Hair jewellery

Hair jewellery with which we are most familiar is, I suppose, mourning jewellery, which often contained a lock of hair of the deceased and would have been given to members of the deceased’s family as a memento. And indeed hair did not need to be made into jewellery to be treasured. Jane Austen’s hair was kept as a momento, as was a lock of her father’s hair, and both are kept in the collection of the Jane Austen’s House Museum. Do note the label -My Father’s Hair- is written in Jane’s hand:

 

She stopped writing, and was unable to start again for ten years

Jane's life was turned upside down in 1800 when it was announced that the family would move from Steventon to Bath.

Bath is an important influence in Austen's novels, and is often portrayed as an exciting place offering escape from the mundane. In Pride and Prejudice Wickham escapes his dull life by running away to Bath. Catherine in Northanger Abbey is all "eager delight" at arriving in the city.

But for Jane Austen her move to Bath was not a happy one. Much as she chafed against her limited life in Steventon, leaving the village was deeply traumatic. The traditional tale is that she fainted on hearing news of the move. She stopped writing, and was unable to start again for ten years.

In 1805 George Austen died leading to difficult circumstances. It was only after 1809, when her rich brother Edward provided Jane with a permanent home at Chawton in Hampshire, that writing began again.

Painting is landmark study of author Jane Austen at Godmersham Park

Painting is landmark study of author Jane Austen at Godmersham Park

This humble painting depicting a family dinner is believed to show Jane Austen aged just five.

Houses in Bath where Jane Austen lived

No 4, Sydney House

No 4, Sydney House was a good, well proportoned newly built terraces house. It was well placed outside the crowded centre of Bath, but within walking distance over Pulteney bridge.

From its talldrawing room windows it looked across the road to the newly laid-out and very agreeable Sydney Gardens at the front

The father of Jane died in 1805 in a house in Green park Building East to which they had moved not many weeks after the lease on Sydney Place ran out.

An old photograph of Green Park Buildings from The Buildings of Georgian Bath by Walter Ison,looking towards Seymour Street)

Jane, her mother and Cassandra had to move again to  No 25 Gay Street. We know very little about the house as it was at the time when Jane Austen lived in it. Gay Street was a very busy street, full of chairs carrying people from the Upper to the Lower town, and would have been noisy. It was firmly set into the centre of town with very little chance of good views of the surrounding countryside.

No 25 Gay Street

You can see that Gay Street steeply descends the hill towards Queen’s Square in the break in the circle of houses in the middle of the picture.

The Austen ladies were of course at this time beginning to find that their financial position was not particularly secure. By his will Mr Austen left everything to Mrs Austen. But his main source of income was the money from his livings of Deane and Steventon and any entitlement to that money ceased at the moment of his death. Mrs Austen had a little independent income and Cassandra had the interest on the £1000 left to her by her late finance Tom Fowle, but Jane Austen had nothing whatsoever in the way of income.

The letters sent between the Austen brothers at this time indicate quite interesting attitudes to the economic and social fate of the Austen ladies. Frank had just been appointed to the 80-gun HMS Canopus. He generously offered £100 per annum towards the upkeep of Mrs Austen and his sisters, and did so in a letter to Henry Austen requesting that he keep this offer secret from the ladies.

Here is part of Henry’s illuminating reply to him:

With the proudest exultations of maternal tenderness the Excellent Parent has exclaimed that never were Children so good as hers. She feels the magnificence of your offer, and accepts of half. I shall therefore honor her demands for 50 pounds annually on your account. James had the day before yesterday communicated to me & Her his desire to be her Banker for the same annual assistance, & l as long as I am an Agent shall do as he does. – If Edward does the least he ought, he will certainly insist on her receiving a £100 from him. So you see My Dear E, that with her own assured property, & Cassandra’s, both producing about £250 per ann., She will be in the receipt of a clear £450 pounds per Ann.

They only remained in Gay Street for six months before moving once again, this time to Trim Street, a narrow lane in the darker and cheaper part of town.

Trim Street

At this time, the family could not afford the social entertainment that they may have enjoyed in former years.

The Jane Austen centre in Bath, provides us with an insight into Jane's life in the city and the life that was going on around her at that time, as illustrated in some of her novels. The centre is housed in No 40 Gay Street, in a Georgian town house, similar to the type that Jane would have lived in during her time at No25 Gay Street.

jane-austen-in-bath-sydney-place

bath/places-to-visit.

tea antiques and Jane Austen

austen only./bath

quillcards

It came as a considerable shock when her parents suddenly announced in 1801 that the family would be moving away to Bath.

