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

educated his boys at home along with his other pupils but in 1782 Cassandra was sent to boarding school at Oxford, with a Mrs Ann Cawley, a sister of Mrs Austen’s brother-in-law, the Revd Edward Cooper, and widow of a former Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. Cassandra was nine and Jane seven. Jane pined for her sister, so was allowed to join her.
    ‘If Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off,’ declared their mother, Jane would have hers cut off too.’
    Jane was not happy away from home even though Cassandra was with her. The seven-year-old girl hated being dragged round Oxford by her proud undergraduate brother James on sight-seeing trips through dismal chapels, dusty libraries and greasy halls. They depressed her. All her life she was more interested in people than in museums. She was too young to notice, as her cousin Eliza did on another occasion, how becoming black gowns and square caps, later known colloquially as ‘mortarboards’, were to young men. Oxford and Cambridge university students wore them as a distinctive uniform well into the twentieth century.
    Mrs Cawley then took the girls with their cousin Jane Cooper to Southampton where she and the children caught a ‘putrid fever’, the name then current for both typhus fever and diphtheria. Mrs Cawley did not bother to notify the parents but Jane Cooper wrote to her mother who came to fetch her and the Austen girls. Mrs Cooper caught the illness and died. The children narrowly escaped death. Infectious diseases, before modern drugs, could easily and with shocking rapidity prove fatal, especially to children. Another killer disease at the time was ‘putrid sore throat’, or gangrenous pharyngitis, mentioned in Jane Austen’s letters as having killed a boy at Eton. Mrs Cooper’s husband did not remarry. He brought up his son Edward (whom Jane Austen did not like) and daughter Jane alone. He gave Cassandra and Jane mementoes of their dead aunt: Cassandra had an emerald and diamond ring, Jane a headband which she later wore to dances.
    The ability to dance was recognized as necessary if a girl was to mix in society, and parents otherwise neglectful of their daughters’ development made sure that the girls never went without dancing lessons. The elaborate routines of country dances, minuets and cotillions had to be memorized and the exercise of dancing would, it was hoped, lead to a graceful carriage. Good deportment was the mark of a lady, who was also expected to play the pianoforte or the harp, and, if she had a good voice, to sing. Accomplishment was supposed to add up to eligibility.
    The Austen girls next went with the motherless Jane Cooper to the Abbey School at Reading, which may have been like Mrs Goddard’s school in
Emma
, where girls might ‘scramble themselves into a little education’.
    Boys went to grammar or public school and then to Oxford or Cambridge, at that time the only two universities in England, with students numbering only a few hundred. The universities exercised an influence out of all proportion to their size, preparing a social élite for the professions of the Church and the law, or in some cases for a life of gentlemanly leisure. Girls did the best they could. Elizabeth Bridges, a daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, baronet, and who was to marry Jane’s brother Edward, went with her sisters to a grand girls’ boarding school in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, known as the ladies’ Eton’, where there was heavy emphasis on etiquette and they were required to practise the art of descending gracefully from a carriage. Little else was learned except French, music and dancing.
    It was rare for girls to go to school of any kind, as many fathers disapproved. In the late eighteenth century governesses were employed only by the very wealthy and grand, like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
Pride and Prejudice
, who is surprised that the Bennet girls did not have one. Neither country gentlemen like Mr Bennet nor clergymen