Jane Austen At Home 3 (Pages 42 - 121)

 Jane Austen had a very close relationship with her sister Cassandra, and both of them went to boarding school.

Cassandra Elizabeth Austen (9 January 1773 – 22 March 1845) was an amateur English watercolourist and the elder sister of Jane Austen. The letters between her and Jane form a substantial foundation to scholarly understanding of the life of the novelist.

They were joined by their cousin Jane Cooper. The school they went to was Mrs Ann Cawley's school in Oxford. 

The school moved to Southampton when an epidemic broke out, but then an epidemic of typhus broke out there, and the girls got sick. Mrs Cawley didn't tell the girls' parents about the move, but when Jane Cooper wrote to her mother that they had been sick and they were in Southampton, the two mothers rushed there. As a consequence, Mrs Cooper contracted typhus and died. 

Then Jane Cooper and the Austen sisers went to the Ladies Boarding School, known as the Abbey House in Reading. Reading Abbey Girls' School, also known as Reading Ladies’ Boarding School, was an educational establishment in Reading, Berkshire open from at least 1755 until 1794. Many of its pupils went on to make a mark on English culture and society, particularly as writers. Most famous is Jane Austen, who used the school as a model of "a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school".

Eliza was Jane Austen's cousin. Eliza Capot, Comtesse de Feuillide (née Hancock; 22 December 1761 – 25 April 1813) was the cousin, and later sister-in-law, of novelist Jane Austen.In 1779 she settled in France and two years later she married a wealthy French Army Captain, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide.  She came back to England with her mother in 1790, after the beginning of the French Revolution. Her husband, who was loyal to the French monarchy, was arrested for conspiracy against the Republic and guillotined in 1794. Her first cousin Henry Thomas Austen, brother of Jane Austen, then courted Eliza, and married her in December 1797.

The Napoleonic Wars started when Jane was 17 and finished when she was 39. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte (1804–1815) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions. 

Cassandra fell in love with Reverend Tom Fowle, but after years of courting he went to the Indies to make some money to marry Cassandra but he died. 

In 1793 Jane wrote a draft of Elinor and Marianne, which would eventually be "Sense and Sensibility". At first this novel was told in letters. Sense and Sensibility is the first novel by the English author Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the title page where the author's name might have been.T he novel is set in South West England, London, and Sussex, probably between 1792 and 1797.

James's daughter, Anna, lost her mother and her aunts, Jane and Cassandra, raised her. Anna Austen Lefroy (1793–1872) was the niece of Jane Austen by her eldest brother James Austen.

Between 1795 and 1796 Jane seemed to have been interested in Thomas Langlois Lefroy. Thomas Langlois Lefroy (8 January 1776 – 4 May 1869) was an Irish-Huguenot politician and judge. In 1796, Lefroy began a flirtation with Jane Austen, who was a friend of an older female relative. Jane Austen wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning "Tom Lefroy", and some have suggested that it may have been he whom Austen had in mind when she invented the character of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, as the courtship between Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen took place over the year or so that Pride and Prejudice was written.

Another man who was interested in Jane was Reverend Samuel Blackall. Samuel Blackall met Jane in 1798 while visiting the Lefroy’s and soon became an admirer of her. He had intended to visit again at Christmas but upon his return to Cambridge, where he was a Fellow, he discovered that he was not in a position to marry at present.