When in ‘The History of England’ Jane Austen compliments her brother by comparing him with Sir Francis Drake, who ‘will be equalled in this or the next Century by one who tho’ now but young, already promises to answer all the ardent and sanguine expectations of his Relations and Friends’ (p. 141), she of course knew that this young brother (only one year older than herself) had a long and hazardous way to go before he reached the eminence she jokingly sketches. The compliment on his condition and prospects serves as an encouragement, but she must have guessed that he was sometimes miserably homesick.3

We have glimpses of the tastes and manners of various Austen children through Jane Austen’s dedication of these early prose pieces to members of her family. Frank gets not only ‘The Adventures of Mr. Harley’ (about another hero who goes to sea) but also the highly literary ‘Jack and Alice’. The oldest son, James, who is interested in drama and tries to write plays himself, is the dedicatee of ‘The Visit’, the extremely short ‘comedy in 2 acts’. The elder sister Cassandra is the recipient not only of ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’ but also of ‘The History of England’ in which she was a joint labourer, supplying the illustrations.

Jane Austen was living at home during the time she wrote the material in the notebooks, entitled by her Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third. She was to remain at home, save for brief visits, for the rest of her life, although ‘home’ was to change. Home ceased to be at Steventon, and became Bath (to Jane Austen’s dismay) upon her father’s retirement in 1801. After her father’s death in 1805, when she and her mother were in straitened circumstances, home became lodgings in Southampton, and then a little house in Chawton, in Hampshire, supplied by the now wealthy Edward. Jane Austen did not, however, remain at home quite all of her existence, although her only excursions ‘into the world’ and away from her family were early ventures into school life. In 1783, about the time when Edward’s adoption was becoming formalized, as we know from the group silhouette made at the time (depicting Edward’s father presenting Edward to Mr and Mrs Knight), Jane Austen was 8 years old. She and her elder (and only) sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford, to the governance of Mrs Cawley, widow of a former principal of Brasenose College. It is strange to think of the child Jane Austen among the silver-grey pinnacles and dreaming spires (and hard-drinking undergraduates) of Oxford of that time. Mrs Cawley was a connection of the Austen parents (who certainly seem, even for the time, remarkably reluctant to venture outside the ties of family). She was the sister-in-law of Mrs Austen’s own sister; presumably the family were trying to help this newly impoverished gentlewoman to support herself in something like the manner to which she had been accustomed. Mrs Austen’s sister Mrs Cooper, née Leigh, sent her own daughter, another little Jane, to be cared for and educated by Mrs Cawley.

Mrs Cawley, a very formal and old-fashioned lady, was not loved by any of the children. Perhaps the stiff, fussy, and old-fashioned Mrs Percival of ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ (pp. 186–229) is in part a portrait of her. Probably because Oxford was expensive, Mrs Cawley removed to Southampton a few months after Jane’s arrival in Oxford. This was a most disastrous move. Jane and Cassandra caught what was called ‘putrid fever’ (probably typhoid). Mrs Cawley did not inform their parents—obviously because she did not want to lose her means of livelihood. Young Jane Cooper had better sense, and informed her mother. Mrs Cooper came in haste with Mrs Austen and removed the girls. Jane Austen nearly died of this ‘putrid fever’—and her unfortunate aunt, Mrs Cooper, did die of it. This sad and frightening experience lurks behind the comical warning of Isabel to Laura in ‘Love and Friendship’: ‘Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the Stinking fish of Southampton’ (p. 77). Jane may have remembered the terrible illness being laid at the door of Southampton’s ‘Stinking fish’ and bad air.

In 1784 the Austens sent their daughters to school again, to the Abbey School, near Reading. If the 8-year-old Jane Austen, like Catherine Morland at 17, nourished a desire to see a real abbey, that was partly gratified by her school, which was built on the ruins of a medieval priory.