When it comes to the love life of history’s most renowned romance writer, there is no shortage of speculation. Jane Austen never married, leaving little documentation as to where her affections lay and plenty of room for hypothesizing.
The long-standing belief, reinforced by the 2007 film Becoming Jane, is that the closest thing Jane Austen had to a real-life Mr. Darcy could be found in the Irishman Tom Lefroy. This connection is largely one of circumstance, however. Austen and Lefroy spent time together briefly over the Christmas holidays in Hampshire when Austen was 20, before Lefroy returned to London to continue his Law Studies.
Soon after, Austen began writing First Impressions, which became Pride and Prejudice. Naturally, historians assumed that given the timeline and proximity between meeting Lefroy and writing her novel, Lefroy had been the muse that inspired Mr. Darcy, the lost love Austen hoped to reclaim through her stories. But in her letters to her sister Cassandra after Lefroy’s departure, Austen is lighthearted and unbothered, a far cry from the romantic longing and loss historians have inserted.
There is, however…another man who appears in Austen’s letters to Cassandra. One she met before Lefroy, and would continue referencing in her correspondences for years afterward. These references are dripping with longing, and indicate a depth of feeling that continued for years after their time together. So who was Jane Austen’s one who got away?
Edward Taylor was a year and a half older than Jane Austen and the eldest son of a respectable family from Kent. His father was a Reverend and his mother’s family was descended from an officer of King Henry VIII’s household. A series of memoirs titled The Taylor Papers, written by Taylor’s brother Herbert, opens a window into the extraordinary young man’s upbringing. The family was highly cultured, spending much of their time traveling across Europe. Taylor and his siblings were all fluent in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and could read and write in Greek and Latin.
There is little known about the time Taylor and Austen actually spent together, except that it was when they were both teenagers and Austen was visiting Kent on holiday. There are no surviving correspondences from their time together (perhaps they could have been found in the large swath of letters Cassandra burnt) but a reference to Taylor does appear years later in September 1796:
“We went by Bifrons and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him, on whom I once fondly doated.” Austen writes to Cassandra. Bifrons Park is the estate in Kent that Taylor would later inherit from his father.
In 1798 Austen comments in another letter about Taylor receiving his inheritance. This indicates a clear commitment on her part to keeping tabs on him. That very same year Taylor’s father had suffered a stroke and died, causing Taylor to leave his military career to inherit the family’s estate at Bifrons, not unlike Edward Ferrars in Sense & Sensibility.
In 1800, years after the two teenagers had spent time together, Austen writes of her disappointment in hearing rumors of Taylor’s planned engagement to his cousin and wistfully mentions his “beautiful dark eyes.”
It is worth noting that the pair had not become officially engaged, this was not public knowledge. Austen was likely seeking information from others about the man she still held a candle for. While Taylor did not marry his cousin in 1800, he sadly did marry someone else in 1802.
Whatever the nature of their relationship, we are eternally grateful to Edward Taylor for the role he played in the creation of the beloved Mr. Darcy. After all, he must have been an extraordinary man to win the affections of our brilliant Jane.