Regency Bath was a place of frivolity, fashion and incessant social striving and provided rich material for Jane Austen's satiric pen.

It came as a considerable shock when her parents suddenly announced in 1801 that the family would be moving away to Bath. Mr Austen would give the Steventon living to his son James and retire to Bath with his wife and two daughters. At this time Jane was 26 years old. The next four years were going to be difficult ones for Jane Austen.

They lived at several addresses in Bath such as Green Park and Gay Street, but for the most part at 4 Sydney Place.

Today, visitors to Bath can take those very walks, and see the very places where Austen’s characters danced and dreamed. An hour and a half from London, Bath is a beautifully preserved Georgian town, a spa town, as it was in Austen’s day. The streets, crescents and gardens that Austen saw are much as they were in her day.

 

The Ball Room

This is the largest 18th century room in Bath.

Dancing was very popular

 and balls were held

 at least twice a week,

attracting 800 to 1,200 guests at a time.

The high ceiling provided good ventilation

 on crowded ball nights

 and windows set at a high level

prevented outsiders from looking in.

--------------------

Only two of Jane Austen's novels are set in Bath: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published in 1818. Both mention the Assembly Rooms, which Jane Austen herself visited.  the Assembly Roomswhere people would gather to play cards, dance and take tea

'Mrs Allen was so long in dressing, that they did not enter the ball-room till late. The season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies squeezed in as well as they could. As for Mr Allen, he repaired directly to the card-room, and left them to enjoy a mob by themselves.' Northanger Abbey, 1818

-------------------------

Austen’s city still remembers her; at the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street visitors can learn all about Bath in her day and the importance of Bath in her life and work. In September, the annual Jane Austen Festival celebrates the beloved author with nine days of exhibitions, performances and literary events.

The main highlights include the Pump Room - the social heart of the city during Austen's time where people registered on arrival in the city and took the water.

The Royal Crescent - the most impressive address, where people enjoyed promenading and generally being seen;

 Gravel Walk - the location of a touching love scene in the novel 'Persuasion';

A short stroll from the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street is Gravel Walk, just off Queen’s Parade Place. Known as something of a Lover’s Lane in Jane Austen’s day, the path was a route for sedan chairs heading to and from the town centre and following th…
 

The Sedan Chair was invented in France and later introduced to Britain. It consisted of a covered box carried on two poles, and proved invaluable to rich people traveling to social gatherings in their finery, in the days when there were no pavements and the streets could become very muddy. The entrances to the grand Georgian houses were made large enough to enable chairs to be carried right upto the door so the occupant would not get wet!

The Museum of Costume and Assembly Rooms exhibits the fashions of Austen’s day

 

Jane Austen Centre

 

jane austen festival

Regency Bath

In 1806 they moved from Bath, first to Clifton, and then, in autumn 1806, to Southampton. Two years later, Jane remembered (in a letter to Cassandra) with "what happy feelings of Escape!" she had left Bath.

Philadelphia Hancock-Austen, Eliza Hancock, Eliza de Feuillide

(22 December 1761 - April 1813), Eliza de Feuillide after her first marriage, to a French nobleman in 1781, and later Eliza Austen after her second marriage in 1797, was the cousin of novelist Jane Austen.

Fourteen years older than her sister Jane, Eliza was the daughter of George Austen’s sister Philadelphia, who had gone to India to marry Tysoe Saul Hancock in 1753.

 

With her glamorous personality, Eliza Hancock is believed to have been inspirational for a number of Austen's works.

She was born in India, and is often believed to be the natural child of her godfather Warren Hastings,
later to be the first Governor-General of Bengal.

Warren Hastings

 

She came to England with her parents, in 1765. In 1779 she settled in France and two years later she married a French Army Captain, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide, a (possibly self styled) French count ("Comte"). Eliza thus became Comtesse de Feuillide. She came back to England with her mother in 1790, after the French Revolution had started. Her husband was arrested for conspiracy and guillotined in 1794.

Henry Austen, brother of Jane, then courted Eliza, and married her in December 1797; they had no children. Eliza's only son, Hastings (named after Warren Hastings), died in 1801.

Eliza died in April 1813, with Jane Austen at her bedside. Eliza Hancock and Austen had been quite close ever since Eliza arrived in England.

