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". On a visit to the town in , he was favourably impressed by the girls' school, and decided to send his elder daughter as parlour boarder , a cut above the ordinary boarder. Mary Butt, later known as the prolific author Mrs Sherwood , devoted two chapters of her memoirs to her schooldays in the s, giving a detailed portrait of life at this long-established boarding school.
The latter, and a more modern building attached to it, housed the girls' establishment, which was thus known as the Abbey School or the Gateway School. The girls' school dates to before , when Lydia Bell took on as assistant her half-sister Esther later Sarah Hackett, who later chose to call herself Mrs La Tournelle , despite being English and unmarried.
St Quentin and Pitts married, and took over management of the girls' school: "with his knowledge and ability [they] soon raised [its] standard and prestige".
By the time the Butt sisters were there Mary was joined the following year by her sister, later Lucy Lyttelton Cameron , the school had about 60 pupils, including three of the nine daughters of artist Philip Reinagle. These performances, shared to some extent with the boys' school, were a good way to demonstrate to parents and prospective customers just what accomplishments they would be purchasing.
Jane Austen was the school's most famous pupil, attending with her sister Cassandra — She drew on her experiences there when writing Emma : [ 10 ]. Goddard was the mistress of a School — not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems — and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity — but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.
