25. Anna’s Choice for Anna Austen, Jane’s Niece, by Becky Brown
Jane Anna Austen
LeFroy (1793-1872)
Jane Austen’s sister-in-law Anne Mathew Austen died in 1795, leaving brother James with two-year-old Jane Anna, called Anna. In Jane Austen's England, single fathers
were considered unqualified to raise young children, so Anna went to live with
her Austen grandparents at the Steventon rectory. Jane and Cassandra were in
their early 20s when Anna came to stay.
Fashion Plate, 1809
Jane was writing Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice in the two years that Anna lived with them. Anna later told her daughter she remembered the aunts reading
the manuscripts aloud.
Anna drew this picture
of the Steventon Rectory from memory.
Collection of the Jane
Austen Memorial Trust.
When her father married Mary Lloyd, four-year-old Anna
returned to their home. James and Mary had two more children James and
Caroline. Mary may have favored her own
children over her stepdaughter, another possible reason for Jane’s impatience
with her new sister-in-law. (See Block 19.)
Anna later remembered her stepmother as "abrupt & sharp....She did not love her stepdaughter & she slighted her...."
Anna's Choice by Dustin Cecil
Aunt Jane’s letters to Anna survive and although she told
her niece, “One does not care for girls till they are grown up,” Jane developed strong affection for her young niece. Anna took up novel writing as an adolescent
and her Aunt Jane patiently criticized her drafts.
The Anna we see in letters earned a reputation as a
difficult teenager. According to Aunt Jane, she had “much unsteadiness” in her temperament, becoming engaged at 18 against James and Mary’s wishes. The engagement was
broken and the girl was sent off to her aunts in Chawton in 1813.
Anna's Choice by Georgann Eglinski
She soon contracted
another engagement, this one to Ben LeFroy, who also fell short of her parents’
standards. Aunt Jane wasn’t
enthusiastic either. The problem wasn’t Ben, the son of Jane's late friend Anna
LeFroy of Ashe and first cousin to Jane’s one-time beau Tom LeFroy. Jane
realized that dreams of writing would be lost in being anyone’s wife because of
“the business of mothering.” “Poor
Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty,” she wrote during Anna’s
third pregnancy.
Anna gave birth to eight children. After her husband's death when she was in her thirties, she became a published writer with a few novellas in periodicals. Anna, however, was never the author her aunt was (Who was?) so perhaps she made the right
choice in the conventional choice of marrying Ben LeFroy.
BlockBase 1141a
Anna’s Choice was given the name in the Kansas City Star in
1941. It's pieced of one patch, a right-angle triangle in different
shades.
A – Cut 16 squares 3-7/8” of four
different shades. Cut each in half with a diagonal cut to make 2 triangles.
You need 32 triangles.
Sewing:
A variation on Anna's Choice by Bettina Havig.
She likes the Y-Seams!
Read Mary Hamilton
“by a niece of the late Jane Austen” at Google Books by clicking here:
And read more about Anna here:
http://becomingjane.blogspot.com/2007/07/anna-lefroy-believer-of-love.html
Anna's Choice by Becky Brown
Well that clears things up. Jane did not want children and considered pregnancy and childbirth "animal" functions that wore out one's body. She was right about that for her times when married women could not control how often they would be pregnant. And Jane may have instinctively known she had only limited time allotted. Fortunately for us she used it for her great talent. And she doesn't seem to have felt she missed anything by not being a mother.
ReplyDelete