Author: West, Jane
Biography:
WEST, Jane, formerly ILIFFE (1758-1852: ODNB)
No baptismal records for Jane Iliffe have been located but her birth date is given as 30 Apr. 1758 in a letter she wrote to Thomas Percy (q.v.) on 28 June 1800. Her father was John Iliffe (1726-1805) of Desborough, Northamptonshire. In the 1750s he was operating as an upholder (upholsterer) at Castle Baynard, near St. Paul’s in London. He married Jane Starkey in 1752; Jane was their only child. They moved to Desborough in about 1769. On 18 Nov. 1782 she married Thomas West (1756-1823), a farmer and landowner in Little Bowden, Northamptonshire. They had three sons: Thomas (1783-1843), John (1786-1841), and Edward (1793-1821). Although her two first books of verse are slight and conventional, for her third she attracted an impressive number of subscribers and the poems pay tribute to other women writers: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward (qq.v.), and Sarah Trimmer. In the 1790s she contributed poems to periodicals, including GM and the Edinburgh Magazine. West’s first novel, The Advantages of Education (1793), was issued by William Lane as by Prudentia Homespun but seven of her subsequent eight novels were published by Longman and Co. West’s didactic novels attracted approving reviews and Longman paid handsomely: she earned from £170 to £210 for each copyright. West also wrote conduct literature: Letters to a Young Man (1801) and Letters to a Young Lady (1806). She benefited financially by inheriting property from her father in 1805 and from her husband in 1823, and census records show her as independent; in 1851 she is listed as living with two female servants and, curiously, a shepherd. West became increasingly blind in later life and she died at Little Bowden on 25 Mar. 1852; she was buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in the village on 31 Mar. Her will benefits her two grandsons and leaves to one of them, the Rev. Edward West, her unpublished manuscripts, but it seems her intention was for them to be destroyed and they have never been located. The will includes a list of the books in her library with the names of those to whom they should be given. (ODNB 10 Jan. 2025; ancestry.co.uk 10 Jan. 2025; EN1, EN2; J. B. Nicholls, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century 8 [1858], 326-31; National Archives UK PROB-11-1425-264; GM 192 [1852], 99-101) SR
Other Names:
- J. West
- Mrs. Thomas West
- Mrs. West
- Mrs. [Jane] West