Jane Austen’s Regency Dashwoods: Sense and Sensibility, India & the Cotswolds

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By choosing Dashwood as Sense and Sensibility’s central family name, Jane Austen drew on the high-profile real Dashwoods, including their West Wycombe ‘Hell-Fire Club’ notoriety. The 4th Baronet’s time at his Bourton-on-the-Hill hunting lodge spanned Jane’s adult life, with Warren Hastings (British-India’s first Governor-General) at Daylesford, and her close relatives at Adlestrop, nearby.

This tightly-grouped Cotswold social network included the East India Company Cockerell family, whose extraordinary Mughal-style house and gardens at Sezincote involved the glittering design trio of Samuel Pepys Cockerell, Humphry Repton, and Thomas Daniell. The latter’s ‘picturesque journeys’ in India and earlier Dashwood commission at West Wycombe pull together complex narrative threads.