They represent her earliest surviving works, written for an audience composed of her family and a few close friends. The surviving verses (with one exception, all are ‘light verse’) were occasional pieces, some of which enjoyed a wider circulation than the prose contents of the notebooks. Most of the surviving verses are of a later date than the notebooks’ mock-novels. Jane Austen never, it appears, truly aspired to be a poet, and prose fiction always had first lien on her literary energies.

The author was born in 1775, on 16 December, a ‘natal day’ later to be sorrowfully commemorated in one of her poems as the anniversary of the death of her close friend Anne Lefroy (see pp. 238–9). Jane Austen’s early years were spent in Steventon in Hampshire, where her father, the Revd George Austen, was Rector. The Austens lived unostentatiously in the old-fashioned Rectory; they had not much of the world’s wealth, but they had enough to live like gentlefolk. They were not themselves, however, landed gentry, although they were related to members of that important class. Jane Austen’s father and all but one of her brothers were men who had to make a living in one of the professions. They had no estate, no rent-roll or tenants. Through her mother’s family, the Leighs, Jane Austen had gentle and even aristocratic connections, but the immediate Austen family had to depend on education and industry (as well as upon all possible connections) for advancement.

The great exception was Jane Austen’s older brother Edward, who was adopted by relatives of the Revd George Austen. A distant cousin, Mr Thomas Knight, had been sufficiently rich and influential to help his kinsman to the living of Steventon, but his son was to do even more for the family. In the 1780s Thomas Knight’s son (another Thomas) and daughter-in-law succeeded to the ownership of Godmersham Park in Kent. This wealthy couple eventually adopted Edward; the date of formal adoption is not certain but it could not have been before 1783. Little Edward had, however, been a welcome visitor in their house in his earlier childhood, as his brother Henry recollected in response to Caroline Austen’s questioning:

… they received a letter from Godmersham, begging that little Edward might spend his Holidays there … and so he went, and at the end of the Holidays he came back, as much Edward Austen as before. But after this, the Summer Holidays, at the least were spent with the Knights, he being still left to his father’s tuition. Uncle Henry could not say when it was announced in the family that one son was adopted elsewhere—it was, in time, understood to be….1

The Thomas Knights in adopting Edward changed his name to Edward Knight, or Edward Austen Knight. Edward himself added to the Knight family fortunes by marrying (in 1791) Elizabeth Bridges, daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, a wealthy country gentleman. The Knights were able to give Edward and his bride an estate called ‘Rowling’ to live upon; upon the death of Mr Thomas Knight (the younger) his widow, behaving as became a dowager with a son, moved out of Godmersham. In 1797 Edward came into full possession of the estate. Godmersham Park was the abode of wealth and elegance, of true gentility combined with some luxury. Cassandra and Jane visited Edward and Elizabeth at Godmersham, usually alternately, as one or the other had to act as companion and caretaker in the parental home. It is of course fortunate for us that they did not visit together, for the letters written by Jane Austen to or from Godmersham give us very clear ideas of the daily patterns of life at home, and on Edward’s estate, and the differences between them.

The story of Edward offered to the young Jane Austen a striking example of the caprices of fortune. There is something fairy-tale-like in the way one child among the eight Austen children was exalted into wealth and status, like a princeling in disguise reclaimed by his true parents. Edward was not even the oldest son. His sober, responsible brother James, the oldest child, was to be educated at Oxford for the clerical life he was expected to follow. James’s life was virtuous but not magical. At the other end of the family scale of luck was poor young George Austen, the unknown child, who appears to have been mentally deficient or physically handicapped in some fashion; his life is still a mystery, but we know that he was boarded out and did not live with the family.2 Francis Austen and Charles Austen were sent away at the very young age customary at the time. They were not sent to a boarding-school, but to the rigours of life as a midshipman. They had to seek their fortunes on literally dangerous waters, during the wars with France, which continued through the later 1790s until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815.