Jane Austen rare manuscript up for sale. A rare, handwritten manuscript of Jane Austen's unfinished

An incredibly rare handwritten manuscript of an unfinished novel by Jane Austen – the only one that is still in private hands – is to appear at auction in London.
The neatly written but heavily corrected pages are for her unfinished work The Watsons, a novel which many believe could easily have been as good as her six completed works.
Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby's senior specialist in books and manuscripts, said it was "a thrill and privilege" to be selling it: "It is very exciting. This is the most significant Austen material to come on the market since the late 1980s."
It is unquestionably rare. Original manuscripts of her published novels do not exist, aside from two cancelled chapters of Persuasion in the British Library.
The novel is considered around a quarter completed and the manuscript has 68 pages – hand-trimmed by Austen – which have been split up into 11 booklets.
It is most but not all of Austen's unfinished novel. The first 12 pages were sold by an Austen descendent during the first world war to help the Red Cross and are now in New York's Pierpoint Morgan Library, while the next few pages were inexplicably lost by Queen Mary, University of London which has been looking after the manuscript.

The college's director of library services Emma Bull said it happened six years ago, before she arrived, and had resulted in a full investigation which, alas, "did not really come to any firm conclusions about what specifically happened." There had been a hope that they would turn up, but clearly that is now highly unlikely.
The Watsons manuscript shows how Austen's other manuscripts must have looked. It also shines an interesting light on how she worked. Austen took a piece of paper, cut it in two and then folded over each half to make eight-page booklets. Then she would write, small neat handwriting leaving little room for corrections – of which there are many. "You can really see the mind at work with all the corrections and revisions," said Heaton.

At one stage she crosses so much out that she starts a page again and pins it in. It seems, in Austen's mind, her manuscript had to look like a book. "Writers often fall into two categories," said Heaton. "The ones who fall into a moment of great inspiration and that's it and then you have others who endlessly go back and write and tinker. Austen is clearly of the latter variety. It really is a wonderful, evocative document."

The Watsons was written in 1804, not a hugely happy time for Austen professionally – she had one novel rejected and another bought by a publisher who failed to print it.

It was also a difficult time personally and one reason it was not finished may be because fact came too close to the fiction. The Watsons heroine is Emma, one of four sisters who are daughters of a sick and widowed clergyman. The novel would have had the father die leaving Emma in a precarious financial position. In real life, Austen's clergyman father died leaving her in a similar pickle to her fictional heroine.

Had Austen completed The Watsons there are many who believe it would have been a classic. Margaret Drabble described it as "a tantalising, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels, had she finished it."
The manuscript was bought by the present owner in 1988 when it was sold by the British Rail Pension Fund. It had been bought from Austen descendents in the 1970s when manuscripts, rare books and fine art seemed like perfectly sensible things for nationalised pension funds to buy.

The manuscript has been valued at £200,000 to £300,000 and will be sold at Sotheby's in London on 14 July.

Mark Brown, arts correspondent

guardian. Friday 20 May 2011

Fanny Knight

You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my life. Such letters, such entertaining letters, as you have lately sent! such a description of your queer little heart! such a lovely display of what imagination does. You are worth your weight in gold, or even in the new silver coinage.

Jane Austen to Fanny Knight

February 20, 1816

Jane Austen was seventeen in 1793 when her niece, Fanny Catherine Knight, was born. The oldest child of Jane's brother, Edward Austen (later Knight), Jane adored Fanny and thought of her as "almost another sister ...  could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me. She is quite after one's own heart...."

Edward (1767-1852) was adopted in the early 1780's by rich childless cousins of the Austens, Thomas and Catherine Knight. He was sent by them on the "grand tour" of continental Europe in 1786-1788, and eventually inherited their estate of Godmersham, Kent, and took the last name of "Knight". In 1791, he married Elizabeth Bridges. Two years later the couple welcomed their first child, Fanny. Unfortunately for the happy couple, Elizabeth died when Fanny was not yet sixteen (shortly after her 11th confinement). Fanny's aunts, Cassandra and Jane, who had once been occasional visitors, now took on a much more involved and motherly role in the lives of their nieces and nephews. Cassandra, especially, spent months at a time at the family estate, Godmersham, tending to the needs of her young charges, while her brother grieved the loss of his wife.

