed with blue. She wrote to him: "It is reckoned like what I am at present. The dress is quite the present fashion of what I usually wear." Mr. Austen might be pleased with the portrait and the attention, but the next thing he heard about his niece filled him with dismay; she had become

  engaged to a wealthy Frenchman, Jean Capotte, the Comte de

  Feuillide. Mr. Austen had not, of course, seen the Comte de

  Feuillide, but he expressed himself as "much concerned" at the proposed connection, which would lead, he was afraid, to his sister and her daughter

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  "giving up their friends, their country and their religion." But what did it matter what he was afraid of? Eliza loved her uncle dearly and had a great respect for his opinion, but it could hardly be supposed that on such a matter as this she would do otherwise than please herself. Besides, her mother approved of the match. The wedding was celebrated, and shortly afterwards Eliza wrote in glowing terms to her cousin, Phila Walter, of her happiness and importance. Her husband was everything that was handsome and agreeable; to say that he loved her was scarcely to do justice to either of them, "since he literally adores me." She enumerated her blessings: her wealth, her rank, her "numerous and brilliant acquaintance." It would have been mere hypocrisy to disguise the fact that Eliza de Feuillide was a most soughtafter and dazzling young lady; nor was the Comtesse guilty of such affectation.

  In 1796 she was expecting a baby, and as she and the Comte wished it to be born in England, she and her mother came to London and took a house in Orchard Street. Here a son was born, and called after his mother's godfather, Hastings de Feuillide. For some time the party moved between England and France. In both countries Eliza was unremitting in the discharge of her social duties. While in London she wrote to Phila Walter describing her mode of life: "I have been for some time past the greatest rake imaginable, and really wonder how such a meager creature as I am can support so much

  fatigue." She had stood for two hours in the Drawing Room,

  "loaded" with the great hoop of her court dress; had gone on to the Duchess of Cumberland's, and from there to Almack's, where she had stayed till five in the morning. It was exhausting, but it was obligatory; but in the midst of these functions there was one which claimed her attention, of a very different nature. In 1788

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  the trial of Warren Hastings opened in Westminster Hall. The

  proceedings, of which Macaulay has left so solemn and magnificent a picture, were on a scale so different from anything in our

  experience that even with his assistance we can hardly conceive them; such were the magnitude of the interests involved and the stupendous eloquence of the orators who inveighed against them.

  Macaulay's enchantment evokes the scene as no first-hand

  information can; but the accounts of eyewitnesses, taking for once a second place, provide, as it were, an interesting footnote to the historian. Fanny Burney attended many days of the trial, and with feelings quite as violently party to Hastings as Eliza de Feuillide's could be. She commented on the paleness of Hastings' face and its immovable expression of distress. The gentlemen in the green

  benches who looked like a pack of hairdressers were really the Commons.

  In August, Eliza made a visit to Oxford, where James and Henry were delighted to do the honors to their attractive cousin. Eliza was charmed by the garden of St. John's and "longed to be a Fellow," that she "might walk in it every day." She was also much taken with academic dress; she thought the square cap "mighty becoming," and, as if from an instinctive association of ideas, she added that Henry had grown so tall, he was now taller than his father, and that he wore his hair powdered "in a very tonish style." There had been "a coolness" between the writer and Henry, but after Henry's confessing himself to be quite in the wrong, this had been done away with, and they were now on what Eliza described as "very proper, relation-like terms," but which were perhaps, if anything, slightly more interesting than the terms between most relations.

  Eliza had also a passion for the theatre; in the summer of 1787 she had gone with her mother and Phila Walter to

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  Tunbridge Wells, and had "bespoken" two comedies at the local theatre: Garrick Bon Ton and Mrs. Cowley Which is the Man, and in the Christmas of that year which she and Mrs. Hancock spent at Steventon, Eliza inspired a burst of amateur theatricals in her cousins and their friends. The fact that Bon Ton and Which is the Man were the plays decided on shows who was the ruling spirit. The big barn on the other side of the lane was fitted up
as a theatre, and meantime the Rectory itself was filled to overflowing. The Austens could only have house parties at Christmas and Midsummer, when the pupils went home for their holidays; and this Christmas, with the theatricals as an attraction, the fullest advantage was taken of the opportunity.

  Word was, however, sent to Phila Walter that room could be found for her, provided she would take a part in the plays, but that Mrs.

  Austen had no room "for any idle young people." Phila Walter was sure she could not act and did not mean to try, and remained

  steadfast to her objection in spite of entreaties from Eliza, who was really very fond of her. ("My Aunt Austen can only promise you 'a hole to hide your head in,' but I think you will not mind this inconvenience; I am sure I should not--to be with you.") In vain did the Comtesse hold out the promise of "a most brilliant party and a great deal of amusement, the house full of company, frequent balls."

  Phila stood firm and would not come. Otherwise, all was gaiety and enthusiasm. The Austens were not new to amateur theatricals. Three years before they had given a performance of The Rivals. From time to time they had given plays in their own dining room, though it could scarcely have accommodated more than a row of spectators along the wall. The proceedings this Christmas were on a much

  handsomer scale; as befitted their respective temperaments, James wrote the prologue and Henry and Eliza acted the

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  chief parts, and one may imagine how very exciting a child of

  twelve, who had never been inside a real theatre, found the goings-on in the great barn.

  The Comtesse de Feuillide was naturally an important person at Steventon; her uncle was fond of her and proud of her, James and Henry were fascinated by her, and to her little cousin Jane she was, with her fashion, her liveliness, her assurance, her savoir vivre, an object of wonder and admiration. Then something happened which gave her the deepest possible claim on their imaginations, their sympathy and interest. The Revolution had broken out. The Comte de Feuillide, who had come to London to be with his wife because her mother had just died, had taken her to Bath, but Eliza was too unhappy to enjoy it; they returned therefore to town, to be met by letters announcing to the Comte de Feuillide that if he did not return to France immediately, he would be proscribed as an émigré and his estates would be confiscated.