[1] Anne's brother Samuel was later to write about his sister: 'My eldest sister was fourteen years and a half older than me: she had an exquisite taste for poetry, and could almost repeat the chief English poets by heart, especially Milton, Pope, Collins, Gray, and the poetical passages of Shakespeare; and she composed easy verses herself with great facility.
Anne wrote a number of poems for her siblings, several of which were collected after her death and published in a private edition by her son Christopher Edward in 1812.
Two children died in infancy (John Henry George, Julia Elizabeth), and a son Anthony Brydges was born in the early 1780s.
In 1787, she was invited to take part in family theatricals, a performance of the play The Tragedy of Jane Shore by Nicholas Rowe, by her friend Katherine Powlett, Duchess of Bolton, of Hackwood Park.
Anne declined the invitation via a poem:[5] ALL to the task unused my faultering tongue, Would mar the tuneful strains that Rowe has sung.
Anne's letters, written mostly to her son Christopher Edward (1785–1856) in the period 1800–1804, depict a lively social life with many engagements.
This she did through setting up a Sunday school, where she taught village children the basics of reading, writing, Scripture and useful skills such as knitting and sewing.
She wrote to Christopher Edward in February 1803:[10] I am now again very busy in Cowpox inoculation as the Smallpox is in many of the Villages around us the common people are all now eager to be secured from infection.
Mr Bramston inoculated 140 in one day & numbers of those whom I inoculated last year & the year before have been employed in attending their neighbours who have the Smallpox & not one has had the least symptom of having taken the infection.Anne also became involved in the community effort which was galvanised in the period 1803–4, as people in southern England expected Napoleon Bonaparte to launch a naval invasion of the British mainland.
[16] Anne's brother Samuel wrote a lengthy obituary which appeared in several outlets, including the Gentleman's Magazine for December 1804.
He wrote:[17] To do justice to the character of Mrs L[efroy] would require a command of glowing and pathetic expression far beyond the powers of the writer of this article.
She received from Nature an intellectual capacity of the highest order; her perceptions were rapid; her memory was tenacious; her comprehension was extensive; her fancy was splendid; her sentiments were full of tenderness; and her language was easy, copious, and energetic...Four years later, Jane Austen wrote her tribute to Anne Lefroy,[15] which was circulated in the Austen and Lefroy families, eventually to be published in Sir John Henry Lefroy's work of family history (1868) and in James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen (1869).