Jane Austen Author: 1775-1817 The Jane Austen Heritage Trail begins here. In the Spring of 1783, at the age of seven, Jane, her sister Cassandra and their cousin Jane Cooper, attended a school nearby run by Mrs Ann Crawley. The exact location of this school is unknown. An outbreak of Typhus closed the school after only a few weeks, and the girls returned home to Steventon, Jane's birthplace in the north of Hampshire.