1793 - 1872

 

Jane Anna Elizabeth Austen, more fondly known as Anna, was born in 1793 to Jane Austen's eldest brother James and his first wife Anne Mathew. Anna was the elder half sister to James Edward Austen Leigh who wrote Jane Austen's memoir. 

 

Anna was very close to her aunts and stayed at Steventon for two years whilst still a toddler following the death of her mother in 1795 until James remarried Mary Lloyd (sister to family friend Martha). When apart, Anna and Jane wrote to each other often, and Jane would offer advice on love to her niece. Jane shows off Anna's virtues in a poem she wrote entitled Mock Panegyric on a Young Friend.

 

Anna married Benjamin Lefroy in 1814. You may recognise this surname as Ben was the cousin of Tom Lefroy, highly publicised (rightly or wrongly) as Jane's great love, and son of Jane's beloved mentor Madame Anne Lefroy. Jane was happy for her niece and visited the couple of several occasions. 

 

Anna's younger sister Caroline didn't recount the wedding with great enthusiasm:

 

"My sister’s wedding was certainly in the extreme of quietness: yet not so much as to be in any way censured or remarked upon–and this was the order of the day… The season of the year, the unfrequented road to the church, the grey light within… no stove to give warmth, no flowers to give colour and brightness, no friends, high or low, to offer their good wishes, and so to claim some interest in the great event of the day – all these circumstances and deficiencies must, I think, have given a gloomy air to the wedding…"

 

However, the marriage appears to have been a happy one and the couple had seven children, which worried Jane: "Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty". Ben sadly died at the early age of thirty eight in 1829 leaving Anna to struggle alone with ill health and strained finances. She never remarried. 

 

Like her aunt, Anna was fond of writing and Jane would advise her. Anna was very accomplished and published several works herself: the novella Mary Hamilton (1833), and two children's stories The Winter's Tale (1841) and Springtide (1842). Unfortunately Jane did not live long enough to see her niece a published writer. 

 

Anna did attempt to complete the unfinished novel of her aunt's, Sanditon, but for an unknown reason, she did not finish the work. Perhaps her ill health and many children occupied her time or she felt unable to complete it satisfactorily. We do not know if Jane revealed to her niece how the story would end. You can find copies of Anna's unfinished attempt but they are extremely rare.

 

Later in life, Anna provided her recollections of her aunt Jane to her half brother James Edward Austen Leigh, which he published in his memoir. She also recollected memories of Jane's relationship with Tom Lefroy in letters to her sister Caroline and wrote in 1869 that "The one thing certain is, that to the last year of his life she was remembered as the object of his youthful admiration". 

 

Despite ill health and poverty, Anna lived until 1872, outliving her husband by over forty years, and saw her daughter Jemima married to another Lefroy, Thomas E P Lefroy (not to be confused with the previously mentioned Tom Lefroy).