Retracing Jane Austen’s life 200 years after her short but significant life

TELLA WALKER RUDGING through the misty graveyard of St Nicholas Church in Steventon, Hampshire, on a chilly Saturday morning, I could really do with some of the ringed patterns Jane Austen and her sister, Cassandra, strapped to their boots to keep off the sodden, muddy ground.

Church warden Linton, who is whitehaired and stooped with age, but robust and animated with it, has taken care of the small village’s place of worship since 1993 and in the process, the Austen family legacy here. He pulls a circular piece of metal from a nook in the stone wall and hands it to me. Like traditional skates, but without the sharp slip of blade for carving through ice, he explains there’s no knowing whether Jane used this particular pattern to keep her feet dry, “but there’s certainly a chance”.

This is the church where Jane’s father, George Austen, was rector, from her birth in 1775 until the family moved to Bath in 1800, when Jane’s brother James took it on. Simple and compact, with a sharp taupe steeple puncturing the grey, wintry sky, it’s a plain, stocky building. Inside is quiet, the cool air percolating with a sense of history.

I am visiting Jane’s home county of Hampshire as 2017 marks the 200th anniversary of her death from suspected Addison’s disease, in 1817, aged just 41. St Nicholas’s is something of a pilgrimage site for Austen fans around the world. The church and grounds are open to visitors, and there are regular services people can attend, too.

Linton shows me an entry in the parish marriage registry that contains Jane’s scrawl, where she’d jokily inserted herself. “Jane got hold of it when she was a teenager for a lark,” he says, adding, with a chuckle: “What her father thought of it is not on record.”

He speaks of the Austens with such affection and good humour, it’s almost as if he knew them personally, even wryly quoting Jane’s witticisms on the “big” family who dominated the village during her childhood (she was not a fan).

Encompassing Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion,

Clockwise from above: Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen and James McAvoy as Thomas Lefroy in the film Becoming Jane; Jane’s tombstone at Winchester Cathedral; the desk at which she wrote most of her novels