Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

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Louisa … burst forth into raptures of admiration and delight on the character of the navy — their friendliness, their brotherli-ness, their openness, their uprightness; protesting that she was convinced of sailors having more worth and warmth than any other set of men in England; that they only knew how to live, and they only deserved to be respected and loved.

— Jane Austen,

Persuasion,

The Oxford Illustrated Edition, page 99

WHEN JANE AUSTEN CREATED THE CHARACTER OF Louisa Musgrove in her final novel, Persuasion, she endowed the young woman with a “fine naval fervour” that present readers might trace to the author's experience of the port towns of Hampshire between 1806 and 1809, a period of considerable naval warfare in which her two brothers — one a post captain and the other a master and commander — were engaged. Austen took up residence in Southampton in the autumn of 1806, but her knowledge of the Royal Navy began as early as her seventh year, when she was sent briefly to school in Southampton with her sister, Cassandra, and cousin Jane Cooper. A few years later, elder brother Frank left home for a stint at the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth, and the Austens' collective naval fervor was unleashed in earnest. The fortunes of Frank and younger brother Charles would occupy a large part of Jane's energy and correspondence throughout her life. Both men ended their careers as admirals — Frank, as Admiral of the Fleet Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House is the sixth of the manuscripts to be collated and edited from a collection of papers discovered in 1992 in the cellar of a Georgian mansion outside of Baltimore.

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