Memoir of Jane Austen
Page 28
copy books extant… by the time she was sixteen: in Ed.1 this sentence reads: ‘There is extant an old copy-book containing several tales, some of which seem to have been composed while she was quite a girl.’ The description of JA’s early writings is much briefer in Ed.1, and no specimen example is given. The ‘copy books’ to which JEAL refers can be assumed to be the three transcript volumes of juvenilia, ‘Volume the First’, ‘Volume the Second’, and ‘Volume the Third’, begun as early as 1787 and continued to 1793. JA herself gave them their imposing titles. By the terms of Cassandra’s will (she died in 1845 and had inherited all JAs manuscripts), ‘Volume the First’ went to Charles Austen, ‘Volume the Second’ to Frank, and ‘Volume the Third’ to James Edward (JEAL). In the interval between Ed.1 and Ed.2 of the Memoir, JEAL may have gained more first-hand knowledge of these copy-books and their contents. B. C. Southam has assumed that JEAL did not see ‘Volume the First’ but worked instead from copied extracts from which he chose to include in Ed.2 ‘The Mystery’ (‘The Manuscript of Jane Austen’s Volume the First, The Library, 5th series, 17 (1962), 231–7 (at p. 231). But this is by no means the implication of what he writes. His detached style of reference—’There are copy books extant… ‘—and restricted quotation is more likely a reflection of his strong desire to protect JA’s reputation as a writer of mature and sober novels of realism, which might suffer with the wide publication of early pieces that he felt sure were meant for family eyes only. Charles’s eldest daughter, Cassy Esten, was helpful, we know, with material for the Memoir; so there is no reason to suppose that she did not allow JEAL sight of ‘Volume the First’, since her father’s death in her possession. An interesting question is why he did not include extracts from his own inherited manuscript, ‘Volume the Third’.
The Mystery: here printed for the first time from Volume the First. Dedicated to JA’s father, it may have been written for a family theatrical as early as 1788; and if so it is certainly one of the earliest pieces to have survived. The inspiration for its two scenes of whispering was possibly Sheridan’s burlesque play The Critic (1779), 11, i. For Sheridan’s impact on the juvenilia, see John McAleer, ‘What a Biographer Can Learn about Jane Austen from Her Juvenilia’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (1989), 15.
following words of a niece: Caroline Austen. JEAL is here quoting, with only slight discrepancies, from his sister’s recollections, in MAJA, included in this collection (see p. 174). The passage is not included in Ed.1.
The family… declined to let these early works be published: as it stands in Ed.2, this sentence is puzzling. It is a reference to what Caroline Austen, in a letter of 1 April [1869?] to JEAL, then collecting materials for the Memoir, called the ‘betweenities’, making it clear that she specifically has in mind Lady Susan, the original manuscript of which was now in Fanny, Lady Knatchbull’s possession. At this stage, she suggests her brother might print ‘Evelyn’ from Volume the Third, in his keeping since Aunt Cassandra’s death, and she continues: ‘What I should deprecate is publishing any of the “betweenities” when the nonsense was passing away, and before her wonderful talent had found its proper channel. Lady Knatchbull has a whole short story they were wishing years ago to make public—but were discouraged by others - & I hope the desire has passed away’ (from the transcript, NPG, RWC/HH, fos. 4–7), included in the Appendix to this edition). But JEAL was not prepared to risk exposing the surreal nonsense of ‘Evelyn’, and Ed.1 of his Memoir contained only a small selection of JA’s tame occasional verses (the lines ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, two humorous epigrams, and the verses to ‘Lovely Anna’). It was in the enlarged Ed.2, printed here, that he included, along with more of JA’s letters, a tiny sample of the juvenilia (‘The Mystery’), the cancelled chapter of P, a summary of Sanditon (the autograph manuscripts of both now in Anna Lefroy’s possession), The Watsons (so-named by JEAL and now owned by his sister Caroline), and Lady Susan, not from Lady Knatchbull’s original but from a copy. Why the earlier strong family decision against publishing Lady Susan was revoked is not clear, though a reasonable guess would be that JEAL was attempting to forestall a rival publishing plan from within the family. But in the light of this change of heart, the paragraph (largely unaltered since Ed.1), and especially this sentence, reads oddly and should have been emended.
‘He was makin’ himsell… and the fun’: Robert Shortreed accompanied Scott on his early ballad-collecting expeditions into the Scottish Borders. These ballads, Shortreed suggests, became the groundwork for much of Scott’s later writing. The quotation is taken from Lockhart’s, Life of Scott (1839), i. 266.
‘Pride and Prejudice’… first composed in 1798: JEAL’s dating and other information about the early drafts of P&P, S&S, and NA accords with Cassandra Austen’s brief memorandum of composition, which may have been drawn up soon after JA’s death, perhaps for Henry when he was preparing his ‘Biographical Notice’ towards the end of 1817, though if that is so, he seems not to have used it. It does, however, appear to have been consulted by JEAL. There is only one slight discrepancy: Cassandra records ‘North-hanger Abby [sic] was written about the years 98 & 99’. An illustration of the manuscript of Cassandra’s notes (now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) is included in Minor Works, plate facing p. 242.
Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy and their family: the Revd I. P. George Lefroy was rector of Ashe from 1783. He had married Anne Brydges (1748/9–1804) in 1778, and it is she, not her husband, who is the important figure in JA’s life. ‘Madam Lefroy’, as she was known locally, became the great friend and intellectual inspiration of the young JA, is mentioned often in her early letters, is named in the spoof ‘History of England’ (Volume the Second), as one of the advocates for Mary Queen of Scots, and played a part in ending the early flirtation with her nephew Tom Lefroy (see note to p. 48 below). She was a distant cousin of JA’s mother through their common Brydges ancestry, and by her brother’s account ‘had an exquisite taste for poetry… and she composed easy verses herself with great facility’ (Egerton Brydges, The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries of Sir Egerton Brydges (2 vols., 1834), i. 5). These verses were published as Carmina Domestica, ed. C. E. Lefroy (1812). Later in this chapter JEAL includes JA’s poem ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, written in 1808 on the fourth anniversary of her sudden death in a riding accident. The Austens and Lefroys were subsequently linked by marriage when James Austen’s elder daughter Anna (JEAL’s half-sister) married in 1814 Anne Lefroy’s youngest son Benjamin.
Sir Egerton Brydges… ‘… cheeks a little too full’: Samuel Egerton Brydges (1762–1837), the younger brother of Mrs Anne Lefroy (see note above), was an antiquarian bibliographer and genealogist with an excruciatingly pretentious and florid prose style. JA describes his novel Arthur Fitz-Albini (1798) in uncomplimentary terms in a letter to Cassandra, 25 November 1798 (Letters, 22). His account of JA is not the earliest published notice, as Henry Austen’s pieces included here show; it appears in his Autobiography (1834), ii. 41.
Mary Brydges: JA’s mother, the former Cassandra Leigh, shared with Anne Brydges Lefroy a common ancestor in Mary Brydges, who married Theophilus Leigh (c.1643–1725) as his second wife in November 1689, making her JA’s great-grandmother. Mary Brydges was a daughter of James Brydges, eighth Lord of Chandos and ambassador at Constantinople, and Eliza Chandos, who wrote the ‘curious letter of advice and reproof’ included here. With the injection of mercantile wealth from Eliza’s family, in the next generation their son, Mary’s brother, was able to live in great magnificence. He became the first Duke of Chandos and was Handel’s patron. It was in compliment to the first Duke’s wife Cassandra that this unusual name entered the Leigh family and was continued by generations of Austens. Writing to her brother as he was collecting materials for the Memoir Anna Lefroy drew his attention to ‘the original of Poll’s letters… in the possession of Mrs. George Austen—it was given to her at Portsdown’ (NPG, RWC/HH, fo. 2)
. The letter must have been a cherished heirloom, handed down through the Leigh and Austen families. Portsdown Lodge, near Portsmouth, became the home of Frank Austen, and Mrs George Austen would be the wife of Frank’s son George. JEAL’s inclusion of this letter to JA’s great-grandmother can only be explained as symptomatic of that social anxiety which surfaces in the Memoir at various points and was itself a major feature of JA’s novels. Writing of her fictional society, David Spring has adopted Alan Everitt’s useful term ‘pseudo-gentry’ to describe the group comprising trade, the professions, rentiers, and clergymen whose concerns propel her novels. It is a group whose membership in reality can be extended to the diversely positioned Austens themselves. The ‘pseudogentry’ are characteristically insecure—in some cases upwardly mobile and with growing incomes and social prestige, and in others in straitened circumstances; but in either case aspiring to the lifestyle of the traditional rural gentry. The Chandos letter not only serves to remind the reader of JA’s distant aristocratic pretensions, but internally it registers the periodic readjustment of relations between rank and trade. JA was not without her own snobbish streak, while her brother Henry was downright opportunistic. (See Agnes Leigh, ‘An Old Family History’, National Review, 49 (1907), 277–86; D. J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, PMLA, 68 (1953), 1017–31; and David Spring, ‘Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen: New Perspectives, (1983), 53–72, esp. 61–3.)
bring yr bread & cheese even’: live within your means.
out run the Constable: fall into debt.
a dead lift: an extremity, a hopeless situation.
know our beginning… who knows his end: cf. Psalm 39: 4.
bartlemew-babby: a Bartholomew doll—someone gaudily dressed, so named after the fair traditionally held around 24 August (Feast of St Bartholomew) at West Smithfield, London.
cry rost meate: publish one’s good luck foolishly.
Pera of Galata: south of Constantinople; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this district was home to most European diplomats to Turkey.
a Turkey merchant: one trading with the Near East generally and dealing in luxury items. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw their heyday, when fabulous fortunes could be made.
