A Jane Austen Education Read Online Free Page B

thus, the rise of the British Empire.
    Though they seem remote from her quiet existence, these events touched her very closely. Her father’s bright, pretty sister, endowed with the striking name of Philadelphia, went out to India as a young woman, like so many girls at the time, to find herself a husband from among the mass of ambitious young men who had gone to the booming colony to seek their fortune. Not only did she find one, she may have also found a lover in the person of Warren Hastings, the brilliant young administrator who was on his way to becoming the first governor-general of India and one of the most important figures in the history of the Raj. From then on, the Austen and Hastings families would remain intertwined. Philadelphia, childless for the first eight years of her marriage, gave birth to a daughter within two years of meeting her husband’s new business associate. The girl’s name, Eliza, was the same as that of Hastings’s daughter, who had died in infancy. Hastings, a widower, not only acted as Eliza’s godfather and later gave her the spanking sum of ten thousand pounds, he also sent his young son back to England to be raised in the home of Philadelphia’s newly married brother—that is, Jane Austen’s father himself.
    Austen never knew the boy, for he died of diphtheria within a few months. But she did come to know her cousin Eliza, who went on to live another remarkable story, very well indeed. Philadelphia had returned to England along with her husband when their daughter was three. When Eliza was nineteen—she had grown up to be a lively, beautiful, and flirtatious young woman—she married a French count and acquired the glamorous name of Capot de Feuillide. A few years later—Jane was ten by now—Madame de Feuillide descended upon the Austens’ sleepy parsonage in all the glory of her French stories and French fashions. Despite the age difference, the two cousins formed a close and loving friendship that lasted to the end of the older woman’s life.
    Meanwhile, Warren Hastings, returned to England after twelve years as the master of British India, was impeached for corruption by the House of Commons and embroiled in the most spectacular trial of Austen’s day. The ordeal dragged on for seven years, followed by the Austens with intense partisanship on behalf of their patron, and finally ended in Hastings’s acquittal. By that point, however, Eliza had become entangled in the French Revolution. Her husband lost his estates; Madame la Comtesse, as she liked to be called, was prevented from returning to France; and at last—Eliza herself was probably taking refuge with the Austens at the time—the count himself was sent to the guillotine. And then, before long, in a turn toward the family with which she had become so close, Eliza married Austen’s older brother Henry, ten years younger than herself.
    The Napoleonic Wars came even closer to home. Two of Austen’s other brothers (she had six in all) joined the Royal Navy, Britain’s proudest institution and first line of defense—Frank, a year older than she, and Charles, the baby, four years younger. Frank sailed to the Far East, fought in the Mediterranean, made captain by the age of twenty-six, narrowly missed the great victory at Trafalgar—a bitter regret—but chased the French across the Atlantic, played a leading role in the Battle of San Domingo, the last major naval engagement of the conflict, and fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Charles, less lucky in his career, still saw his share of perilous action, helping to run down one French warship in a chase of some two hundred miles, capturing another from a small boat in a heavy storm, hunting Napoleon’s allies after the emperor’s escape from Elba, and fighting Greek pirates in the Aegean. Austen, needless to say, followed all of these events—by letter, by rumor, through newspaper reports, and in her brothers’ own stories when they returned home on