Jane Austen Letters

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A father argues against sending Eliza to India

Philadelphia Hancock, Jane Austen’s paternal aunt, is in England with her daughter Eliza while her husband works in India. He warns against bringing the girl out to join him, fearing the attention she would receive from men there. The biography quotes this extract without a precise date.

Tysoe Saul Hancock to Philadelphia Hancock
Date unresolved

You know very well that no girl, tho' but fourteen years old, can arrive in India without attracting the notice of every coxcomb in the place; you yourself know how impossible it is for a young girl to avoid being attached to a young handsome man whose address is agreeable to her.

Life and Letters, pp. 33–36 identifies this as Hancock’s warning to his wife about bringing their daughter to India. The reference to a girl of fourteen is a general warning, not a dated statement of Eliza’s age. The passage does not establish when he wrote it.

Extract from Life and Letters (1913), p. 33.