ABSTRACT
I imagine that the sisters were but seldom separated in 1814, since I have but five letters belonging to that year. The first two are from Henrietta Street, Henry Austen’s house, and were written in March. My mother had accompanied my grandfather to Chawton and Bath in February, where her grandmother, Lady Bridges, was staying for the benefit of the waters, and on their return home they paid Henry Austen a visit, arriving on Saturday, the 5th, and staying till Wednesday, the 9th of March. It was very cold weather, for in the winter and spring 1813–14 there were seventeen weeks of frost consecutively, and it was recorded as the hardest winter which had been known for twenty years. The weather, however, did not prevent the party in Henrietta Street from amusing themselves to the best of their ability. The visitors from Bath arrived shortly before five, and after dinner ‘Aunt Jane’ and her niece were escorted by Henry Austen to Drury Lane, to see Mr. Kean in ‘Shylock.’ Of this evening Aunt Jane says (Letter 71), ‘We were quite satisfied with Kean,’ whilst her younger companion notes in her diary, ‘We were delighted.’ In this same letter is the remark, ‘Young Wyndham accepts the invitation. He is such a nice, gentleman-like, unaffected sort of young man that I think he may do for Fanny.’ I think this must mean my uncle Dr. Knatchbull; the description does not agree with that which Mrs. Knight (Catherine Knatchbull) gives of her ‘nephew Wyndham’ in her letter to my father (see Appendix), and moreover, this son of ‘old’ Wyndham Knatchbull would seem to have died in 1813 (see Letter 68), unless there were two sons besides those two given in the Baronetage who survived their father’s death in 1883.
