Jane Austen's time in Reading

Jane Austen spent 18 months at school in Reading between the summer of 1785 and December 1786, aged 9 & 10 at Reading Ladies Boarding School. Reading Abbey Gateway, which was one of the school buildings and was part of the former medieval Reading Abbey, still stands today and can be visited as part of Jane Austen 250. 

Jane Austen's family ties to Reading

Jane was fortunate to have been born into a family where education was highly prized, in its own right, but also as a means of earning a living. Her mother Cassandra Leigh came from the academic and intellectual, though not wealthy, branch of the aristocratic and affluent Leigh family. Jane’s father George Austen grew up in Kent and was awarded a fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. When he married Cassandra Leigh in 1764 he took up Holy Orders and settled in the Hampshire parish of Steventon, 25 miles south of Reading.

Jane Austen at School in Reading

In 1783, Jane and her elder sister Cassandra and their cousin Jane Cooper moved to Southampton for their education but both contracted typhus and were brought home. Tragically Mrs Austen’s sister Mrs Cooper, died of the fever although the girls recovered. Mrs Cooper’s widower, Rev Dr Edward Cooper, was the Rector of Sonning, just four miles west of Reading.  It was decided that the two older cousins, Cassandra and Jane Cooper, should go to school again and in spite of there being schools nearer to Steventon and cheaper, Reading Ladies Boarding School was chosen. Its good reputation for education was well-known, in particular, for the daughters of clergymen. The fact that its situation in the Forbury, in what is now central Reading, was considered to be a particularly healthy spot and was also only a couple of miles from Sonning must have been a decisive factor.

Pictured above: Reading Ladies Boarding School. Credit Reading Museum

Jane’s mother is known to have said: “Jane was too young to make her going to school at all necessary... (but) she would go with Cassandra; if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off Jane would have hers cut off too.”

Mr Austen paid £37 19s per girl per half year. This probably included board, tuition, washing, materials and dancing lessons, as was the norm. So the three cousins came to school in Reading in July 1785. Jane mentions her school days only once in her letters, ‘I could die of laughter at it as they used to say at School’, but it is widely thought that when she describes Mrs Goddard’s School in Emma she is recalling her own school: ‘a real old-fashioned Boarding school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies’.

Unfortunately, this educational idyll came to an end in December 1786: much of Mr Austen’s income derived from his farm and an exceptionally harsh winter followed by late frosts and devastating blight severely affected his income. Consequently, the girls had to leave school at the end of the term.

We will never know how much Jane was influenced by her short time in Reading. However, within months the twelve-year old Jane was writing seriously.

Copyright Joy Pibworth, Jane Austen Society