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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  J. E. AUSTEN-LEIGH

  A Memoir of Jane Austen

  and Other Family Recollections

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  KATHRYN SUTHERLAND

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN

  AND OTHER FAMILY RECOLLECTIONS

  JAMES EDWARD AUSTEN-LEIGH (1798–1874), the only son of Jane Austen’s eldest brother James and his second wife Mary Lloyd, was born at Deane parsonage, Hampshire, and moved the short distance to Steventon rectory in 1801, aged 2, when his father became rector there on his grandfather’s retirement to Bath. Thus he spent his childhood and youth in the same house in which Jane Austen had spent hers. After school at Winchester he went to Exeter College, Oxford, was ordained in 1823, and, like his father and grandfather, became a country clergyman. As a schoolboy he wrote verses and even began a novel, which Jane Austen encouraged. He represented his father at her funeral in 1817. Upon his great-aunt Jane Leigh Perrot’s death in 1836 he inherited the estate of Scarlets, taking the name of ‘Leigh’ in addition to Austen. In 1852 he became vicar of Bray, near Maidenhead, where he lived until his death. A keen huntsman, it was his late success as a published writer with Recollections of the Vine Hunt (1865) which encouraged him to begin the Memoir in the Spring of 1869, in which he drew upon the memoirs of his sisters Anna Lefroy and Caroline Austen, and of his uncle Henry Austen.

  KATHRYN SUTHERLAND is Professorial Fellow in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has published widely on fictional and non-fictional writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Her editions include Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (for Penguin Classics). She is currently completing a critical study of Austen under the title Jane Austen’s Textual Lives.

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  The Austen Family Tree

  Introduction

  Note on the Texts

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of the Austen family

  J. E. AUSTEN-LEIGH

  A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN (1871)

  HENRY AUSTEN

  ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ (1818)

  HENRY AUSTEN

  ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833)

  ANNA LEFROY

  ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’ (1834)

  CAROLINE AUSTEN

  My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir (1867)

  Appendix: Family Letters

  Explanatory Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In preparing this edition I have incurred many debts and received advice and assistance from several sources. My greatest debt is to Deirdre Le Faye, who generously shared with me her Jane Austen scholarship and knowledge of the archives; she also checked my text of Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir against the manuscript in Jane Austen’s House, Chawton. I am grateful to the staff of the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester; to the staff of the Heinz Archive, the National Portrait Gallery; to Judith Priestman of the Modern Manuscripts Room, Bodleian Library; and to the staff of Balliol College and St Anne’s College Libraries, Oxford. My thanks for specific and general advice go to Geneviève Baudon Adams, Claire Harman, Tom Keymer, Claire Lamont, Hermione Lee, Matthew Leigh, and Jim McLaverty; to my sister Moira Wardhaugh for helping me think about family memories; and to Judith Luna for her enthusiasm for the project.

  I am grateful to the Archive Department of the Hampshire Record Office and to the Heinz Archive and Library, the National Portrait Gallery, for permission to publish manuscript materials in their possession. I would also like to thank Brian Southam and the Jane Austen Society for permission to reprint Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir. For permission to reproduce images of family members, my thanks go to Katharine Beaumont, T. F. Carpenter of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, and to Maggie Lane.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  James Edward Austen-Leigh, a portrait added as a frontispiece to the Memoir, ed. R. W. Chapman (1926)

  Jane Austen, steel-engraved portrait by Lizars from a likeness drawn by Mr Andrews of Maidenhead (after Cassandra Austen’s watercolour sketch now in the National Portrait Gallery, London), used as a frontispiece to the first edition of the Memoir (1870)

  Wood engraving of Steventon Parsonage

  Wood engraving of Steventon Manor House

  Wood engraving of Chawton Church

  Lithographic facsimile of an autograph manuscript of the verses on Mr Gell and Miss Gill, now in the Pump Room, Bath

  Henry Austen, miniature, c.1820

  Private collection

  Anna Lefroy as a y
oung woman

  Jane Austen Memorial Trust

  Anna Lefroy in later life, 1845

  Maggie Lane

  Caroline Austen as a child

  Private collection

  Caroline Austen as an old lady

  Private collection

  THE AUSTEN FAMILY TREE

  AND DESCENT OF BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Business of Biography

