Becoming Jane Austen
The True Love Story That Inspired
the Classic Novels
by John Spence
Part of a continuing series.
George's elder sister was called Philadelphia, a name that might seem singular to us but was regularly if not commonly used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Phila, as she was usually called, was eleven and Leonora nine when their brother went back to Tonbridge to school. Four years later, in 1745, the fifteen-year-old Phila was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden.
Phila's apprenticeship indicates just how desperate her circumstances were. She had no benefactor to pay for her education and no mother like Elizabeth Weller to give her a clothes allowance and see that she was introduced to prospective husbands. Betty Austen had had £400; Phila had nothing. She had to prepare to earn her own bread. Her apprenticeship in Covent Garden would have provided glimpses of an even harsher side of London life. Covent Garden was a haunt of prostitutes, who often worked in brothels fronted by milliners' shops.
Jane Austen
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While Phila was learning sewing and hat-making so that one day she would be able to make a meager living, her brother George was distinguishing himself as a clever and diligent pupil at Tonbridge School. In 1747 at sixteen he capped his early career by winning a scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford. Up to now he had stood as more or less the adopted son of his uncle Francis, but his uncle finally married at the age of forty-nine and immediately produced a son and heir in the same year that George went to Oxford. This changed George's prospects, though his situation remained bright with possibilities and Uncle Francis continued to treat him like a son.
Phila's life had no such promise. In 1750, the year she finished her apprenticeship, her uncle Stephen died. He had little money and felt himself honour-bound to leave it all to his widow. In his will he apologises for being unable to do anything for his relatives, evidently referring to his nieces. His widow married again only a few months after his death, but she and her new husband agreed to let Leonora continue to live with them, even though Leonora wasn't her blood relative. Perhaps for a while Phila continued to live with them as well, but it must have been obvious to her that she would one day have to support herself and perhaps her sister too. The moment had come to act.
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