Poole, Jane

Born deaf at Ludow; rejected by her mother because of her deafness, at age 6 she went to live with two maiden aunts. An uncle on the aunts' side of the family died and bequeathed a vast sum of money to Jane, which was used to set up a trust fund for Jane. With that money, she attended the Braidwood Academy for the Deaf and Dumb in Hackney 1787-1795. After both aunts passed away, Jane inherited the full trust and hired a servant maid who was fluent in the manual alphabet. Her sister and mother, greedy and jealous of Jane's wealth, made repeated attempts to seize control of her finances. Jane became blind in 1841 at the age of 60, dependent on her trusted servants and a trusted cousin to protect her interests. After defeating her sister's attempt to grab the largest part of another inheritance that was supposed to be divided equally, she had a will drawn up, using the manual alphabet to dictate it. Upon Jane's death, her greedy sister challenged the will on grounds that Jane, being deaf-blind, could not possibly have written such a complicated legal statement and that deaf people were incapable of writing wills. A special jury in 1861 ruled that the will was valid, establishing the important British legal precedence that deaf people were not in any way intellectually inferior to hearing persons because of their handicap, firmly establishing the right of deaf persons to write wills and have them upheld in court.