I Was Jane Austen's Best Friend

by Cora Harrison

  She picked up her paper and dramatically read aloud:

  ‘The joy, the gratitude, the exquisite delight may be imagined. Her doubts and worries had all disappeared; she was really in danger of becoming too happy for security. What had she left to wish for? Nothing! In the gayest and happiest spirits, she looked forward to spending the rest of her days by the side of the man whom she had loved for so long.’

  ‘Loved for so long?’ I queried.

  ‘Well, for at least three weeks,’ said Jane, and after we had finished laughing we stayed awake for a long time, planning what we would do at Bath.

  Author’s Note

  Whenever I finish reading a novel about a person who really existed, one of the first questions in my mind, before I close the book, is always: How much of this is true?

  Although a lot is known about Jane Austen as a woman, not much is known about her as a teenager so I had to use my imagination to portray her. However, luckily her family did keep a number of the stories that she scribbled in her notebooks between the ages of thirteen and eighteen so I could get an impression from them of what she was like. I thought she seemed very clever, very witty, but above all I felt that she was enormous fun — quite wild — and would be someone who was great to have as a friend.

  Very little indeed is known about Jenny — and I must confess here I am guilty of changing two things. One is that her name was really Jane Cooper, but because I couldn’t have two Janes I changed her name to Jenny, a common pet-name form of Jane at the time. As well as that, I made her younger than she really was so that she and Jane were nearer in age, and I changed the year that both she and Jane were at Mrs Cawley’s school in Southampton.

  What we do know about Jenny (Jane Cooper) is that she was an orphan (with no family other than one brother) who lived with the Austen family at Steventon in the year in which she met Captain Thomas Williams (later Sir Thomas Williams, which turned Jenny into Lady Williams). They fell instantly in love with each other, were engaged three weeks after their first meeting (a real whirlwind romance!) and were married at Steventon later in the year. Jane and Cassandra were her bridesmaids.

  When Mr Austen retired, his furniture was put up for sale at an auction, and one of the items in the barn at Steventon was ‘a set of theatrical screens’. We know from a letter sent by Eliza to a cousin in Kent that Jenny was very pretty and acted opposite Henry in one of the plays put on in the barn.

  We also know that Jenny is the one who was brave enough, against Mrs Cawley’s orders, to smuggle out a letter from the school informing Mrs Austen that Jane was terribly ill and that by doing this, she is considered to have saved Jane’s life.

  All the neighbours, friends and relations and people in the village — and Mr Austen’s pupils — that I mention in the book, like the Chutes at the Vyne, the Biggs at Manydown House, and the Portsmouths, were real people. Jane did have a handicapped brother, called George, who did not live with the family but was boarded out with a villager. Later in life she spoke of being able ‘to talk on her fingers’ — in other words, she had learned sign language. And as far as can be ascertained, Nanny Littleworth was foster-mother to all the young Austens.

  For the story and the characters of the people, I suppose my imagination was triggered by the six novels that Jane Austen wrote. I love the balls and the snippets of conversation as they move down the sets in the dances as described in those books, and I am a great fan of the gowns they wore then — so much more elegant and flattering than the later Victorian dresses. When I wrote the description of Jenny’s first ball, I was remembering Catherine at the Assembly Rooms in Bath in Northanger Abbey and how she met a young man there, fell in love, and by the end of the book he had proposed marriage to her. Captain Williams is like some of Jane Austen’s heroes — a bit of a Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, or perhaps a Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Jenny’s preaching brother (loathed by Jane Austen) is a bit like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, and his wife is rather modelled on Mrs Elton in Emma.

  Mrs Austen and Eliza were both prolific letter-writers, and it is from their letters that I got an impression of their characters. They are both great favourites of mine. No letters from Jenny (Jane Cooper) survive, and in some ways perhaps that is good because now she is mine — my own creation, and I can imagine her emerging from a sad time of her life after the death of both parents into the fun and glamour of balls and cousinly chats and then falling madly in love and being loved in return by the handsome Captain Williams.

  The sort of wonderful year that people remember for the rest of their lives!

  CORA HARRISON fell in love with Jane Austen when she first read Pride and Prejudice at the age of twelve. She has published many novels for children and adults. She and her husband live on a small farm in the west of Ireland with a very large and rather lunatic German shepherd dog called Oscar and a very small white cat called Polly.