page_title: Reading Abbey Girls' School
section_title: Hans Place, London and Frances Arabella Rowden
hierarchical_section_title: Reading Abbey Girls' School / Hans Place, London and Frances Arabella Rowden
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828)Українська: Томас Лоуренс (1769–1830), бл. 1805 р. «Леді Кароліна Лем» (1785-1828), недовга коханка лорда Байрона, поета
context_page_description: Reading Abbey Girls' School, also known as Reading Ladies’ Boarding School was a girls' boarding school in Reading, Berkshire open from at least 1755 until 1794. Many of its pupils went on to make a mark on English culture and society, particularly as writers. Most famous is Jane Austen, who used the school as a model of "a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school".
context_section_description: A couple of years later, the St Quentins opened another school, this time in the capital, at 22 Hans Place. This garden square address, in the desirable West End of London, was made possible by their former pupil Mrs Sherwood selling a novel. The St Quentins employed Frances Arabella Rowden (1774-1840?), who had been a parlour boarder with them in Reading when she was 16. Rowden's mother kept a school at Henley-on-Thames, at which Mary Wollstonecraft's sister Everina worked briefly. One source says Rowden was a governess in the household of Lord Bessborough (i.e. Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough and his wife Harriet Spencer, whose only daughter was Lady Caroline Ponsonby, more commonly known by her married name as Lady Caroline Lamb).
  Rowden was an engaging teacher, with a particular enthusiasm for the theatre, and as private tutor to Mary Russell Mitford, she was able to indulge her fondness for the Kemble family of actors. Rowden was not only a poet, but, according to Mitford, "she had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils" Some of the girls she taught at the Hans Place school included the above-mentioned Caroline Ponsonby, who wrote Glenarvon following her affair with Lord Byron; the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon ("L.E.L."); Emma Roberts, the travel writer; Anna Maria Fielding, who published as S.C. Hall; and Rosina Doyle Wheeler, who married Edward Bulwer-Lytton and published her many novels as Rosina Bulwer Lytton.
  The school taught Greek and Latin, unlike its curriculum in Reading; it also taught French and Italian, and dance and deportment. British History Online deems it a "superior school". It was smaller than its Reading Abbey predecessor, with only 23 in the household, and this would have included live-in servants. In 1809 St Quentin retired and Rowden took over 22 Hans Place.
  Curiously, Jane Austen's brother Henry moved into number 23 in 1814, so on her visits to London, she stayed next door to her old school. "L.E.L." was born at number 25 in 1802, and after attending school at number 22 as a small child, ended up lodging in a room on the top floor between 1826 and 1837. By that point the house had been taken by two Misses Lance, who also ran it as a school. Much later, 22 Hans Place formed the headquarters of the 1921 Irish Treaty delegation. Another innovative educational establishment, Hill House School, has been based in Hans Place since 1951.
caption: Portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb
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