One of the most comfortable ingredients of all was the frontispiece portrait of the author, based on a slight watercolour sketch made by her sister Cassandra in about 1810. After family consultation, Austen-Leigh commissioned a professional artist, James Andrews of Maidenhead, to execute a portrait from the sketch, and this then provided the model for a steel engraving. Its difference from Cassandra’s original is evident to the most cursory glance. Her crude pencil and watercolour likeness is sharp-faced, pursed-lipped, unsmiling, scornful even, and withdrawn; in its Victorian refashioning, the face is softer, its expression more pliant, and the eyes only pensively averted. The greater attention to detail and finish in costume and seating (the chair the figure occupies is now elegantly Victorian) serves to assimilate the face to a whole, where in Cassandra’s representation it expresses an energy at odds with its unformed context. As visual biographies the two tell quite different stories, whatever claim either might make to be representing a human original. At the time of the Memoir’s writing, Cassandra’s sketch was the property of Cassy Esten, Charles’s daughter, and was considered by Anna Lefroy to be ‘hideously unlike’. Writing to her cousin on 18 December 1869, immediately after publication of the Memoir, Cassy Esten expresses her relief at how the picture has turned out: ‘I think the portrait is very much superior to any thing that could have been expected from the sketch it was taken from. —It is a very pleasing, sweet face, —tho’, I confess, to not thinking it much like the original; —but that, the public will not be able to detect.’ Caroline records something similar, telling her brother ‘there is a look which I recognise as hers—and though the general resemblance is not strong, yet as it represents a pleasant countenance it is so far a truth—and I am not dissatisfied with it.’35 It is tempting to find in the story of the portraits a lesson for the biography reader.
Other Family Recollections
One of the purposes of this collection of family biographies is to help the reader of Jane Austen’s life recover the texts and contexts from which it continues to be rewritten; and to help reconsider the steps by which we have moved from a reticent to a revelatory view of the individual life. Because of what we can now see it does not say, the early family record can also help us gain critical understanding of our own less perceptibly partial accounts. Recognized or not, Austen-Leigh’s Memoir stands as pre-text for the large-scale Austen biography industry of the twentieth century. His sisters’ less mediated recollections interpellate his narrative to provide its most particular, unshaped moments. Situated within his expansive prose, the vivid illuminations of their childhood memories, in themselves profoundly located, stand out as sharp dislocations—texts out of context. Caroline’s is the more consciously crafted account. To her we owe the most intimate details of Jane Austen’s daily routine at Chawton—how she looked at that time; her piano-playing; her superintendence of the household supplies of tea, sugar, and wine; her stories about fairyland. From Caroline, who got it from her mother who was present, we also have the account of Jane Austen’s final illness and death. Anna’s memories reached back further, to Steventon days, and they are touchingly quirky. For her, aunts come in pairs, mysteriously distinguishable only by a forgotten detail of their bonnets, which otherwise were perfectly alike as to ‘colour, shape & material’. Anna, sent to Steventon at the age of two to be comforted after her mother’s death, remembers things that relate to her—the fuss made over her likely memory of hearing an early version of Pride and Prejudice read aloud, and in later years the co-operative storytelling that so exasperated Aunt Cassandra. Anna’s recollections are the more persuasive and haunting for being voiced —her memory of Grandpapa enquiring ‘Where are the Girls? Are the Girls gone out?’ (p. 157) is the freshest, most startling, and most authentic detail the family biographies have to offer.
