By Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
Jane Austen’s letters are full of reports and asides on her siblings, parents, and extended family. At every turn, they show her deep commitment to recording the comings and goings—and successes and setbacks—of her relatives. Broadening our sense of the impact of Austen’s literary family offers a crucial lens through which to examine her writings, authorship, and legacy.
Literary Parents and Children
Austen came from a large, and not a landowning, English family. She was the daughter of Reverend George Austen, a clergyman and schoolteacher. There is reason to believe he was supportive of his daughter’s creative efforts. He’s said to have tried, unsuccessfully, to help get her fiction published in the 1790s, by seeking a publisher for First Impressions, an early draft of Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh, was descended from a more economically and socially powerful family. The Leighs had landowners among their ranks, as well as writers and authors. The young Jane Austen was aware that her mother’s cousin, Cassandra Leigh Cooke, anonymously published her historical novel, Battleridge, as ‘By a Lady of Quality’. Jane’s own mother, Cassandra, also left behind some unpublished poetry. She wrote a poem, a ‘Dialogue between Death and Mrs. A’, after recovering from an illness.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that such a couple would have literary children. Two of the Austens’ sons also became published authors—Jane’s brothers James and Henry Austen. They wrote for and edited the humor magazine, The Loiterer. It ran weekly in Oxford for 60 issues, in 1789 and 1790, when Austen was a girl.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Life and Works of Jane Austen. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Loiterer
The Loiterer mixed serious content with humorous levity. It imagined its fellow Oxford students—who at that time were all men—as its audience. James and Henry Austen weren’t afraid to poke fun at their contemporaries. They must have shared their insights into college men’s behavior, and their writings in that periodical, with the rest of their family.
In fact, one fictional piece may have been an inspiration for Austen’s character in Northanger Abbey: John Thorpe, the mildly villainous Oxford student who makes heroine Catherine Morland’s life difficult.
Reading The Loiterer gives us insight into the kinds of knowledge of the human character—and knowledge of the craft of writing—that Jane Austen was likely to have gained from conversation with her brothers.
James Austen went on from Oxford to become a clergyman like his father. He was also a poet who preserved two volumes of his poetry in manuscript. His verses are comic and learned, with much of the work best described as light. Some poems are addressed to family members and friends. They show a well-exercised sense of humor and an appreciation for natural beauty. James also wrote prologues and epilogues to the plays that the family privately performed among themselves.
Austen’s Brothers
Jane’s other brothers, too, were writers. Her economically fortunate brother, Edward—he was adopted by the wealthy Knight family–wrote and preserved two travel journals from his tour of Europe. He captured the sights he saw in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands with succinct, descriptive prose. These journals suggest he was a man who knew his own mind and was hard to please and impress.
Two other Austen brothers did even more traveling than Edward Knight, as part of their military duties. Jane’s naval brothers, Francis and Charles, also kept years of substantial, although often merely functional, diaries. Charles’s diary suggests he was an avid reader of popular novels. There’s also evidence of his pride in Jane in the decade after her death. He recorded it in his diary when a new acquaintance in the West Indies engaged him in conversation about his late sister, the brilliant novelist.
A Family of Writers and Readers
Austen’s 161 surviving letters show that she understood and appreciated that her family was made up of writers. She corresponded with some of them about fiction writing, including the niece who became Anna Lefroy, and the nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, who became her memoirist. Aunt Jane offered them support and advice. She’s said to have advised her young niece to read more and write less, at least until age 16—a piece of advice that seems to recommend the opposite of what Jane herself did .
We’ve known all of these details separately but seeing them together makes it clear: Austen was raised in a family of unapologetic diarists, essayists, poets, and fiction writers, who had an artistic impact on her. She was brought up, and flourished, in a family community of writers and readers. This is a crucial insight about an author who wrote with such care about familial love, conflicts, and dysfunctions.
The Austen family continued down a literary path even after Jane’s death. Her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, and her great nephew, Lord Brabourne, published influential writings about Jane Austen’s life many decades after she died. But it’s important to understand that these weren’t one-off efforts for these men. Austen-Leigh privately published a work of recollections showing his love of hunting. And Lord Brabourne famously wrote dozens of volumes of fairy tales for children, as well as histories for children and conservative political pamphlets.
Common Questions about Jane Austen’s Literary Family
Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh, was from an economically and socially powerful family. The Leighs had landowners among their ranks, as well as writers and authors. She herself left behind some unpublished poetry. She wrote a poem, ‘Dialogue between Death and Mrs. A’, after recovering from an illness.
James Austen, along with his brother Henry, wrote for and edited the humor magazine, The Loiterer. James was also a poet who preserved two volumes of his poetry in manuscript. His verses are comic and learned, with much of the work best described as light. He also wrote prologues and epilogues to the plays that the family privately performed among themselves.
Jane Austen’s brother Edward wrote and preserved two travel journals from his tour of Europe. He captured the sights he saw in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands with succinct, descriptive prose. Jane’s naval brothers, Francis and Charles, also kept years of substantial, although often merely functional, diaries. Charles’s diary suggests he was an avid reader of popular novels. There’s also evidence of his pride in Jane in the decade after her death.
