Jane Austen family letters offer ‘deeply personal’ insight into author’s world

A window into the life of Jane Austen’s mother’s family, the Leighs of Adlestrop, is promised by an unpublished collection of manuscripts which are set to “draw back the curtain on the formalities of society” in Regency England.

The Huntington Library in California has acquired 52 unpublished letters, poems and other material from six generations of the Leigh family. Austen’s mother was Cassandra Leigh, and the novelist visited her Leigh family in Adlestrop several times, with some believing that the setting of Mansfield Park is partly drawn from the Gloucestershire village.

The letters are “deeply personal”, said Vanessa Wilkie, curator of English historical manuscripts at the Huntington, and although they do not mention the author of Pride and Prejudice specifically, they “will help people develop a more vivid understanding of Austen’s immediate world”. Most of Austen’s own letters were burned by her sister, after her death.

Acquired from a UK rare book and manuscript dealer, the correspondence reveals “the intimate, mundane, playful, and tragic aspects of the times”, said Wilkie. “You get a dear mother, affectionate father, dear son, dear cousin, dear brother, dear little niece, dear Madame, and even A. Nonymous, who writes a really funny letter that cautions against the dangers of falling in love with Miss Fortune.”

A passage from a letter James Leigh wrote in 1750 to his uncle Theophilus Leigh, master of Balliol college in Oxford and Jane Austen’s great-uncle, sees him tell of the earthquakes which hit London that year. “A general panic seems to have taken possession of all here, particularly the female world, and made us all deaf to everything but our own fears. We have already felt two pretty strong earthquakes at 28 days distance,” wrote Leigh. “On Thursday, three weeks, it is prophesised we shall have another much more violent than the former, in which London is to share the fate of Lima.”

A second sample comes from an 1806 letter Warren Hastings wrote to Reverend Thomas Leigh in which, said Wilkie, Hastings is drafting the potential language of a woman’s tomb. “Cheerful, benevolent and generous, she endeared herself by the simplicity of her manners, which like the playfulness of her mind, enlivened society without ever giving offense, or exciting alarm,” wrote Hastings, a friend of the Austen family and the first governor-general of British India.

“Austen fans and scholars are certainly thirsty for anything connected to her life, and this collection is comprised of the writings of her ancestors, family, and kin. On the surface, people just get excited anytime anything is in close physical or intellectual proximity with a beloved figure like Jane Austen,” said Wilkie. “Family relationships are also such a central theme to so many of Austen’s novels that it is quite natural to be curious about her own family and friends.”