Ann Prowting submitted to fate and married Benjamin Clement of the Royal Navy. After the end of the Napoleonic wars turned him on shore, the young couple took up residence in Chawton and remained there until their deaths. Catherine Prowting never married.
Edward Austen and his children took the surname of Knight in 1812, when his patroness Catherine Knight died. He stayed briefly in the Great House in 1813 and again in 1814, but remained until his death a resident of Kent. The Middleton family gave up the lease of the Chawton estate in 1812, and in the years before Edward’s eldest son, Edward (1794–1879), moved into the Great House in 1826, the place was at the disposal of Jane’s naval brothers, Frank and Charles. Frank’s fourth son, Herbert, was born there in 1815.
For those who wish to know more of Jane Austen’s neighborhood in Hampshire, I must recommend Rupert Willoughby’s slim volume, Chawton: Jane Austen’s Village, The Old Rectory, Sherborne St. John, 1998; Jane Austen and Alton, by Jane Hurst, copyright Jane Hurst, 2001; Nigel Nicolson’s The World of Jane Austen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991; Jane Austen, A Family Record, by W. Austen-Leigh, R. A. Austen-Leigh, and Deirdre Le Faye, The British Library, 1989; and Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Chawton Great House was sold in 1993 to Ms. Sandy Lerner, an American, who has completely refurbished the house and grounds as a Center for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing—a use Jane Austen might have approved, although she would certainly have lamented its inevitable passage from family hands. Chawton Cottage is in the care of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, and can be toured most days of the year.
Stephanie Barron
Golden, Colorado
January 2004
The Jane Austen Mysteries by Stephanie Barron
Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor
Jane and the Man of the Cloth
Jane and the Wandering Eye
Jane and the Genius of the Place
Jane and the Stillroom Maid
Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House
Jane and the Ghosts of Netley
JANE AND HIS LORDSHIP’S LEGACY
A Bantam Book / March 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Stephanie Barron.
Map by David Lindroth Inc.
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barron, Stephanie.
Jane and his lordship’s legacy/Stephanie Barron
p. cm.
1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Women novelists—Fiction. 4. Chawton (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A8357 J325 2005 2004048796
813/.54 22
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90127-6
v3.0
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Chapter 1
1 The manor of Chawton, which included the Great House and the whole of the village, was deeded to Jane’s third brother, Edward, in 1797 as part of his inheritance from distant cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Knight of Kent, a childless couple who adopted Edward as their heir. Edward enjoyed the freehold of more than thirty cottages and gardens in Chawton, as well as the Great House, farm, and Chawton Park. The entire estate, including the village holdings, was gradually sold off in the twentieth century by Knight family heirs.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 2
1 To be in the commission of the peace for the county, as Jane phrases it, was to be appointed a justice of the peace, or magistrate. Deputy lieutenant was a post appointed at the pleasure of the lord lieutenant of the county, usually the county’s ranking peer, and carried with it certain administrative duties.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 3
1 Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, formed in the Middle Ages to provide lodgings for young men studying law. It sits roughly half a mile from Covent Garden in the center of London, and in Jane Austen’s day was a common locus of solicitors’ and barristers’ chambers, as it remains today.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 4
1 It was customary, in Jane Austen’s day, to refer to the spouse of a sibling as one’s sister or brother. The term in-law often referred to step-relations.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 6
1 At this time, country branches of London banks were authorized to print notes backed by currency held in their London branches. For a full description of Henry Austen’s banking activities, see “Jane Austen’s Banker Brother: Henry Thomas Austen of Austen & Co., 1801–1816,” by Dr. Clive Caplan; Persuasions (Jane Austen Society of North America), No. 20, 1998, pp. 69–90.—Editor’s note.
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2 Miss Benn is held to be the original from which the character of Miss Bates was drawn in Emma.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 7
1 To “live on tick” was to live on credit.—Editor’s note.
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2 Jane makes a similar observation of her character Mrs. Musgrove, in Persuasion, who has lost a troublesome son in the navy.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 8
1 Anatomization, or the dissection of a corpse, was a fate usually reserved for hanged felons. Autopsy was regarded in Austen’s time as a violation of a God-given body, abhorred and reviled by all but those familiar with medical interests.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 9
1 Robin Hood Butts was an area of open land between Chawton and Alton that served as the site of Alton’s April Fair.—Editor’s note.
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2 According to the practice of primogeniture, only the first-born son and heir of a peer was considered ennobled at birth; the rest of the Duke of Wilborough’s children, like Lord Harold, were considered commoners, and accorded courtesy titles of lord or lady only during their lifetimes. Their children, in turn, were plain Mr. or Miss.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 10
1 We are to assume from Lord Harold’s oblique reference that Frederick Vansittart acceded to his elder brother’s earldom sometime in 1785, and that for this reason he returned to England aboard the Punjab with the governor-general’s party.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 11
1 The Lewkenor Carpet is a tapestry roughly sixteen feet by seven feet, executed in the mid-sixteenth century in France and now in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.—Editor’s note.
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2 The Vyne, or Vine—ancestral home of the Chute family at Sherborne St. John a few miles beyond Basingstoke just north of Chawton—was the site of one of the more famous hunting groups in southern England. William Chute (1757–1824), the patriarch in Jane Austen’s time, was both Master of the Vyne Hunt and a Member of Parliament for his borough.—Editor’s note.
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3 The term Corinthian is derived from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I: “a Corinthian, a lad of mettle …” and connoted a gentleman practiced in such manly sports as boxing, fencing, cocking, horse-racing, gambling, hunting, and carriage-driving.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter
12
1 The Battle of Chandernagar refers to the English East India Company’s assault, under the direction of Robert Clive, of the French Compagnie des Indes Fort d’Orléans in Chandernagar, India, in 1757. At the cost of significant casualties among Royal Navy troops brought in to fight against the French, the British decisively established control of Bengal for commercial trading.—Editor’s note.
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2 Thomas Coutts (1735–1822), a cautious Scot who became the chief banker and financial support of the most fashionable people in London during the late Georgian period, was known for having privately floated the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whose fatal habit was gambling away a fortune.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 15
1 The sweep, in Austen’s day, was the term for a driveway.—Editor’s note.
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2 A person’s “vowels” were his or her I.O.U.—a signed note promising repayment of a debt of honor that could not be immediately settled.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 16
1 Hoby’s establishment sat at the corner of St. James’s and Piccadilly, and was considered the most elegant gentlemen’s bootmaker of the period. Hessians were a style introduced in the early part of the nineteenth century, worn outside the trousers and curving under the knee, with a leather tassel dangling from the center front.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 17
1 Lewis Wyatt was one of a family of architects who, collectively, were responsible for some of the most significant buildings of the late Georgian and Regency periods.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 20
1 “Caky” was the Austen-Knight children’s name for Susannah Sackree, nursemaid at Godmersham from 1793 to 1851.—Editor’s note.
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2 Henry Pearce, a prizefighter known as the Game Chicken, was named champion of England in 1805.—Editor’s note.
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3 Gin.—Editor’s note.
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Chapter 22
1 The Season, a period of intense social activity among the Upper Ten Thousand of London society, ran generally for twelve weeks—from Easter through June, when the wealthy of Austen’s period departed for their country houses or Brighton.—Editor’s note.
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2 The rapidity and frequency of mail delivery during Austen’s era, despite the relatively bad quality of the roads, is astonishing compared to the infrequent but predictable service of the present day. Sunday mail service, such as Austen describes here, was expected.—Editor’s note.
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