Jane Austen For Dummies by Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray

Price leaves her poor birth family to join the household of her rich and titled aunt and uncle; she becomes a gentlewoman who marries well. In fact, when Fanny visits her birth parents, she disappointingly finds they are too poor, too harried, and too distracted with their brood of younger children to have ever missed her!
Emma
’s Jane Fairfax, orphaned by the early deaths of both parents, leaves the home of her kind but poor aunt and grandmother to be raised by her late father’s dear friends, Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, who have their own daughter, Jane’s age. The Campbells raise both girls as young ladies, with all the masters and training required for a daughter of the gentry, enabling Jane to associate with the gentry and make a genteel marriage. In the same novel, the widowed Mr. Weston allows his brother-in-law and his wife, the wealthy but childless Churchills, to raise his son Frank from childhood; they adopt Frank, who will succeed to the Churchills’ estate and money. When Isabella Knightley recalls the story of little Frank’s departure from his father, she exclaims, “‘I never can comprehend how Mr. Weston could part with him. To give up one’s child! I really never could think well of any body who proposed such a thing’” (E 1:11). But Jane Austen appears to have been far more practical than her distressed character Isabella. For she saw that her own brother Edward’s good fortune filtered into his birth family. As she grew up, Austen visited many great estates, including Edward’s, which enabled her to depict the country life of the gentry accurately in her novels. But she also enjoyed the luxury of visiting him and his family, too! In 1809, Edward provided his widowed mother and two unmarried sisters with a place to live: Chawton cottage, which is now the Jane Austen Museum, a popular tourist site in England and a veritable shrine to Jane Austen’s fans and admirers. (For details on the museum and instructions on how to get there after you arrive in London, see Chapter 19.)

    Photo by Adrian Harvey, Courtesy of the Jane Austen Society of North America
    Growing Up Gentry: Jane’s Formative Years
    The Austens were gentry, but they occupied the lower end of the gentry class. The Austens had less land and less money than the characters from Jane Austen’s novels, but rather than owning a magnificent country house at the center of a huge estate with a working farm, the Austens lived at the rectory, which had a farm that produced enough food to sustain them.

    The farm was away from the Austen’s house, not next to it as the 2005 film version of
Pride and Prejudice
erroneously shows the Bennets’ farm.
    Austen was later able to write so eloquently and so knowledgeably about life on the large country estates owned by richer gentry. The Rev. Mr. Austen’s clerical profession and excellent education opened the doors of the homes of richer neighbors of the gentry with whose children his children could associate. Back then, like today, a good education opened many doors.
    But Jane rarely longed for playmates or entertainment.
    Living and learning at the rectory
    The Steventon rectory was a busy place. To help make ends meet, the Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Austen boarded four or five young boys — frequently from wealthy and even titled families — as students, who lived with Jane’s brothers in the rectory’s attic. The Rev. Mr. Austen taught the boarding students, along with his own sons, such subjects as Latin, Greek, and literature, thereby preparing them for Eton or the other elite public schools. (Such schools are still called public schools even though they’re private. For more information on elite English public schools, see Chapter 9.)
    Mrs. Austen supervised what women of that time supervised: the busy household, which included the cooking, washing, and mending. Like Cassy, Jane was nursed by their mother and then sent to live