Two unlikely ladies in the life of Jane Austen: Philadelphia Austen Hancock and Eliza de Feuillide Austen

Philadelphia Austen Hancock and her daughter Eliza de Feuillide Austen are close female relations of Jane Austen's whose lives have been relegated to the margins of Austen biographies. This biography places these two women at center stage. Philadelphia, the sister of Jane Austen's father, opted to go to India in the eighteenth century to find a husband and a maintenance. In India she met and married a man considerably older than she and nine years after her marriage, when living in Calcutta, she had a daughter Eliza, most probably the result of an affair she had with Warren Hastings who would become the Governor General of Bengal. Hastings supported the two women throughout their lives. When Tysoe Saul Hancock, Philadelphia's husband, died, Philadelphia took Eliza to Paris where, because of their connection to Hastings (Eliza had been made Hastings's goddaughter) they dined at Versailles, the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, befriended a circle of French aristocrats, and eventually Eliza married M. de Feuillide who said he was a French count and who was to be guillotined during the Reign of Terror. Eliza soon thereafter married her cousin, Jane Austen's favorite brother, Henry.;This biography puts to rest once and for all the idea that Jane Austen knew little of the great historical events going on outside her English country village: the French Revolution, for instance, and the British colonial enterprise in India. Unlike Austen's imaginary heroines who go through a process of self-discovery emerging as moral leaders in their community and to Austen's readers, Philadelphia and Eliza were neither self-reflective nor concerned with moral issues. Theirs were lives intriguing to Austen but alien to her aesthetic and moral purpose. It is in the juvenilia that Austen comes closest to expressing the sensibilities similar to those of Philadelphia and Eliza---their sense of adventure, their flaunting convention, their impulsivity and exuberance. Although much of this spirit is suppressed in Austen's mature work it is something of this very spirit which energizes the major novels.