I've recently been seeing pictures of bright green grass and flowers in the gardens of southern England and I find myself longing to be there, rather than here at home, where brown grass and a lingering pile of snow say it’s definitely not springtime yet. Today I paid a visit to the grave of a remarkable woman who probably felt the same longing for the early English spring, someone who forms a connection between my home county and Jane Austen’s: Catherine-Anne Hubback, Jane Austen’s niece.
The area is full of Civil War history – as a teenager I went on regular weekend
rambles in the Manassas battlefield, and my dad had a drawer full of found bullets and other artifacts – but I never dreamed there was an Austen
connection so close by.
In the churchyard of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Haymarket, Virginia, a tall headstone reads:
Catherine
Wife of John Hubback
Of the Inner Temple
London, England
Born July 7, 1818
Died Feb. 25, 1877
Wife of John Hubback
Of the Inner Temple
London, England
Born July 7, 1818
Died Feb. 25, 1877
“Of the Inner Temple”
identifies John Hubback as a barrister. One
could be forgiven for assuming, from the headstone alone, that Catherine was a Victorian matron who enjoyed the wealth and status that came with her husband’s profession.
Her life was very different,
however.
Catherine Hubback's headstone is the tall moss-stained one. |
Catherine-Anne Hubback was born at Chawton Great House in 1818, the eighth child of Jane Austen’s brother Francis-William Austen (who later became Admiral of the Fleet). Despite this auspicious start, she faced unusual challenges in life. When Catherine married John Hubback in 1842, they honeymooned in Worthing before setting off on a Continental tour. They quickly had three sons, but while the children were still small, John’s serious mental illness was recognized and he was put into care at Westbrook House Lunatic Asylum in Alton, Hampshire. Catherine and her sons went to live with her father at Portsdown Lodge. (Biographical details from Deirdre Le Faye’s Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family.)
Catherine turned to writing fiction to support herself and her children, producing ten novels (well thought of at the time, now largely forgotten) in just thirteen years. Sara Wheeler states that a Hubback relation took the two elder sons as apprentices in the grain trade. The middle son, Edward, found a post in a grain brokerage in San Francisco, and the youngest, Charles-Austen Hubback, answered an advertisement and secured a job at a mill in Prince William County, Virginia. In 1870, at the age of 52, Catherine emigrated to the United States and traveled alone by rail to join Edward, to whom she gave what money she had to advance his business interests. She enjoyed California, traveled to see the sights, and tried her hand at writing stories with an American flavor, but achieved publication with only one. To assist her sons, she made money by making lace, tinting photographs, and teaching. Letters she wrote during this period have been published; details of this fascinating phase of her life with quotes from the letters appear in a Persuasions article by David Hopkinson.
Chapman's Mill at Thoroughfare Gap, Virginia, as it stands today. While I can't say this is the mill where Charles Hubback worked, it is just a stone's throw from where he lived and where Catherine Hubback is buried. (From chapmansmill.org) |
One of these other English families were the Lywoods, who emigrated from Newton Stacey in Hampshire and arrived around the same time as Charles Hubback. The Lywoods, who evidently were better-off than the Hubbacks, settled at Bacon (or Beacon) Hall, a large farm between Haymarket and Gainesville, where they raised sheep imported from England. Charles and Bernhardine Hubback's son Francis was born in 1874 at Bacon Hall, but was Charles a hired hand, or an esteemed neighbor? The Lywoods had a vineyard, so I think it most likely that Charles was their employee for a time. (I hope to read Catherine Hubback's letters from Virginia, which may answer the question definitively.)
The headstone of Harriet Lywood. After years of extreme cruelty at the hands of her husband, Harriet was granted a divorce. She is buried at St. Paul's next to her son Leonard Wyndham Lywood. |
Charles and Bernhardine Hubback had at least five children in Virginia--county birth records record four, and a fifth, who apparently did not live long, appears in death records. (Genealogist and Austen descendant Ronald Dunning lists six, only four of which overlap with the ones recorded in Virginia records.) One child was “Fanny Carsandra Hubban” who died at four months of age. Her middle name recalls two earlier Cassandras, her great-aunt and great-grandmother, and her first name probably honors Catherine's sister Fanny-Sophia.
As for Catherine Hubback, she had little chance to establish herself in Virginia and get to know her son's growing family. On February 25, 1877, in the middle of a Virginia winter much harsher than those she had known in England or California, she died of pneumonia. Charles did not put down roots in Virginia either: a few years later he and his family moved to California.
Catherine had never met Jane Austen, who had died almost exactly a year before she was born. Catherine certainly knew of her famous aunt, however, having heard stories from her aunt Cassandra. She identified with Jane to the extent that she wrote a completion of Austen’s novel The Watsons, titling her own book The Younger Sister. Family connections were important: she began but never finished a memoir of her father, and she provided extensive information to her cousin James-Edward Austen-Leigh for use in his biography of Jane Austen. In time, Catherine’s son John-Henry Hubback took up his pen to write Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (1906), in collaboration with his daughter Edith. Catherine carried certain mementos of her family to America with her; Deirdre Le Faye's Chronology records ‘a pair of small gold Bracelets with Topaze Clasps,” possibly originally Elizabeth Austen’s; the portrait miniature of Eliza de Feuillide that is now at Jane Austen’s House Museum; and a set of lace dress ornaments that had descended in the family to Catherine.
Catherine Hubback (Photo: Brodnax Moore, from findagrave.com) |