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Jane Goodwin Austin was an American female writer, notable for her popular stories of that time.
Background
Jane Goodwin Austin was born on February 25, 1831 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. She was a Mayflower descendant, and all her immediate ancestors had been born and reared in Plymouth.
Her father, Isaac Goodwin, was a lawyer, antiquarian, and authority on Pilgrim history; her mother, Elizabeth Hammatt, a writer of poems. At the birth of Jane (named by her parents Mary Jane), they were living in Worcester, Massachussets, to which place they had gone from Plymouth, carrying with them many old traditions and records.
When Jane was very young her father died, and her mother went to live in Boston. Browsing about in the family records as she grew up she was inspired to write stories, at first for her own amusement, and later for publication.
The most of Mrs. Austin's life was spent in the vicinity of Boston. For a time she lived in Concord and was on friendly terms with Emerson, Louisa Alcott, and the Hawthornes.
Education
As a child, she was educated at nine different private schools in Boston.
Career
Austin's most popular works were her Pilgrim stories, for which she relied on family lore, archival research, and a creative imagination. She contributed her stories to the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Putnam's Magazine, Emerson's Magazine, and the Galaxy, a collection from which is to be found in David Alden's Daughter and Other Stories (1892). Thereafter, she was constantly engaged in literary work.
The "Pilgrim Books" constitute a series, the proper sequence of which is Standish of Standish (1889), Betty Alden (1891), A Nameless Nobleman (1881), Dr. Le Baron and His Daughters (1890). They cover a period from the landing of the Pilgrims to 1775. She had planned a fifth and completing volume which she did not live to write. They afford an excellent idea of the atmosphere, customs, and characters of early New England days. It was her practice, Mrs. Austin states in her preface to David Alden's Daughter, to put nothing down as a fact which she had not carefully determined to be such.
Her last works deal almost wholly with characters from Colonial and Revolutionary history. At the time of her death, she was engaged upon a story which followed the fortunes of the Aldens and others of the Plymouth Colony in the migration to Little Compton or Sakonnet Point, Rhode Island.
Achievements
Jane G. Austin was the author of 24 books and numerous short stories. Her contributions to the literature of early New England possessed a rare value from her intimate knowledge of the pioneers of the eastern colonies gained from thorough reading and tradition. Her work is distinctly American in every essential way.
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Membership
Member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Personality
She was a woman of instinctive graciousness, and in her later years her rooms were the weekly resort of admirers, and especially of those who were of direct Pilgrim descent.
Connections
In 1850 she married Loring Henry Austin of Boston by whom she had three children, Rose Standish Austin, Le Baron Loring Austin, Lilian Ivers De Silva.
