Memoir of Jane Austen

by Austen-Leigh, James Edward; Sutherland, Kathryn;

  Cassandra’s Legacies

  The major ingredients of the Memoir, as well as its reverent colouring, are owed, in one way or another, to Cassandra Austen. The closeness of the relationship between Jane and Cassandra has been the subject of much speculation among modern biographers, ranging through good sense, bizarre curiosity, and wild surmise. It is undisputed that theirs was the deepest and most sustaining emotional bond that either made; and as the guardian of her sister’s reputation and material effects, Cassandra is the key to what tangibly remains. The sisters lived in close companionship, not unusually for the period sharing a bedroom at Steventon and again at Chawton. But they spent weeks and months apart, often when one or other was staying at the home of another of the large Austen family. It is this regular round of visits—to Godmersham to the Edward Austen Knights, to London to Henry Austen’s various fashionable addresses—which accounts for the majority of the surviving letters, addressed from Jane to Cassandra. It was with Cassandra that Jane discussed her work in any detail; Cassandra was her chief heiress and executor of her will. As such she was almost solely responsible for the preservation (and the destruction) and subsequent distribution among brothers, nieces, and nephews of the letters, manuscripts, and memories. She decisively shaped—not only through stewardship of the archive but through conversation—what was available to the next generation. The point is significant (though surely unsurprising) that, through Cassandra’s management, and not least through her apportioning of the inheritance, the nieces and nephews individually knew rather less than we might expect. Writing to James Edward in 1864 Anna speculates: ‘There may be other sources of information, if we could get at them—Letters may have been preserved’ (p. 162), but she does not know this with any certainty. A few years later she concludes: ‘The occasional correspondence between the Sisters when apart from each other would as a matter of course be destroyed by the Survivor—I can fancy what the indignation of Aunt Cassa. would have been at the mere idea of its’ being read and commented upon by any of us, nephews and nieces, little or great—and indeed I I [sic] think myself she was right, in that as in most other things’ (p. 184). The collected letters of Jane Austen, as they are now available to us, only came together in 1932, and so the reconnection of the various parts of the epistolary archive considerably post-dates both the Memoir and the publication of the largest Knatchbull cache (in 1884). Of the 161 letters from Jane Austen now known to have survived, only six were addressed to Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull) in her own right; but Cassandra left to her keeping almost all of her own surviving correspondence with her sister, presumably because very many of these letters were written either to or from Fanny’s childhood home of Godmersham. Without them, James Edward’s memoir lacks significant information. For example, the sparseness of his record for the Southampton years and his vagueness about how long the Austens lived there (his calculation is out by about eighteen months) can be explained in part by the fact that the letters covering that period were, since Cassandra’s death, with Lady Knatchbull.18

  According to Caroline, who gives the fullest account of the treatment of the letters, Aunt Cassandra ‘looked them over and burnt the greater part, (as she told me), 2 or 3 years before her own death—She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces—but of those that I have seen, several had portions cut out’ (p. 174). Between May 1801 and July 1809 Jane Austen’s life was, in outward circumstances at least, at its most unsettled—various temporary homes and lodgings in Bath and Southampton, holiday visits to the seaside, new acquaintances and friendships—and for all that potentially exciting period James Edward provides only four letters. When the Knatchbull cache is added in, there is still a long silence between 27 May 1801 and 14 September 1804. And there are earlier hiatuses in the record—from September 1796 to April 1798, for example. These gaps coincide with important personal and family events: in the earlier years, the death of Cassandra’s fiancé Tom Fowle, James Austen’s second marriage and Henry Austen’s marriage to glamorous cousin Eliza, Mrs Lefroy’s attempt at matchmaking during the visit of the Revd Samuel Blackall to Ashe, the writing of ‘First Impressions’ (the early version of what would become Pride and Prejudice), and its rejection by the London publisher Thomas Cadell; in the later years, between 1801 and 1804, almost all the romantic interest in Jane Austen’s life of which we have any hints at all. We simply do not know the extent of Cassandra’s careful work of destruction and whether it is this that accounts for the unyielding nature of the evidence—in particular, the difficulty we have in recovering anything more satisfactory than a partial and unconfiding life of Jane Austen. Lord Brabourne’s description of the letters he edits as the ‘confidential outpourings’ of one soul to another is, from the evidence, wildly inaccurate, but perfectly explicable in terms of family rivalry—his claims to marketing another Jane Austen. Equally, Caroline’s account of Cassandra’s pruning of the correspondence may suggest secrets hidden and confidences suppressed, but it is just as likely that what remains is not atypical within a larger, censored record but fully representative of it. Cassandra may have chosen to preserve and apportion with such care these letters and not others chiefly because their addressees and internal details were of particular value to one branch of the family or another. It might be that there never was a confiding correspondence to hold back; on the other hand, there might have been.

