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November 1798 to her sister when Cassandra was staying at Godmersham with her brother Edward: in one sentence she tells Cassandra that sheep had cost her father twenty-five shillings each and her father wanted news of Edward’s. In the next she mentions buying books.
    In her next letter she reports that her father is glad to hear Edward’s pigs are doing so well and wants Edward to know that Lord Bolton was deeply interested in pigs: he had built them elegantly constructed pigsties and visited them first thing every morning. Pigs had to be killed. One of her father’s pigs, sold to the butcher, weighed twenty-seven and a quarter pounds per quarter. Jane’s sister Cassandra, remembering a happy childhood, wrote later in life that there was so much amusement and so many comforts attaching to a farm in the country that people who had experienced such pleasures did not easily forget them.
    Between the rectory and the church were hedgerows which sheltered primroses, anemones and wild hyacinths. Steventon was remarkable for its hedgerows. In Hampshire at that time a hedgerow was not a mere boundary, but an irregular border of copsewood and timber, often broad enough to have a path inside it. A few of these can be seen today. The elm walk, also called ‘the wood walk’, stretched from the terrace westward, skirting the glebe meadows, and led to a shrubbery on the sunny side. Another hedgerow-lane was known as ‘the church walk’, leading through the wood up the hill to the church. There were sycamores, thorns and lilacs, making a rich habitat for wildlife. Jane Austen writes of such a hedgerow in
Persuasion
, one whose density makes it possible for Anne Elliot to overhear a conversation about herself between Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove.
    George and Cassandra lived from the start with her mother and a ready-made child. Penniless orphan Philadelphia Austen, George’s sister, had been sent to India at twenty-one to catch herself a husband. This expedient for matching up lonely white businessmen and administrators with British wives was cynically known as ‘the fishing fleet’. The sea voyage took eight months. Philadelphia, slender and elegant, with dark upswept hair and large dark eyes, took just six months more to marry a middle-aged surgeon, Tysoe Saul Hancock. He was punctilious, and her scatterbrained ways sorely tried his great affection for her.
    Saul and Philadelphia Hancock came home from India taking care of a sickly boy called George Hastings, motherless son of the famous Warren Hastings, later Governor-General of Bengal. George Hastings had been sent home, as the custom then was, for his education. The return journey cost Saul Hancock £1,500. He was disappointed to discover that he could not afford to live in Britain at the same standard as he had done in India so went back to make his fortune but got into further difficulties. In 1772 Warren Hastings gave him £5,000, later doubled. The pair traded in salt, timber, carpets, rice and opium. An attempt has been made to sensationalise Jane Austen’s father as a drug-dealer, because he helped as an agent to distribute these goods; but opium, though known to be addictive, was used as an everyday painkiller, as easily available as aspirin today. Hancock, a doting father, died in Calcutta, a world away from his wife and daughter Eliza, the month before Jane Austen was born. He was sixty-four. Mrs Hancock was reduced to £600 a year, the income on Hastings’s gift. This was inadequate for life in London, so she settled abroad, first in Germany and Belgium, and then in Paris, where she cut a dash and gave Eliza a polish which later dazzled her Austen cousins.
    Warren Hastings was a hero to the Austen family Jane Austen was gratified with his praise of
Pride and Prejudice
, which her brother Henry had forwarded to him. Mr Austen sought the help of Warren Hastings to get a promotion for his nautical son Frank. When Hastings was impeached before the House of