Henry Thomas Austen In 1793 he joined the Oxfordshire Militia, rising to captain before resigning in 1801. In 1804 he founded, with two associates, the bank of Austen, Maude and Tilson in Covent Garden, London. It went bankrupt in 1816. He entered the church that same year and was made curate of Chawton, Hampshire. In 1820 he was made Rector of Steventon. He arranged the publication of "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" after Jane Austen's death in 1817. He is believed to have published the first biographical notice of her, which prefaces those novels. He revised and expanded that short memoir for the republication
Jane Austen Centre for a film company, from eye-witness accounts. As David Baldock said: “We were always asked what Jane Austen looked like and in a way the only reference point we had was Jane Austen’s sister, Cassandra’s, very poor watercolour and we didn’t feel it did her justice.” The portrait was unveiled in December 2002. The process was taken a step further in 2011, when the Jane Austen Centre commissioned a three-dimensional, life-size wax figure. Based upon the 2002 portrait, the wax figure’s creation was undertaken by the portrait sculptor Mark Richards. During the three-year process it took to create the Jane