  When in 1926 Robert Chapman published his edition of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography of his aunt Jane Austen the Times Literary Supplement chiefly welcomed its reissue not for the life it recorded but for the manuscripts described in it. Under the heading ‘Manuscripts of Jane Austen’, it concentrated on that feature of the Memoir which ‘makes it necessary to the complete Austenian . . . the particular account, in Mr Chapman’s introduction, of the manuscripts of Jane Austen’s letters and of her other writings’. The reviewer continued: ‘Here we may find ... the last word about Jane Austen manuscripts, which not only is a thing to welcome for its own sake but may help to bring to light other manuscripts which are known to exist, or to have existed, but have been lost to sight’.1 In 1926 the manuscript notebook of juvenilia, Volume the First, was known outside Austen family circles only by the two scenes of the spoof play ‘The Mystery’, printed by Austen-Leigh in 1871 and perhaps written as early as 1788 (when Jane Austen was 12 or 13). After 1871 and Austen-Leigh’s second edition of the Memoir, enlarged with early or unfinished manuscript drafts of several ‘new’ Jane Austen works (the cancelled chapter of Persuasion, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and a synopsis of Sanditon), there was no further printing of such material until the 1920s; readers had to wait until 1951 for the first publication of Volume the Third, the last of the juvenile manuscript books. There was an important exception to this silence, in the edition in 1884 of Jane Austen’s Letters by her great-nephew Lord Bra-bourne, which brought to public light eighty-four autograph letters in the possession of Lord Brabourne’s mother, Jane Austen’s niece, Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull), and a minor exception in the printing in 1895 of Charades . . . by Jane Austen and her Family.

  But in the 1920s Chapman was busy distinguishing life from works and extending the Jane Austen canon beyond the six major novels on which her reputation so far rested. He had published or was planning separate and handsomely produced editions of the non-canonical writings that Austen-Leigh had chosen, after family consultation, to stretch out his biography, and it did not seem impossible that more manuscripts might come to light, especially as materials in family ownership were now beginning to appear in the auction rooms. Chapman was particularly concerned at this time with tracing Volume the First and the whereabouts of surviving Jane Austen letters. This explains his slant on the Memoir in his brief introduction: its importance to him is as a frame on which to hang the extant literary remains and as a guide to the reconstruction of writings which may or may not still exist. Even now this aspect of Austen-Leigh’s work cannot be disregarded; in some cases the Memoir provides the only documentary authority—for certain letters and for the mock panegyric to Anna Austen (‘In measured verse I’ll now rehearse’).2 But more subtly at work on Chapman’s own Austenian ambitions in 1926 was the influence of later generations of the family as biographers and keepers of the archive. In 1913 James Edward’s grandson Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh had published with his uncle William Austen-Leigh an expanded biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters. A Family Record, enlarging the 1871 account with materials drawn from other branches of the family. Substantially updated and largely rewritten by Deirdre Le Faye in 1989, A Family Record remains the ‘authorized’ reference or ‘factual’ biography. The absence of biographical notice or speculation from Chapman’s introduction and appended notes to his edition of the earlier Austen-Leigh memoir not only registers a reticence to engage critically with what in 1926 was still family business, it was also the prudent act of a scholar and publisher eager to claim the literary remains in family hands for his own shaping. Chapman was Secretary to the Delegates at Oxford University Press, which had as recently as 1923 issued under its Clarendon imprint his pioneering edition of the six novels—not only the first accurate text of Jane Austen’s novels, after the careless reprint history of the nineteenth century, but the first major textual investigation of the English novel as a genre.

  Since 1926 there has been no serious editorial engagement with the Memoir and little critical attention paid to it.3 Yet James Austen-Leigh here assembled a major work of Austenian biography which stands unchallenged as the ‘prime source of all subsequent biographical writings’.4 This is even clearer when, as in Chapman’s edition and in the edition printed here, the Memoir is cut free from the manuscript writings which in 1871 threatened to overshadow it. What is left is an account of a life shaped and limited by the recollections, affections, and prejudices of a very few family members who knew her. But it is worth dwelling on those drafts a little longer because, by attaching Lady Susan and The Watsons to the Memoir text of 1871, James Austen-Leigh, by this time an elderly and respectable Victorian clergyman, may be said to have undermined his overt purpose. ‘St. Aunt Jane of Steventon-cum-Chawton Canonicorum’, as Austen-Leigh’s hagiographic portrait has been wittily dubbed, is a comfortable figure, shunning fame and professional status, centred in home, writing only in the intervals permitted from the more important domestic duties of a devoted daughter, sister, and aunt. ‘Her life’, her nephew summarized, ‘had been passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of domestic affections, without any self-seeking or craving after applause’ (p. 130). To such a meek spirit, writing was of no more value than needlework, at which she equally excelled: ‘the same hand which painted so exquisitely with the pen could work as delicately with the needle’ (p. 79). Indeed, when Austen-Leigh describes her writing it is her penmanship and the look of the page that concerns him, as it concerns her brother Henry (‘Every thing came finished from her pen’) and niece Caroline, who records somewhat curiously that ‘Her handwriting remains to bear testimony to its own excellence’ (p. 171). But the unpublished manuscripts speak a different story—of long apprenticeship, experiment and abandonment, rewriting and cancellation, and even of a restless and sardonic spirit. They provide unassailable evidence to upset some of Austen-Leigh’s chief statements about Jane Austen the author; considered by the light of these irreverent works her steady moral sense looks more ambiguous, her photographic naturalism (‘These writings are like photographs ... all is the unadorned reflection of the natural object’ (p. 116)) less trustworthy. The unpublished writings challenge Austen-Leigh’s image of the writer who is first and foremost ‘dear Aunt Jane’, whose novels are the effortless extensions of a wholesome and blameless life lived in simple surroundings:

