About Us & Jane

About Us

The Jane Austen Tearoom was created in deepest respect and dedication to an amazing Author that still manages to touch the many hearts, 200 years on.  
In designing the Tearoom we wanted to capture a feeling of drifting away to a simpler time and for us to stop and pause in our busy lives.  To step back into a time and remember when time was enjoyed, instead of race against.

In that we don’t claim to it being a shrine to Jane but to bring a feeling of calmness and beauty which is often lost and forgotten in our current hip cafes. 

Even today if you have had the pleasure of visiting England, as we have, you find the quaint little tearooms, Devonshire teas, and picturesque landscape.
As a result we decided to combine the two together and do believe we have created a modest refection of a timeless beautiful era and grand land.

About Jane

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817, 41 years old) was an English romantic novelist.  She was the fifth child of eight, with six brothers and one sister.  Just like her sister Jane never married.

When Austen was twenty she fell in love with Tom Lefroy but the Lefroy family intervened and sent him away.  Marriage was impractical, as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again.

In December 1802 Jane Austen received her only proposal of marriage. Harris Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted.  Harris was not attractive.  He was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra her sister a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.

Jane Austen novels were never so popular when she was alive; she made little living out of them.  Real respect for her books came in the 1900s and from then on has continued to be of great fortune.  Her novels are:

• Sense and Sensibility (1811)
• Pride and Prejudice (1813)
• Mansfield Park (1814)
• Emma (1815)
• Persuasion (1818)
• Northanger (1818)