Lost Jane Austen album turns up on eBay

IT was an album in which every picture told a story, even though Jane Austen appeared to have told some of them before.

Karen Levers, a genealogy researcher, bought it on eBay for £780, expecting it to contain pictures from Victorian high society.

But within its curled pages lay an extraordinary collection of lost photographs of Austen’s relatives, compiled by an aristocrat who scandalously married two of her nieces.

A historian who examined the album said the lives of those within it appeared, unwittingly, to have imitated some of her fiction.

Dr Sophia Hillan, a retired associate director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, who

Cassandra died in childbirth just like her mother. Historian

Dr Sophia Hillan.

had previously uncovered the Austens’ link to the philandering Lord George Hill, said his mother resembled Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice.

The author’s niece Cassandra fell in love with Lord George, and “just as in Persuasion, they had to part for eight years until, like Captain Wentworth, he returned and they could marry”.

Dr Hillan added: “In the novels, the heroines have often lost a parent at a young age – and we see that time and time again in this album.

“Cassandra died in childbirth just like her mother. The parallels are there.”

Also in the album is a wedding picture of a groom who lost his arm to a tiger while fighting in India, just before marrying Austen’s great-niece.

Ms Levers said she hoped the photographs could be exhibited in the future.

HISTORY UNCOVERED: Top, Karen Levers with the Victorian photo album that she bought for £780; centre left, Jane Austen’s niece Louisa (left) with the writer’s nephew Edward Knight (seated); centre right, the Rev Charles Bridges Knight with two women; above, the wedding of Elizabeth Knight, Jane’s great-niece, in 1865.