Letters sent from Hampshire villages Chawton, where Austen lived, and Steventon, where she was born, will also get a special postmark for a week.

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Once they were finally settled with their mother into the cottage at Chawton, Jane took up the writing she had abandoned when they left Steventon.

ECONOMIST: Literary lives

She writes of the three times that Jane was removed from the stability of her home at three months to a wet-nurse in Steventon village, at seven to a horrible boarding school, at 25 to a nomadic, spa-haunting existence and she argues that these upheavals helped to create the defensive, self-protective spikiness of which her contemporaries sometimes complained.

ECONOMIST: Literary lives