In this setting the Austens mingled easily with other gentrified professionals and with local gentry families.
Yet they were also linked, though tenuously in some ways, with the larger world of fashionable society and of patronage, politics, and state. George Austen owed his education at Oxford University to his own merit as a student at Tonbridge School, but he owed his clerical position, or "living," at Steventon to the patronage of a wealthy relative, Thomas Knight of Godmersham Park, Kent, who held the appointment in his gift. Later the Knights, who were childless, adopted one of the Austens' sons, Edward, as their own son and heir to their estates in Kent and Hampshire. One of Jane Austen's cousins, Elizabeth (Eliza) Hancock, married a French aristocrat--Jean Capotte, Comte de Feuillide. The comte was guillotined during the French Revolution, and Eliza later married Jane Austen's brother Henry. Local friends of the Austens included the Reverend George Lefroy and his wife, Anne, sister of an eccentric, novel-writing, obsessively aristocratic Kentish squire, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges.
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