Author: Winscom, Jane
Biography:
WINSCOM, Jane Cave, formerly CAVE (1752-1812: Orlando)
She was baptised on 24 May 1752 at Gillingham, Dorset, the youngest of four daughters of John Cave (1713-1802), glover, Methodist author, and later excise officer, and his wife Jane Vaughan (d. 1777), a Welsh innkeeper’s daughter. She married Thomas Winscom (1762-1817), a miller and later an excise-officer, on 17 May 1783 at St. Maurice, Winchester, over the objections of his father Jasper Winscom (1733-1809), linen draper and well-known Methodist preacher. He wrote to John Wesley acknowledging that she was “an agreeable, well-bred, sensible woman” but would not tolerate his son’s bad example. Wesley wrote to her as “Jenny” advising patience and compliance. The couple went on to have a son who went to Trinity College Cambridge and entered the church, and a daughter who never married and later lived with her brother. She later recounted her husband’s drinking, infidelities, confrontations with his mistresses, and the diseases he gave her in great detail in Prose and Poetry (c.1800), thinly disguised as an “Authentic, & Affecting History of Orenzo and Sarah.” The fourth edition of her Poems on Various Subjects (1794) had added new poems on her headaches and attempted sea-bathing cures which may well have been symptoms of her psychological distress: “On bathing at Teignmouth in Devonshire,” “The Head-Ach, or an Ode to Health,” “An Invocation to Death.” Two years before her death, she nearly drowned and had a “miraculous escape from a watery grave” (GM). She died at Newport, Monmouthshire, on 24 Nov. 1812, aged 58 (sic), and was buried in the family tomb at Talgarth, alongside her mother and father. Her husband died at Bristol in 1817, aged 55.(Orlando 20 May 2023; ODNB 20 May 2023; Kathleen Béres Rogers, “Jane Cave Winscom,” in The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers[2022]; Helena Ruth Bladon Coney, The Winscom Family [2016]; ancestry.co.uk 20 May 2023; findmypast.co.uk 20 May 2023; Bristol Chronicle29 May 1783; Gloucester Journal 30 Nov. 1812; GM Jan. 1813, 88; Bristol Mirror 6 Dec. 1817; John Wesley, The Letters, ed. John Telford [1931], 6: 192-3, 303) AA
Other Names:
- Miss Cave, now Mrs. W.
- Mrs. Thomas Winscom
- Jane Cave
- Miss Cave
- Mrs. W------
- Mrs. Winscom