The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

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Paula Byrne. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things

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Dedication

For my very own Elinor (Ellie)

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It was called the Abbey School and was run by Sarah Hackitt, who went by the name of Madame Latournelle, no doubt because female French teachers were the height of fashion. The school adjoined the remains of the ancient Abbey of Reading: ‘the greater part of the house was encompassed by a beautiful old-fashioned garden, where the young ladies were allowed to wander under tall trees in hot summer evenings’.23 The school was connected to an antique gateway, which looked out on the green and a marketplace beyond. Inside, new girls were received by the headmistress in a wainscoted parlour in which chenille tapestries depicting tombs and weeping willows were hung round the walls.

According to a family member, the school was a ‘free and easy one … In Cassandra and Jane’s days the girls do not seem to have been kept very strictly, as they and their cousin, Jane Cooper, were allowed to accept an invitation to dine at an inn with their respective brothers, Edward Austen and Edward Cooper.’24 As the family descendants noted, it all sounds rather like Mrs Goddard’s school in Emma, which ‘had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter [she] dressed their chilblains with her own hands’.25 Madame Latournelle always dressed in the same way and had a cork leg. She encouraged the arts, dancing and theatre in particular. It seems to have been a happy place, full of girlish glee. ‘I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school,’ Jane Austen remarked in one of her letters to Cassandra.26

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