Becoming Jane Austen
The True Love Story That Inspired
the Classic Novels
by John Spence
Part of a continuing series.
Little is known of Jane's own life before 1783, but we can reconstruct something of life at Steventon. In 1773, two years before Jane was born, George Austen began to take boarding pupils as a means of increasing the family income. It was a good way to make money while beginning to educate James. Mr. Austen taught the boys, and Mrs. Austen acted as housekeeper, adviser and mother to the pupils as well as to her own children.
On the side of formal instruction, Mr. Austen is said to have had considerable talent as a teacher. Frank later remembered that his father "joined to an unusual extent of classical learning and a highly cultivated gentleness of manners." Mrs. Austen's genius was of a different kind. She was capable, energetic and sensible. She had a facility for composing impromptu verse, a lively talent she used to cajole the boys and keep them amused.
Jane Austen
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When she was a small child, her uncle Theophilus Leigh, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, had called her "the poet of the family," and a few surviving poems written to or for the Steventon pupils give a sprightly picture of the part she played in their lives. When Gilbert East kept making excuses to delay his return to Steventon and his studies, Mrs. Austen sent him a letter in verse to urge him to come back. She begins the poem with a cheerful expression of concern:
Your Steventon Friends
Are at their wits Ends
To know what has become of Squire East:
They very much fear
He'll never come here
Having left them nine weeks at least.
After six more verses relating what the pupils and family at Steventon had been doing both in work and play, she comes to the point with a compliment and a question:
That you dance very well
All beholders can tell.
For lightly and nimbly you tread: But pray, is it meet
To indulge thus your feet
And neglect all the while your poor head?
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