In contrast are Henry Austen’s two formal notices of his sister from 1818 and 1833. ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer’, an opening remark from his 1818 ‘Biographical Notice’, strikes the reader rather differently now. Himself recently refashioned as a clergyman of the Church of England, Henry first suggested that Jane Austen’s religion be considered as relevant—a conventional gesture on his part, perhaps, but it has had far-reaching critical consequences. Here and in his later piece Henry gives the briefest details of a writer’s life, habits of composition, and literary debts, and he sets the hagiographic tone for his nephew. But it was thanks to Henry’s airy reference to the deathbed verses, ‘replete with fancy and vigour’ (p. 138), that his primmer Victorian relatives found themselves defending Aunt Jane from the potential charge of unseemly frivolity. It is also in Henry’s two accounts that the long-running myth begins of effortless artistic originality, the morally irreproachable spinster who, entirely unconsciously, produced exquisitely finished novels (‘Every thing came finished from her pen . . .’ (p. 141)). His second account is the more considered —he removes all mention of those deathbed verses—and it is less narrowly grounded in family recollection. His purpose is far removed from that served by Anna and Caroline’s whimsical conjuring of childhood memories. Now he supplements biography with professional critical assessment, incorporating passages from contemporary reviews. The larger motive for Henry’s two notices, as it is for Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, is our conventional assumption that books need authors. His first notice, written within months of Jane Austen’s death, prefaces the posthumously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Up to this point the novels had been published anonymously, or, more accurately, they had followed one another as an accumulating set of textual alliances—for example, Mansfield Park: A Novel. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. In writing and reading the biographies of writers we may be tempted to work back from the writings to the subject and to find in the fiction the coherence that eludes ‘real’ experience. But another of the questions literary biography sets out to examine, if not to answer, is why books need authors. Why do the self-governing, independent states of fiction require to be referred back to a figure who fashioned them? Henry Austen’s biographical notices cannot answer the question but, standing at the beginning of the Jane Austen life project, they help us to formulate it.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The text printed here of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen is that of the second edition of 1871, but with significant omissions. Issuing it less than a year after the first edition, Austen-Leigh expanded the second edition in several ways, incorporating in the main body of his text further correspondence, family papers, and biographical recollections, much of it material which had only lately come to light. He also printed for the first time, and as a sequence of appendices to the biography, important fragments of unfinished or early drafts of his aunt Jane Austen’s works. Those expansions which form part of the body of the text of the second edition (described in the preface as a ‘narrative . . . somewhat enlarged’, ‘a few more letters’, and ‘a short specimen of her childish stories’) are retained here. But the appended Chapter 12, consisting of the cancelled chapter of Persuasion, and Chapter 13, extracts from and a synopsis of Sanditon, still under the title of ‘The Last Work’, are omitted; omitted, too, are Lady Susan and The Watsons, both also published for the first time in 1871 as an appendix to the Memoir. In addition, I have restored some elements which were present in the first edition of 1870 but removed from the second edition: namely, the second postscript, dated 17 November 1869, defending Jane Austen from the attack in Mary Russell Mitford’s newly published Life, and the set of five illustrations—a portrait of Jane Austen, a facsimile of her handwriting, and family drawings of Steventon Parsonage, Steventon Manor House, and Chawton Church—an important feature of the first and of subsequent editions, but unaccountably left out of the second. The effect of these cuts and expansions is to deepen the work as memoir and family record, an impression which the publisher’s calculated marketing of the second edition did something to obscure. As Austen-Leigh remarked of the n
ew edition to his American correspondent Susan Quincy: ‘It will be smaller & less expensive than the former edition, being made to range with, & to form an additional Vol. to Bentley’s last Edition of the novels.’1 In token of this, the lettering on the spine of the binding of the second edition misleadingly read Lady Susan & c. Marketed as the sixth volume in Richard Bentley’s ‘Favourite Novels’ reissue of the complete set of Jane Austen’s novels, the Memoir became in outward appearance Lady Susan & c., signalling the importance placed at this time on the appended fictions over biography. With editions of these previously unpublished writings now widely available, there is little justification for following what was in 1871 a commercial strategy. On the other hand, a modern market which in one recent year alone (1997) saw three substantial biographies of Jane Austen competing for attention, suggests that Austen-Leigh’s account of a life ‘singularly barren’ of events compels ever more interest.
I have included with Austen-Leigh’s Memoir four others: the account written by Jane’s brother Henry Austen to accompany the posthumous joint publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818; Henry’s reworking of the same materials to preface the edition of Sense and Sensibility issued by Bentley in 1833 as No. 23 of his ‘Standard Novels’ series; Anna Lefroy’s ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’, written in 1864 and first published in 1988; and Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir, written in 1867 and first published in 1952. Henry’s two biographies are printed from the first editions of 1818 and 1833 respectively. Anna Lefroy’s ‘Recollections’ are taken from the surviving autograph manuscript in the Austen-Leigh archive, Hampshire Record Office, and Caroline Austen’s memoir is reproduced from the 1952 edition which R. W. Chapman prepared for the Jane Austen Society, corrected against the manuscript held in Jane Austen’s House, Chawton. Further editorial and bibliographical information can be found in the headnotes accompanying the annotations to each text. An Appendix prints a few brief recollections, mainly from family letters preserved as autograph manuscripts or later typescripts. All are accounts, drawn up late in life, by members of Jane Austen’s family or close connections who knew her personally. In their various ways, these further recollections represent the decomposition or pre-texts of the Memoir.
In the Memoir Austen-Leigh’s footnotes appear at the foot of the page. A degree sign (°) indicates an editorial note at the back of the book. The only silent editorial change made to the texts of the shorter recollections and Appendix has been to replace double quotation-marks with single throughout, to accord with the practice adopted in the 1871 edition of the Memoir.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reference and Background
Austen, Jane, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), a revised and expanded edition of R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen’s Letters (1932; 2nd edn., 1952).
Gilson, David, A Bibliography of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1982; rev. edn., Winchester, Hants: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1997).
Grey, J. David, Litz, A. Walton, and Southam, Brian (eds.), The Jane Austen Companion (New York, 1986); published in the UK as The Jane Austen Handbook (London: Athlone Press, 1986).
