Jane Austen by Valerie Grosvenor Myer Read Free Book Online Page A

in his own (he was writing in the late 1860s). It was certainly customary, early in the nineteenth century, for ladies to wash valuable china themselves, for fear of breakages, and to starch their own linen after it had been washed. The Austens employed a cook, but no housekeeper. Meals had to be planned and supplies organised, servants trained. Jane, aged nearly twenty-four, wrote playfully to Cassandra, who was on one of her visits to Godmersham, ‘My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence, and for this reason - I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping.’ The recipe book collected and written out by her friend and lodger Martha Lloyd survives. Mrs Austen contributed one in rhyme.
    Jane Austen did not do her own housework. In December 1798 she writes of the inconvenience of having been without a maid for a long while, and having to employ casual charwomen. Jane carried the keys of the wine and tea closets when her mother was indisposed and gave orders in the kitchen. But though a lady, she was a poor relation, socially insignificant, all her life and she resented it.

4
Upbringing
    J ANE’S FATHER BAPTIZED her himself when she was one day old. Infant mortality was high and the weather was too cold to take so young a child out of doors. Her official christening, with godparents, took place the following spring on 5 April 1776. Her sponsors at the font were the Revd Samuel Cooke, Rector of Cotsford, Oxfordshire, and Vicar of Bookham in Surrey, Mrs Jane Austen, a great-aunt and wife to the rich and generous Great-uncle Francis, and Mrs James Musgrave, wife of the Vicar of Chinnor in Oxfordshire, whose mother was a rich great-aunt of Mrs Austen. Samuel Cooke‘s wife, born another Cassandra Leigh, cousin of Jane’s mother, was a published novelist. Perhaps she smiled on Jane Austen in her cradle.
    Seventh child and second daughter among eight children, Jane formed close bonds of affection chiefly with her sister Cassandra and with her brothers, and later with those brothers’ children. She did not always get on so well with her sisters-in-law. In
Persuasion
friction between in-laws is made the subject of wry comedy. It is possible, though unlikely, that Jane never learned the ability to make deep relationships with outsiders. She dismissed an acquaintance, admittedly during an unhappy and unsettled time in her life, as liking people rather too easily Jane wrote in
Mansfield Park
that the link between siblings is unique and stronger even than the marriage tie. The four youngest Austen children, Cassandra, Francis, Jane and Charles, remained specially close emotionally, though physically scattered after the boys joined the navy, all their lives. They may have felt crowded by George’s pupils, the other children in the house, and drawn tighter together as a consequence.
    When little Jane Austen was fetched home from her foster parents’ house, she followed her big sister Cassandra everywhere. Jane loved Cassandra best of all her siblings. They seemed to share a life with each other within the general family life. Except when paying visits, when they were separated, they shared a bedroom all their lives and probably slept in the same bed. A bedroom to oneself, especially in large families, was a luxury except among the very rich until recently and for sisters to share a bed was not unusual even in the mid-twentieth century. As a child Cassandra spent much of her time with her maternal aunt and uncle, the Coopers, in Bath. On one occasion her father had collected her for the last stage of the journey in a hackney chaise. Some distance from home they met Jane, aged six and a half, in the roadway, holding her little brother Charles, then just three, by the hand. Impatient for her sister’s return, Jane had gone to meet her.
    Mr Austen