For Jane, the plight of young Fanny was especially worrisome, as she considered her new role in the family:
Dearest Fanny must now look upon her- self as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend; as the being who is gradually to supply to him, to the extent that is possible, what he has lost. This consideration will elevate and cheer her. Adieu.
Jane Austen to Cassandra
October 15, 1808

The Great House at Chawton—Former Home of

Jane Austen's Brother, Edward Austen-Knight

Fanny had always been particularly dear to Jane and several pieces of Jane Austen's Juvenilia were dedicated to her in her infancy. The two shared a close friendship during Jane's life and several of the letters written between the two of them survive to this day. Fanny seems to have looked to her aunt for the wisdom and advice she could not ask of her mother, especially in the area of love and courtship. Some of these letters have more to say on the subject than any other surviving pieces of Austen correspondence. Is it possible Jane wrote with the wisdom of one who had loved and lost?

Soon after his wife's death, Edward inherited a house and property in Chawton and was able to offer the nearby cottage to his mother and sisters. This close proximity to the family they loved so much must have only deepend the intimacy of the two.

Sadly, Jane never lived to see Fanny married to any of the young men they discussed. In 1820, three years after her aunt's death, Fanny married Sir Edward Knatchbull, 9th Baronet, a widower several years older than herself, with six children. It appears to have been an equitable marriage and Fanny produced nine more children for the Baronet. As Lady Knatchbull she lived a long and full life, dying in 1882 at the age of 89.

www.janeausten.co.uk/

Knatchbull married secondly Fanny Catherine Knight, daughter of Edward Knight (né Edward Austen, the brother of English novelist Jane Austen).[1] They had nine children, including:
Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen, 1st Baron Brabourne (1829–1893)
Reverend Reginald Bridges Knatchbull-Hugessen (b. 1831)
Herbert Thomas Knatchbull-Hugessen (b. 1835)

Portrait of Edward Austen Knight back in Chawton

chawton house album

Jane Austen and Bath Buns

Jane Austen was only too familiar with Bath Buns. She often found it necessary to sneak them surreptitiously into her room to augment the rather meagre meals given by her well-meaning but rather stingy Aunt Leigh Perrot.
Bath Buns are probably this city's most famous gastronomic contribution. No one is sure of their origin, but they were mentioned as early as 1763. Another famous baker, Sally Lunn, lends her name to a similar type of tea bread. The Sally Lunn Bun is baked from a secret recipe, handed down through the generations. It is only available at Sally Lunn's Refreshment House, where she established her baking as a favourite of fashionable society in the 1680's. The actual building is the oldest house in Bath, dating from the fifteenth century. Today's visitors can still enjoy a scrumptious tea and a tour through their Kitchen Museum.

jane austen and bath buns

Everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.

During the Christmas and New Year's season of 1795-96, Jane Austen met a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy, who was visiting his uncle and aunt in Hampshire. Lefroy was on a break from his legal studies at Lincoln's Inn, London. Both Austen and Lefroy were twenty years old.

Saturday, January 10, 1796)

"In the first place, I hope you will live twenty-three years longer. Mr. Tom Lefroy's birthday was yesterday, so that you are very near of an age. After this preamble I shall proceed to tell you that we had an exceedingly good ball last night, ... Mr H. began with Elizabeth, and afterwards danced with her again; but they do not know how to be particular. I flatter myself, however, that they will profit by the three successive lessons I have given them. You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at these last three balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago. ... After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is well behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same colored clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded. ..."

(Thursday, January 14 - Friday, January 15, 1796)

"...Our party to Ashe to-morrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (for a ball is nothing without him), Buller, who is now staying with us, & I—I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat. Friday.—At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this, it will be over—My tears flow as I write this, at this melancholy idea. ..."

The Lefroy's were neighbours

and friends of the Austen family.

 They lived at Ashe rectory,

which is pictured above, as of 1998.

Read more over Jane and Tom

Jasna

 

Royal wedding cakes: a history

royal wedding dresses

This video, produced in the run-up to last week’s royal wedding contains an interview with Dr Joanna Marschner on the styles, meanings and history of the royal wedding dresses worn over the last 200 years, from Princes Charlotte onwards.



The Historical Royal Palaces website has a wonderful blog and You Tube channel.


on the blog of the Historical Royal Palaces

Fan of hearts

 Here you can read

 a nice article

Jane Austens house museum

Recently they found a few gifts and offerings to Jane and the house. They found a carefully made fan of hearts hung on a door handle in The Austen Family room. Each heart has a name of a character from Sense and Sensibility and they rotate to align with different people.

You can see a letter a devoted fan wrote to Jane

They found this letter to Jane in the bedroom...

The room where Jane Austen died.

This is the house

where Jane Austen

died in 1817

In this article

the-room-where-jane-austen-died/

 you see photo' s

what the room looks today