Southampton

bargate

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In 1783, Jane and Cassandra Austen and their cousin, Jane Cooper, attended Mrs Cawley's school in Southampton. It was here that they all caught typhus. 

The exact address is not known, but the Jane Austen Trail has a series of plaques around the city related to Jane Austen's connections there. (She also settled here after the timeline of this novel which you will be able to read about in The Austens of Bath.)

The first plaque on the trail states that Mrs Cawley's school was near to Bargate.

If you would like to follow the trail yourself around the nine different sites in the city, you can access the website for Tudor House and Garden here. It has a downloadable leaflet for the Jane Austen Trail with more information.

the dolphin hotel

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Photos: The Dolphin Hotel, Southampton.

The Dolphin Hotel was one of the main coaching inns in the city of Southampton where travellers took overnight rest and changed their horses. It would also have been the place where mail coaches delivered post and carried letters onward to new destinations.

Today this hotel is closed for bookings, but from the outside it retains many of the original features that would have been there when the girls were at school with Mrs Cawley in 1783.

Jane Austen and Cassandra Austen danced here in December 1793 when they visited the city with their brother Frank, who was home on shore leave from the navy. They stayed with the Butler-Harrison family, who were cousins on their father's side.

The Hampshire History website has a brief summary of the history of The Dolphin Hotel which you can access here.

If you would like to read more about the Austen's connections with the Butler-Harrison family in Southampton, there is a very informative article written by Cheryl Butler for the Persuasions-On-Line magazine of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) entitled 'Jane Austen, Netley Abbey, and Gothic Tourism'. You can find it here.

southampton extract

If you would like to read an extract from The Austens of Steventon, where the events take place in Southampton, click here.