  [Steventon] was the cradle of her genius. These were the first objects which inspired her young heart with a sense of the beauties of nature. In strolls along those wood-walks, thick-coming fancies rose in her mind, and gradually assumed the forms in which they came forth to the world. In that simple church she brought them all into subjection to the piety which ruled her in life, and supported her in death. (pp. 24–6)

  On the contrary, the manuscript pieces, both early and late, show a rawer, edgier, social talent (of the major Romantic-period writers she is the least ‘natural’), and reveal that the artlessness of the finished works is the result of laboured revision, of painful inner struggle, rather than unconscious perfection. Bound together, they irresistibly implied a new Austen novel; once read, they even suggested a new Jane Austen. Chapman reminds us that, ‘by inadvertence or cunning’, the publisher Richard Bentley had the spine of the second edition of the Memoir printed to read Lady Susan & c; and this is how it was subsequently issued in the six-volume Steventon set of Jane Austen’s Novels (1882), where volume 6 is Lady Susan, The Watsons, & c. (With a Memoir and Portrait of the Authoress).5

  Since 1926 the emphasis has shifted—the manuscript writings ha
ve been absorbed into the canon, changing our readings of the six novels and, more pertinently here, literary biographers have appropriated the ‘family record’, discovering or imposing psychological and aesthetic forms to explain and expand the little we know of Jane Austen’s life. But a better way to describe literary biography, caught somewhere between the ‘facts’ of historical documentation and the competing ‘truth’ of imaginative association, might be to say that biography is not so much an attempt to explain as an attempt to satisfy. In a now notorious review of Deirdre Le Faye’s revised edition of the Letters, Terry Castle wrote that the reader of Jane Austen’s fiction is ‘hungry for a sense of the author’s inner life’.6 If this is so—and the number of Austen biographies even since the revised Letters of 1995 argues that our appetites remain keen—then it is not facts or explanations we crave but intimacy and identification. Writers themselves have regularly expressed distaste or fear at the hunger for biographical detail which their own creativity has fuelled and which threatens to invade every private corner. George Eliot viewed biography as a ‘disease’, complaining to her publisher John Blackwood of the posthumous fascination with the details of Dickens’s life: ‘Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public, is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to re-read his books?’7 But, as theorizers of biography regularly note, it is the novel itself—more particularly, the nineteenth-century realist novel, with its illusion of the comprehensive and comprehensible life—which is the biographer’s readiest model. It is not that we are too idle to reread works of literature, but rather that one powerful consequence of reading certain kinds of literature (and especially novels) is our wish to extend and bring closer to us the illusion of knowing and of knowingness they create. The novel-writer is by association the inevitable victim of the hunger her imagination has stimulated and appeared to appease. And, as John Wiltshire suggests, ‘of all writers in the canon, Jane Austen is the one around whom this fantasy of access, this dream of possession, weaves its most powerful spell’.8 Because she is more than usually retiring, because there seems so little to know, because her plotless fictions, themselves the subtlest and most tactful of biographies, present human beings in the fascinating light of their trivial and essential moments, we long to know more. Her novels absorb us deeply and, in a genre where absorption is a conventional expectation, even uniquely. We cannot believe that they will not lead us back to their author. Against this natural longing, artfully stimulated, we should set that other, more sceptical knowledge which novels try to teach us: ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken’, the narrator of Emma warns the naïve reader; while, for the narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot, biography is ‘a collection of holes tied together with string’.9 But biography, like novels, is built on paradoxes.