A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family

For more than thirty years Deirdre Le Faye, one of the world’s leading authorities on Jane Austen, has been gathering and organising every single piece of information available about the Austen family before, during and after Jane’s lifetime. She has now collected all this material together to produce a unique chronology, containing some 15,000 entries. For the first time, those interested in Jane Austen can discover where she was and what she was doing at many precise moments of her life. The entries, many taken from hitherto unexplored and unpublished documents, are presented in a clear and readable form, and each item of information is linked to its source. The volume includes family trees for the extended Austen and Knight families from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This is a key work of reference that every scholar and reader of Austen will find fascinating and indispensable.

DEIRDRE LE FAYE is a biographer and editor of Jane Austen, and is the author of Jane Austen: A Family Record (revised edition, Cambridge, 2004).

1 Map of Southern England, showing places visited by Jane Austen.

A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family

DEIRDRE LE FAYE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521810647

© Deirdre Le Faye 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-81064-7 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-81064 -7 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Illustrations

Family trees

Preface

It is now more than thirty years since I started to research the life and times of Jane Austen, investigating many hitherto unnoticed manuscripts in both public and private collections. This research enabled me to compile a card index of some 15,000 documented facts concerning the Austen family and their contemporary friends and neighbours. All the most important information so gathered went into the composition of my biography Jane Austen, a Family Record, published in 1989, and also provided the basis of the biographical and topographical notes to my edition of Jane Austen’s Letters in 1995. Since 1989, ongoing research by members of the Jane Austen Society in this country, and by members of JASNA across the Atlantic, has brought to light still more facts, and this latest knowledge is incorporated in the second edition, revised and enlarged, of Family Record (2004).

   But no biography, no matter how detailed, can include every single small scrap of information about its subject’s life; and yet such scraps can add up, in a pointilliste technique, to create a picture of the background to Jane Austen’s life that is useful alike for biographers or for the particular interests of economic, social or local historians. Even though Family Record had been published, I felt reluctant to throw away the card index which had taken me so long to compile, and so decided instead to publish the contents purely as a chronology that could be used as a reference text by other writers. Original research takes up a great deal of time, not to mention the expenses of travelling to libraries, county record offices and private archival collections, and I was very lucky in being able to spend so many years journeying round England and reading through manuscripts at my leisure – a situation which in all probability no other researcher into Jane Austen’s life will ever enjoy again.

Sources

(1) Many entries come directly from unpublished documents, the manuscripts being either in county record offices or still in private collections. Call-marks are given for those MSS in record offices, preceded by a coded identification of the actual document – e.g.,

FCKpb
U.951/F.24/1
stands for:

Fanny Catherine Knight pocket-book, its call-mark at the Centre for Kentish Studies being U.951/F.24/1 [for the year 1804].

   Such identification codes are given in the list of Abbreviations, and the sources are identified in the MS Bibliography.

(2) Some Austen and Austen-Leigh family documents which were extant in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries cannot now be found, and may have been destroyed in the bombing raids on London in the 1940s. In some cases, but unfortunately not all, R. A. Austen-Leigh made MS or typewritten notes or partial transcripts from these documents, and these later copies survive in the Austen-Leigh archive now in the Hampshire Record Office.

(3) One particular item whose loss leaves a considerable gap in Austenian studies is the ‘Memoir Album’, a volume bound by Birdsall of Northampton and containing all the correspondence and reviews concerning the first and second editions of the Revd James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen. This album was lent by R. A. Austen-Leigh to Dr R. W. Chapman in 1926, but what happened to it thereafter is unknown. Dr Chapman made typewritten extracts from some of the letters, and eventually passed his copies on to the National Portrait Gallery, where they form part of the Gallery’s file on the portraits, genuine or otherwise, of Jane Austen. These limited and haphazard extracts are now the only source for several facts concerning Jane Austen’s life as remembered by her collateral descendants in the 1860s–70s.

Editorial policy

I hope that this uniquely detailed chronology will be of the greatest use to all future biographers, literary critics and historians, providing as it does accurate documented facts gathered from a wide variety of sources.

DEIRDRE LE FAYE
Portishead, 2004

Acknowledgements

During the years in which I was researching Jane Austen’s life and finding the information now published here, I was helped in various ways by many kind friends and correspondents, and wish to give my most grateful thanks first to these personal contacts: the great-grandsons of Admiral Francis Austen, and Miss Belinda Austen; Joan Austen-Leigh (Mrs Denis Mason Hurley); Mr Jack Ayres; Ms Liz-Anne Bawden; Miss Jean Bowden; Mr and Mrs Joseph Bown; Lord Brabourne; Mr Andrew Bradford; Miss Mary Burkett, OBE; Dr Clive Caplan; Mr Tom Carpenter and his staff at Jane Austen’s House Museum; Sir Frederick Cholmeley, Bt.; Mr G. C. R. Clay; Dr Kenneth Cliff; Mrs Irene Collins; Mr T. A. B. Corley; Mr David A. Cross; Prof. Peter Davison; Miss Elizabeth Einberg; Mr David Gilson; Mr John Hart; Miss Carol Hartley; Mr and Mrs David Hopkinson; Mrs Violet Hunt; Mrs Jane Hurst; the Impey and Fowle families; Revd W. A. W. Jarvis; Mr Henry Jenkyns; Miss Diana Joll; Dr Brian Keith-Lucas; Mr and Mrs Richard Knight; Miss Helen Lefroy; Mrs M. Martin; Mr John Murray; Mrs Susanne Notman; Mr Anthony Peel; Sir Jonathan Portal, Bt.; Dr Vera Quin; Miss Susan Radcliffe; Mr Henry Rice; Mrs Margaret Sawtell; Mr David Selwyn; Mr R. J. Smith; Prof. Joan Stevens; Mr Patrick Stokes; Streatham Local History Society; Mr George Holbert Tucker; Mrs Valdes-Scott; Mr Robin Vick; Mr Chris Viveash; Prof. Sir David Waldron Smithers; Miss Janet Wallace; Mr George Ward; Dr Brian Willan; Mrs Margaret Wilson.

   The archivists and staff of the following reference libraries, record offices and private institutions have all provided me with information, either by correspondence or during my visits to their establishments, and I am glad to acknowledge their help and efficiency: All Souls College, Oxford; Bank of England; Bath City Archives and Bath Central Library; Berkshire Record Office; Bodleian Library; The British Library; London Borough of Camden; Canterbury Cathedral, City and Diocesan Record Office; Chelsea Reference Library; the Church Commissioners; Drummonds Bank (Royal Bank of Scotland); Dublin Castle; East Sussex Record Office; Guildford Central Library; Guildhall Library, London; Hampshire County Museums Service; Hampshire Record Office; Hoare’s Bank; Huntington Library, California; Jane Austen Memorial Trust; Kensington Central Library; Centre for Kentish Studies; Lincolnshire Record Office; Lloyds Bank; National Army Museum; National Library of Scotland; National Maritime Museum; National Portrait Gallery; National Trust, at The Vyne; Northamptonshire Record Office; Oxfordshire Record Office; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Princeton University Library, Princeton New Jersey; Public Record Office (now National Archives); Royal Library, Windsor; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Southampton City Record Office; Surrey Record Office; Victoria & Albert Museum Library; Wells Cathedral; City of Westminster Archives Centre; Winchester Cathedral Library; Winchester College.

Abbreviations

(for full details of published or unpublished works, see respective bibliographies)