Jane Odiwe Jane Austen Sequels

Jane Austen with her father George Some years ago, I painted a little picture of how I imagined Jane and her father would look when she was about five years old. I thought about this painting whilst I was writing a little scene in Project Darcy when Ellie goes back into the past and becomes Jane Austen, and tied it in with what seem to be Jane’s own recollections that she wrote about in Northanger Abbey . Although she is writing about Catherine Morland when she says her heroine was ‘ noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house’, I have a feeling she was referring to a memory of doing that herself. If you’ve ever been to Steventon to see the site where the rectory stood, the back of the garden has a pronounced slope! Here’s how I imagine Jane and her beloved brother Henry playing at the back of the rectory. I hope you enjoy this little excerpt from my latest novel,  Project D...

By Christmas 1787, Eliza was at Steventon Rectory again, and excited about performing in a make-shift theatre (her uncle's tithe barn) with her cousins. The Austen brothers most likely fitted out the barn with a stage, scenery, curtain and oil lamps to illuminate the actors. Eliza tried unsuccessfully to invite her cousin Phila to join them all, but the latter declared she had no wish to appear in public. The play decided on was The Wonder: A Woman keeps a Secret! James Austen wrote a prologue and epilogue for the play which celebrated the abilities of women to conquer men by their wit and charm - one cannot help wondering if Eliza had influenced his thinking and inspiration! Though I am certain the Austen brothers behaved impeccably, I am sure they were both captivated by the sophisticated and flirtatious Comtesse who exercised every opportunity to steal their hearts by acting alongside them. When Jane Austen later wrote Mansfield Park, surely some of the inspiration for the play...

Eliza de Feuillide (1761-1813) is a fascinating personality in Jane Austen's life. Eliza's mother was Jane's aunt, her father's sister, Philadelphia Hancock. Jane's father George and Philadelphia had been orphaned from a young age and though it seems they managed to stay in touch with one another, they both had to make their way in the world. Philadelphia was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden for five years before being shipped off (most likely by her uncle Francis Austen) at the age of 15 to India in order to find a husband. She met and married Tysoe Saul Hancock, a surgeon, twenty years her senior but remained childless for the first six years of their marriage. In Calcutta they befriended Warren Hastings who later became the Governor General of India. When Eliza was born Hastings became her godfather and took his role so seriously that there was a certain amount of gossip spread about that he was in fact her father. Whatever the truth of the matter, he ...