Littlewood, Ian (ed.), Jane Austen: Critical Assessments (4 vols., Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd., 1998).
Modert, Jo, Jane Austen’s Manuscript Letters in Facsimile (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).
Poplawski, Paul, A Jane Austen Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998).
Roth, Barry, and Weinsheimer, Joel, An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1952–72 (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1973).
—— An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1973–83 (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1985).
—— An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies, 1984–1994 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996).
Southam, B. C., Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers (1964; new edn., London: Athlone Press, 2001).
—— (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (2 vols., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul): vol. 1, 1811–70 (1968); vol. 2, 1870–1938 (1987).
Jane Austen: Family History (5 vols., London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995). The collection reprints, with new introductions by David Gilson, several of the standard reference and background works.
‘Jane Austen Studies’, listed regularly in the Jane Austen Society Reports (the journal of the Jane Austen Society, Chawton, Hants), provides an annual update on the main bibliography.
Jane Austen Society Reports (1949– ) and Persuasions (1979– ) (the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, JASNA) regularly include articles of biographical interest on Jane Austen and members of her family.
Persuasions On-Line has from vol. 22 (Winter 2001) updated bibliographies (http://www.jasna.org/index.html).
A Memoir of Jane Austen
James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Richard Bentley, 1870).
—— A Memoir of Jane Austen, to which is added Lady Susan and fragments of two other unfinished tales by Miss Austen (2nd edn., London: Richard Bentley, 1871).
—— Memoir of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926): mainly a reprint of Ed.2, but omitting Lady Susan and The Watsons.
—— A Memoir of Jane Austen, included as an appendix to Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965).
—— A Memoir of Jane Austen, with an introduction by Fay Weldon (reprint of R. W. Chapman’s 1926 edn.; London: Century Hutchinson, 1987; and Folio Society, 1989).
—— A Memoir of Jane Austen, with an introduction by David Gilson (facsimile reprint of 1870 edn.; London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994).
Contemporary Reviews of J. E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, Ed. 1
[Margaret O. Oliphant], Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 107 (1870), 290–313 (reviewed with A. G. L’Estrange’s Life of Mary Russell Mitford).
[Richard Simpson], North British Review, 52 (1870), 129–52.
[Henry F. Chorley], Quarterly Review, 128 (1870), 196–218 (with L’Estrange’s Life of Mitford).
Contemporary Reviews of Ed. 2
[Anna Isabella Thackeray], Cornhill Magazine, 24 (1871), 158–74.
Extracts from several of the above reviews can be found in Southam (ed.), Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1 (1968).
See, too:
Austen-Leigh, Mary Augusta, James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir (privately published, 1911).
Other Family Biographies
Austen, Caroline, Reminiscences of Caroline Austen, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (written 1870s; Alton, Hants: Jane Austen Society, 1986).
Austen-Leigh, Mary Augusta, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1920).
Austen-Leigh, William, and Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1913).
Austen-Leigh, Richard Arthur (ed.), Austen Papers 1704–1856 (privately printed; London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne, and Co., 1942).
Brabourne, Lord (Edward Knatchbull-Hugesson), The Letters of Jane Austen (2 vols., London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1884).
Hubback, J. H., and Edith C., Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers: Being the Adventures of Sir Frances Austen, G.C.B., Admiral of the Fleet, and Rear-Admiral Charles Austen (London: John Lane, 1906).
Knatchbull, Lady, ‘Aunt Jane’, Cornhill Magazine, 163 (1947), 72–3.
Knight, Fanny, Fanny Knight’s Diaries: Jane Austen Through Her Niece’s Eyes, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Alton: Jane Austen Society, 2000).
Lefroy, F C., ‘Is It Just?’ and ‘A Bundle of Letters’, Temple Bar, 67 (1883), 270–84 and 285–8.
Non-Family Biographies
Caplan, Clive, ‘Jane Austen’s Banker Brother: Henry Thomas Austen of Austen & Co., 1801–1816’, Persuasions, 20 (1998), 69–90.
Chapman
, R. W., Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948; repr. 1961, 1963, 1970).
Fergus, Jan, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991).
Hill, Constance, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends (1902; London: John Lane, 1904).
Hodge, Jane Aiken, The Double Life of Jane Austen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972).
Honan, Park, Jane Austen: Her Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).
Jenkins, Elizabeth, Jane Austen: A Biography (London: Gollancz, 1938; rev. edn., 1948).
Le Faye, Deirdre, ‘Jane Austen and her Hancock Relatives’, Review of English Studies, NS 30 (1979), 12–27.
—— Jane Austen. A Family Record (London: British Library, 1989), a revised and enlarged edition of W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh’s Life and Letters (1913).
Nokes, David, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997).
Shields, Carol, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001).
Tomalin, Claire, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997).
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