Jane Austen’s Birthday: Did She Enjoy it? by Diana Birchall

Today, Jane Austen’s birthday (her 246^th to be exact), it is tempting to reflect on how she spent her birthdays and what she thought of them. This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer, first because she made little mention of birthdays in either the surviving letters or in her novels; and also because birthdays were not as elaborately celebrated during her lifetime as they are today, certainly not in the family of a clergyman with a modest income and numerous children, of whom Jane was the seventh of eight.

So we can only search for the faint snippets and glimpses of her birthdays. In her childhood, there is evidence that she was given books as presents on or near her birthdays, which is no surprise as the Austens were a reading family. A volume of French fables (Fables choisies) was given to her in December 1783, for her eighth birthday, with her name inscribed. Around the time of her eleventh birthday, her cousin Eliza, the young Contesse de Feuillide, and Eliza’s mother, Jane’s aunt Philadelphia Hancock, sent Jane from France a series of moral tales in twelve small volumes, called L’ami des Enfants. She found these tedious, and judging by the scribbling inside the earlier volume, did not care much for moral tales in general.

Eliza de Feuillide

There are virtually no mentions of birthdays in her novels (unless you count Harriet’s silly comment about Mr. Martin in Emma:  “He was four-and-twenty the 8th of last June, and my birth-day is the 23d — just a fortnight and a day’s difference! which is very odd!”) However, a birthday is mentioned in the very first sentence of the first of her extant letters. January 9, 1796 was her sister’s 23^rd birthday, and Jane sent birthday wishes from Steventon to Cassandra who was staying with friends the Fowles at Kintbury: “In the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer,”she wrote. (Cassandra did, but Jane herself did not.) “Mr. Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday, so you are very near of an age.” Another birthdate coincidence – though less silly than Harriet’s, it was possibly just as partial and heartfelt!

Two years later, on 18 December 1798, two days after her own 23^rd birthday, Jane wrote  to Cassandra, who was visiting their brother Edward at Godmersham, about Edward’s little son George, then three years old: “I am very much obliged to my dear little George for his messages, for his Love at least; – his Duty I suppose was only in consequence of some hint of my favourable intentions toward him from his father or Mother. – I am sincerely rejoiced however that I ever was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of Tea.” (The tea would have been in honor of her birthday.)

A Dish of Tea. Royal Winton Grimwades “Pekin” collection of Diana Birchall (Orange Pekoe tea)

The next letter that refers to a birthday, is towards the end of her life. Jane was staying in London, where she was arranging for the publication of Emma, as well as nursing her brother Henry through a serious illness. To Henry’s doctor friend Charles Haden she wrote on December 14^th, 1815, thanking him for lending some books, and also mentioning that she was to leave town on Saturday (her birthday) and return to Chawton, so must say goodbye.

Her birthday in December 1816, was her last. Yet on that day she wrote a charming and cheerful letter to her favorite nephew James Edward Austen, then eighteen years old, who had recently left Winchester.  In this letter she makes her famous reference to his having lost two and a half chapters of a novel he was writing, joking that she “cannot be suspected of purloining them…What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?”

Donkey and Cart by Vincent Van Gogh

She then refers to her own health, saying she was forced to decline an invitation by his sister Anna and her husband to dine as “the walk is beyond my strength (though I am otherwise very well) & this is not a season for Donkey Carriages.”

Then there is the occasion in 1808 when she mentions her own birthday prominently in a poem. The poem commemorates a tragic event that occurred on her birthday four years earlier, in 1804, when she turned twenty-seven. Her dear friend Madam Lefroy was killed by a fall from her horse, and the poem is dedicated: “To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy, who died Decr. 16 – my birthday. – written 1808.”  Here is the poem’s sad opening:

The day returns again, my natal day;
What mix’d emotions with the Thought arise!
Beloved friend, four years have pass’d away
Since thou wert snatch’d forever from our eyes.–
The day, commemorative of my birth
Bestowing Life and Light and Hope on me,
Brings back the hour which was thy last on Earth.
Oh! bitter pang of torturing Memory!–

The poem finishes with another mention of her own birthday, hoping that the coincidence of date may be an omen of the two friends meeting in heaven:

Fain would I feel an union in thy fate,
Fain would I seek to draw an Omen fair
From this connection in our Earthly date.
Indulge the harmless weakness–Reason, spare.—

Other sad events in her life also occurred on or around her birthday. It was on December 2, 1802, that she had her proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, which she accepted and then after an anguished night, changed her mind and rejected it. She left her friends’ house immediately, summoning her brother James to escort her home.  No doubt the distress of the experience still lingered on her birthday that year.

Another sad December for Jane was that of 1800, when she returned from a visit to her friends the Lloyds, to be greeted at the door by their mother who announced “Well, girls, it is all settled, we have decided to leave Steventon in such a week and go to Bath.” Jane supposedly fainted at the news, and it was later remembered that she had been “greatly distressed.” None of her letters from that December exist – Cassandra must have destroyed those to keep the painful memory private.

We can see that scant as these mentions of Jane Austen’s birthday are, it is clear that she was not invariably happy on her birthday, or given to much in the way of celebration. Though she says in the above quotes that she was glad to have been born, and thankful for the “life and light and hope” bestowed upon her, we hear no more about birthdays themselves.

So it is left to us to celebrate her “natal day” joyfully and thankfully, in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling, who wrote:

Jane lies in Winchester, blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And, while the stones of Winchester – or Milsom Street – remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto England’s Jane!