Jane Austen Trivia

Who knew that Jane brewed her own beer?

In a letter to her sister Cassandra in January 1800, Jane told her, “We are brewing spruce beer again.” During this period, brewing was a traditional chore for women because water was often contaminated and it was considered safer to drink beer.

Jane started writing satirical works when she was just a teenager with Love And Friendship, an epistolary novel which she wrote in 1790 to parody romantic novels. The following year, Jane wrote The History Of England, a comical parody of the standard history books which were popular at the time.

Jane’s father was proud of his daughter’s work and after she completed her first draft of First Impressions in 1797, he sent it to a London publisher, Thomas Cadell. Cadell rejected the novel without even reading it and it remains unknown whether Jane knew about her father’s efforts.