[1] His father George Austen's living had been in Steventon, Hampshire, and James succeeded him in this position, in 1801.

Austen's mother, formerly Cassandra Leigh, was a member of a prominent Oxford family, and was a descendant of one of the founders of St. John's College.

[4] According to Felicity Day, writing in The Telegraph, for a year in the 1790s, he published a weekly periodical called The Loiterer, and wrote much of its content.

[3] Day says the satirical pieces in The Loiterer resembled the unpublished juvenilia the teenage Jane wrote for her family.

James and his brother Henry were both romantically interested in their cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, the daughter of their aunt Philadelphia Austen Hancock.