Our celebrated novelist Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in a little village called Steventon, a few miles south of Hampshire’s Basingstoke – and I’m very excited to be doing tours of the nearby market town of Overton, where Jane shopped and the town she knew so well due to her brother, James, serving as curate at Overton’s St Mary’s Church.
Jane was the seventh of eight children, with six brothers and the sister to whom she was so very close, Cassandra. And her childhood was spent, according to her niece Anna, with “all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family”.
She lived in Steventon until 1801 and a keen walker, would often stroll across the couple of miles to nearby Overton. With her own village too small to own a shop, Overton was where Jane made her purchases.
“The Overton Scotchman has been kind enough to rid me of some of my money, in exchange for six shifts and four pairs of stockings,” she writes to Cassandra in 1798.
And a prolific letter-writer, it was to the Overton Post Office Jane would come to post her letters.
Today, Overton is a beautiful English village, the streets and country lanes lined with many of the shops and houses Jane would have known and walked past on her many visits to the then bustling and busy market town, with its sheep fairs and a major stopping point for the horse and carriages making their way up and down between London and the West Country.
On my tour, offered through Experience Hampshire, we will be Treading in the footsteps of Jane Austen, walking along those streets and lanes, visiting St Mary’s Church, and hearing about the stories of the many relations and friends for whom Overton was also a special place.
If you, too, would like to ‘tread in the footsteps’ of the novelist particularly well known for her books, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and take a step back in time to see the background of Jane’s early life and find out what life was like in the 18th century – then I’d love to see you on one of my tours.
Caroline Wigley 