The story of Jane Austen's links with the idyllic village of Adlestrop and Stoneleigh Abbey, the ancestral home of the two branch of the Leigh family, has not yet been fully told. Jane's mother, Cassandra, was a Leigh, a dynasty that boasted an Elizabethan Lord Mayor, ducal marriage alliances, a peerage granted by Charles I, eccentric Oxford luminaries, as well as the spectre of lunacy and bitter inheritance quarrels.

Jane Austen visited Adlestrop at least three times and kept in constant touch with events there by letter. It wasi n Gloucestershire that she first heard of Humphry Repton wo was emplyed by the Leighs and saw at first hand how the 18th century craze for improvements totally changed the village.

Jane Austen & Adlestrop opens up a fresh window on the author's life and experience and is also a portrayal of archetypal English village's journey through the last two hundred years.