The vegetable garden, the dairy—the family kept five cows—and the poultry yard would also have been among Mrs. Austen’s responsibilities, as was the supervision of enormous family meals.

The parsonage at Steventon, where Jane Austen was to live for the first twenty-five years of her life, was a large, respectable, but rather plain dwelling. The reception rooms on the ground floor showed their honest whitewashed beams, as well as a host of other architectural inelegancies, though the setting of the house, with its sundial, its flowers and hedgerows and rustic seats, was said to have been exceptionally charming.

Certainly the interior space was commodious enough to contain the boys’ boarding school run by the Austens. The Reverend George Austen, Jane’s father, was headmaster and sole teacher in the school, and Mrs. Austen supported the endeavor with her good will and practical assistance, overseeing the boys’ laundry and offering cheerful encouragement.

Mr. Austen was considered to be a handsome man and one who lived close to the ideal of a country gentleman, occupied with farm and parish duties, at the same time pursuing his scholarly and scientific interests. By all accounts he was a family man, a good father with a genuine interest in his offspring—he himself had been orphaned by the age of nine—and an admirable tolerance for his children’s differences, directing them down varying paths: the Church, the Admiralty, or in daughter Jane’s case, a life of literature. A farewell letter to his son Francis, off to the East Indies, survives, full of moral and practical advice, mild in tone, yet loving in its construction. Prudence, he told Francis, “will teach you the proper disposal of your time and the careful management of your money—two very important trusts.” (This letter from father to son was found with Francis’s papers when he died in his nineties, much creased and worn from rereading, a testimony of respect and love.)

The number of students at Steventon was small enough to make the school a family enterprise. Mr. Austen supervised the boys’ Greek and Latin in the parlor, to the accompaniment of everyday domestic buzz, visitors coming and going, and the younger children tumbling about. A household of this size, the ten Austens along with their four or five student boarders, ensured a lively ambience and what was most certainly an atmosphere of boisterousness and perhaps, for the young Jane, even ravishing happiness. Boys’ games, boys’ jokes, boys’ inevitable horseplay—all this made the Austens different from the more restrained families of their acquaintance, and young Jane and Cassandra were undoubtedly offered liberties that other girls were denied. They would have shared, too, in the overspill of earnest scholarship—privy to their father’s library, invited to observe his globe of the world and peer at natural mysteries through his microscope.

Jane Austen, describing the childhood of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, might be touching on her own early years of lightly supervised freedom, years of being “noisy and wild,” of playing with balls instead of dolls, of rainy days spent in the barn and family theatricals shared with the wider neighborhood. Such a childhood may well have given her understanding and sympathy for the way in which young male energy is transformed into gentleness and gallantry, a characteristic of all her male heroes.

A childhood is shaped by the presence or nonpresence of siblings. Jane Austen’s sister and six brothers, all of whom lived to adulthood, made her the person she was, a privileged observer of close family connections and inevitable conflicts. In addition to the immediate family there were engaging, affectionate neighbors who took an interest in the young Austens. Letters arrived from Aunt Philadelphia, bringing a whiff of a more cosmopolitan world. The seasons came and went; Christmas 1782, when Jane was seven, was celebrated with a play, Matilda, put on by the older Austen boys, the first of many family theatricals.

On the whole it can be said that warmth and respect marked the Austen household, but at the same time the family structure was slowly changing. The first son, James, ten years older than Jane, enrolled at Oxford in 1779, leaving some breathing space for the newly born Charles. Another brother, Edward, formed an attachment with the wealthy, distantly related Thomas Knight family of Godmersham, an arrangement that would eventually lead to his formal adoption. A farm refuge was found for another brother, George, who suffered from an unknown disability, probably a form of brain damage or deafness or both.

The idyllic life at Steventon ended abruptly when it was decided that Jane, aged seven, should be sent away to boarding school along with Cassandra and their cousin, Jane Cooper. Whether this decision was made with reflection or through lack of thought is not known, but the transition from country to city life can only have been shocking to so young a child; from rural Hampshire she went to Oxford, and later Southampton, as a pupil in a school run by Mrs. Cawley, whom the family knew only casually. The loss of freedom and the sense of banishment were imprinted on young Jane, and she spoke scathingly of girls’ schools and school-mistresses for the rest of her life. Rescue came in the form of an illness, referred to as a “putrid fever,” which sent both sisters home to their indulgent parents.

After a brief interlude the two sisters were sent away once again, this time to the Abbey School in Reading, romantically situated in a ruined twelfth-century monastery where the headmistress, Mrs. La Tournelle, spoke not a word of French, despite her name. Other mistresses did teach a little French as well as some drawing and needlework, and almost certainly dancing. The doors of universities were closed to females, and girls’ education in Jane Austen’s time consisted of what might be called “accomplishments.” The atmosphere of the Abbey School was relaxed, even indolent, and might well have resembled Mrs. Goddard’s School in Emma, a harmless social construct in which young girls were exposed to healthful food, outdoor exercise, and a less than rigorous academic program.