Revealed, how Jane Austen created two fake weddings ... for herself!
SHE is behind some of literature’s most iconic romances.
And it seems that Jane Austen’s penchant for creating fictitious marriages extended to herself.
Newly unearthed documents reveal that as a teenager the author falsified a marriage register to announce her impending marriage to two separate men.
Miss Austen, who never married, created the fake entries in the Steventon register for 1755-1812, which she had access to because her father, George Austen, was rector of the Hampshire parish.
The document, held by Hampshire Archives, includes a fake entry for the publication of banns of marriage between Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London and Jane Austen of Steventon.
Another details the marriage of the author to Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool. It is not known whether either of the men actually existed.
Hampshire county councillor Andrew Gibson said the document ‘reveals a mischievous side during [Miss Austen’s] younger years.’
It will go on display in May at an exhibition in Winchester to mark 200 years since her death.