Reading reveals plans for Jane Austen celebrations
Next year will be the 250th anniversary of her birth
In 2025, as part of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, her former school room in Reading’s Abbey Quarter, often cited as the inspiration for Austen’s Mr Goddard’s School in Emma, will open for a series of special events and tours.
When she was just nine years old, Jane Austen spent 18 months at school in Reading. Based in the former Gateway of the medieval Reading Abbey, Reading Ladies Boarding School became home to Jane, her elder sister Cassandra and cousin Jane between the summer of 1785 and December 1786.
In 2025, Reading Museum will be putting on a series of events, tours and visits to the Abbey Gateway and Reading Abbey Quarter to tell the story of Jane’s time at school in Reading as part of Reading’s Jane Austen 250 celebrations, which also include visits to the film location for Pride and Prejudice - the National Trust’s Basildon Park, a Mill at Sonning theatrical world premiere of Death Comes to Pemberley, based on a PD James novel, as well as guided walks, tours and talks.
Jane Austen’s mother is known to have said: “Jane was too young to make her going to school at all necessary... (but) she would go with Cassandra; if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off Jane would have hers cut off too.” So, Mr Austen paid £37 19s per girl per half year which would have included board, tuition, washing, materials and dancing lessons, as was the norm, and the three cousins headed off to school in Reading in July 1785.
Jane mentions her school days only once in her letters, ‘I could die of laughter at it as they used to say at School’, but it is widely thought that when she describes Mrs Goddard’s School in Emma she is recalling her own school: “a real old-fashioned Boarding school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies”.
Many of Jane Austen’s family lived in the villages around Reading and so Reading was a logical choice as a schooling destination for her. Within a short period of leaving Reading, the twelve-year old Jane was writing seriously.
More information at www.visit-reading.com/janeausten