Right Hon. Thomas Lefroy… Ireland: (1776–1869), mentioned by name in JA’s earliest extant letters, where she records for Cassandra their brief romance over the Christmas holidays of 1795–6 when she was just 20. By 15 January 1796 she is writing: ‘At length the Day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over —My tears flow as I write, at the melancholy idea’ (Letters, 4). Almost three years later, in November 1798, she has news of him, reluctantly provided by his aunt, her friend Mrs Anne Lefroy, that ‘he was gone back to London in his way to Ireland, where he is called to the Bar and means to practise’ (Letters, 19). Tom Lefroy practised as a barrister in Dublin, married in 1799, had nine children, and became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in 1852. These letters, by that time in the possession of Fanny, Lady Knatchbull, were not known to JEAL when he made reference to the incident in the Memoir; but the story was not forgotten in family tradition. Both Caroline Austen and Anna Lefroy shared versions of it with their brother. As usual, Caroline pressed for discretion if not total silence: ‘I think I need not warn you against raking up that old story’, which she admits to having from their mother Mary Lloyd Austen. Anna, on the other hand, writing to JEAL’s wife, is far less discreet and, having married into the Lefroy family, has a different perspective on events. Before the Memoir was published Tom Lefroy had died, and in August 1870 his nephew T. E. P. Lefroy (who had married Anna Jemima, Anna Lefroy’s eldest daughter) wrote to JEAL communicating his uncle’s late admission ‘that he was in love with her’ but that ‘it was a boyish love’. T. E. P. Lefroy continued: ‘As this occurred in a friendly, & private conversation, I feel some doubt whether I ought to make it public.’ In the event, JEAL confined himself to the extremely guarded paragraph printed here. (See the transcript of Caroline Austen’s letter, 1 April [1869?], NPG, RWC/HH, fos. 4–7, printed in the Appendix; also, Le Faye, ‘Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen’, Jane Austen Society Report (1985), 336–8, for Anna Lefroy’s version; and R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (1948), 58, for extracts from T. E. P. Lefroy’s communication to JEAL.)
To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy: for details of Mrs Anne Lefroy, see note to p. 44 above. An account of the accident which killed her can be found in Reminiscences of Caroline Austen, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (1986), 6–7. Caroline compiled these reminiscences in the early 1870s, after the publication of her brother’s Memoir. She got her account of the accident, which occurred in 1804, the year before she was born, from her mother Mary Lloyd Austen. JA’s poem, composed in 1808, to commemorate what she describes in stanza 11 as ‘this connection in our earthly date’ (the fact that her friend died on JA’s birthday), was the first of her works to be published after the six novels. It was included in Sir John Henry Lefroy’s Notes and Documents relating to the Family of Loffroy… by a cadet (1868), 117–18. The manuscript (apparently in JA’s hand) of the version held by the Lefroy family is now in Winchester Cathedral Library (Gilson, M124 and M1343). This version has thirteen stanzas, two more than JEAL prints in the Memoir. For the fuller version, see Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (1993), 238–40. The version printed by R. W. Chapman in Minor Works, 440–2, derives from that in the Memoir rather than from one of the manuscripts, and prints the two missing stanzas as an appendix rather than inserting them in their appropriate place, as stanzas 4 and 5. According to David Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Verses’, Book Collector, 33 (1984), 25–8, there are four known manuscripts.
reconcile herself to the change: biographers have speculated much about this incident in JA’s life and how it affected her. JEAL’s informant was Caroline Austen, who got the details from their mother, Mary Lloyd Austen, who ‘was present’ when the news of the move to Bath was broken to Jane in November 1800. Caroline wrote to her brother: ‘My Mother who was present said my Aunt Jane was greatly distressed’ (transcript of Caroline’s letter, 1 April [1869?], NPG, RWC/HH, fos. 4–7, included in the Appendix). Another family account, deriving from Fanny Caroline Lefroy, Anna Lefroy’s daughter, tells how JA ‘fainted away’ when told of the imminent departure. It is this version which is recorded in the authorized family biography of the next generation (Life & Letters, 155–6), where the authors add, on no discernible grounds, that Cassandra’s destruction of her sister’s letters for the period 30 November 1800 to 3 January 1801 ‘was a proof of their emotional interest’. See the Introduction for further consideration of this episode.
not to expect too much from them: this is Caroline Austen’s view as expressed in correspondence with her brother as well as in her own memoir, MAJA: ‘There is nothing in those letters which I have seen that would be acceptable to the public… they detailed chiefly home and family events’ (p. 173, in this collection). Their half-sister Anna Lefroy writes vaguely, ‘Letters may have been preserved’ (RAJ, 162 also printed here). The Memoir makes use (much expanded in Ed.2) of the letters that these three, James Austen’s children, had from their aunt to themselves. It draws on the further letters which Caroline inherited after Cassandra’s death in 1845 and on those inherited in turn by Charles Austen’s eldest daughter Cassy Esten. JEAL does not seem to have had access to the bulk of his aunt’s letters to Cassandra, though he knew from Caroline of their existence and dissemination as legacies. The largest cache, in Fanny, Lady Knatchbull’s possession, was not available for inspection during the writing of the Memoir and was only published after her death by her son, as Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Edward, Lord Brabourne (2 vols., 1884). Hence JEAL’s statement at p. 65 —’I have no letters of my aunt, nor any other record of her, during her four years’ residence at Southampton’—can be explained by the fact that the
letters for that period (nos. 49–67 in Letters) went to Lady Knatchbull in the post–1845 division.