The woman who ran the school, the imposingly named Mrs Latournelle, was not in fact qualified to teach French (a major feature of a young gentlewoman’s curriculum) as she could not speak it herself—despite her (false) name. This lady was chiefly remarkable for possessing an artificial leg made of cork. The Abbey School has generally been thought to conform to Austen’s dry description of a typical girls’ school offered in the quick sketch of Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma:

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a School—not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies. (1. 18)4

Harriet Smith, however, is no very great advertisement for such a school, and if Jane had been required to rely for information and intellectual stimulus on such an uninspired if unpretending place she would have fared badly. The Austens apparently did not think school-education of much importance for their daughters (and perhaps it was too expensive); they brought Jane and Cassandra home the next year.

Most of Jane Austen’s education took place at home. Yet there are no signs that Mrs Austen, though of a more cultivated mind and a much higher rank by birth than Mrs Bennet, made any more effort than that excellent mother to form her girls’ minds. Jane Austen’s education was basically self-education, although extensive self-education would not have been possible without the companionship of a father and elder brother who were lively and educated and liked books. Jane Austen was fortunate in that her father possessed a library. Perhaps she was even more fortunate in the presence of novel-reading neighbours and the occasional lending library. Austen notes the advent of one such source of books, with the opening of a new subscription-library:

As an inducement to subscribe Mrs. Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature, &c.&c.—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers and not ashamed of being so…. (Letter to Cassandra, 18 Dec. 1798)5

We know from Frances Burney’s Journals of the lists of books that the young Frances Burney set herself to read. Doubtless Jane Austen made such lists too—and felt guilty over not completing them, after the manner of Emma. But there is no reason to doubt Austen’s extensive and even encylopaedic knowledge of the modern English novel. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed he had read all the major modern novels (at least, all those in French) by the time he was 7;6 we may believe he was stretching a point or two, and nobody would make an equally hyperbolical claim for Jane Austen. Yet it is evident from her surviving writings that by the end of the decade of the 1780s she was deeply familiar with most of the English fiction of the eighteenth century. She was as fortunate in belonging to a family of ‘great Novel-readers’ as Mozart was in belonging to a family of musicians. What is even more striking is the young Austen’s evident command of the sheer idea of fiction in itself. By the time she writes the earliest works of Volume the First, pieces such as ‘Frederic and Elfrida’, ‘Jack and Alice’, or ‘Henry and Eliza’, she is entirely aware of thematic patterns and plot structures, or paradigms that could be familiar only to a reader of a multitude of books—and of a re-reader, at that. By the time she was 15 (or even 13 or 14—the earliest date suggested for any of the early pieces is 1787), she was as familiar with the workings of fiction as a watchmaker with the interior movements and structures of a clock.

These Juvenilia of Jane Austen exist in three manuscripts, which are three separate notebooks. The titles were given to these ‘Volumes’ by Jane Austen. Volume the First, bound in calf, is sadly worn. Several pages are dated, the most significant date being that at the end: ‘End of the first Volume June 3d 1793.’ There are no dates attached to the very first pieces in the volume. We also know that Austen went back and used some of the pages remaining in this notebook for later work after the summer of 1793. Volume the Second is a finer notebook, bound in white vellum. Jane Austen writes on the contents page, ‘Ex dono mei Patris’—her only recorded utterance in Latin except for the ‘in propria persona’ of Mansfield Park.7 Had her father taught her a little Latin? We cannot know. We are on firmer ground in supposing that her father had been so pleased and entertained with the material already appearing in Volume the First that he supplied the finer notebook as an encouragement to further productions.