Author: Sargant, Jane Alice
Biography:
SARGANT, Jane Alice, formerly SMITH (1789-1869: ancestry.co.uk)
She was baptised on 28 July 1789 at St. Mary, Whittlesea, Cambridgeshire, the daughter of John Smith (1756-1843), surgeon, and his wife Eleanor Moore (1760-1813). They had at least twelve children. She married Daniel Sargent (sic) (1774-1830), an attorney, by licence in 1807. Bankruptcy proceedings were issued against him in 1816. She later contrasted the “fairy scenes” of her youth with her subsequent “miseries of the most severe domestic afflictions.” They evidently separated and there were no children; he seems to have remained in Whittlesea but by 1817 she was advertising for pupils from West Terrace, Clapton Field, Hackney, London, and does not appear to have received support from him. Three of her brothers fought at Waterloo (1815), as she proudly proclaimed in Sonnets (1817). She was still running a school for about eight girls in Clapton Square, Hackney, with her sisters Eleanor (1783-1857) and Anna Maria (1794-1875) in 1841. By 1851 she had moved to Ely Lodge, 4 Lordship Road, Stoke Newington and was living with her sister Anna Maria. By 1861, they had been joined by her sister-in-law, Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon (1798-1872), the recently widowed Spanish wife of their renowned brother, General Sir Harry Smith. Jane Alice Sargant died at Ely Lodge on 22 Feb. 1869, aged 79, and was survived by her sister Anna Maria, to whom she left an estate of just under £4000. In addition to the work listed here, she published several novels and stories, mostly for children, and a five-act play, Joan of Arc (1840). Several political pamphlets dating from as early as 1820 by “an Englishwoman” or “a Widowed Wife” (10 years before she was widowed) or “Sinceritas,” attributed to her in various library catalogues, are doubtful. (ancestry.co.uk 23 May 2023; Cambridge Record Office; Cambridge Chronicle 17 Dec. 1813, 14 June 1816; Stamford Mercury 4 Dec. 1807; “Smith, Sir Henry George Wakelyn,” ODNB 23 May 2023; Drakard’s Stamford News 16 July 1830; Morning Post 26 Feb. 1869) AA