  Biography is suspicious of gaps and silences; the form has tended to assume a correlation between biology and chronology, to the extent that any break in this ‘natural fit’ supposes the suppression of information. This is all the more so when documentation is not available for periods of obvious psychological interest—love affairs and deaths—when events appear, inexplicably to hindsight, not to have been recognized as ‘eventful’ and therefore simultaneously translated into narrative form. Literary biography in particular is bound to the twinned assumptions that a life can be written and that its writing is pre-given, part of the natural fit, according to which its texts must already exist and be recoverable as the chronology of thought and feeling attending a sequence of events. Commenting on the paucity of textual clues to Jane Austen’s response to the emotional crises of 1796–8, David Nokes despairingly asks: ‘Why do we have no letters from this period? It can hardly be because Jane Austen did not write any ... It can only be that Cassandra . . . chose to destroy them . . . she preferred to obliterate the memory of a period of such distress.’ A favoured strategy among recent biographers has been to reconstitute empathetically such ‘destroyed’ textual traces. Accordingly, Nokes tells us that ‘Cassandra received the news [of Tom Fowle’s death] with a kind of numbness. Outwardly, she was strangely calm . . . Upon Jane the influence of this change in her sister’s disposition was no less profound for being, at first at least, unacknowledged and unperceived.’19 It is the biographer’s duty, in the interests of recording the complete life, to recover not only what must have existed and been destroyed but what only appears to be ‘unacknowledged and unperceived’. Biography’s texts are thus almost endlessly recessive.

  Partiality and Evasion, or Secrets and Lies

  The family members whose labours around 1870 chiefly constructed the public record of Jane Austen—James Edward, his two sisters, and their cousin Cassy Esten—were alive equally to the fortuitous and the ethical dimensions of their task. The failings of memory and the shadow of old age as it falls across a later generation ensure that the Memoir opens on a note of elegy which contends perilously with annihilation: ‘the youngest of the mourners’ at the funeral, now in old age, will attempt ‘to rescue from oblivion’, ‘aided by a few survivors’, a life ‘singularly barren’ (pp. 9–10). Old age recovers childhood impressions of a life, itself empty of event, cut short in its middle years—the reader should not be deaf to the effects of an irony which runs throughout the Memoir. Accidents of survival, both personal and documentary, constitute what is known, while a more purposive dimension distinguishes what is known from what can be told.


  The Memoir is a rag-bag, not the shaped life of the historio- or psycho-biographies of the late twentieth century, but an undesigned and unprioritized assortment of textual states. These range through the expansive contextualizing and ‘costume’ detail of Chapter 2, with its tansey-pudding, minuets, and eulogy of spinning; to the more relevant antiquarianism of Chapter 3, with its letter of 1686 to ‘Poll’ (Mary Brydges), Jane Austen’s great-grandmother, and on to the digression on the Welsh ancestry of the Perrot family which opens Chapter 4; and, in Chapter 9, the roll-call of Jane Austen’s famous readers and the student recollections of Sir Denis Le Marchant, Austen-Leigh’s brother-in-law. The annotations to this edition give some sense of both the desultoriness and the indulgence of Austen-Leigh’s clerical prosings. Against their background noise, voices from letters (though Austen-Leigh is careful to edit them), scraps of remembered conversation, and an occasional sharp vignette convince of their authenticity by the power of surprise—’There is a chair for the married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline’ (p. 128). At such moments, and there are many more of them in the unedited recollections provided by Anna and Caroline, it is as if text, as an aspect of its privacy (its recovery through private recollection), gives up to the reader the trace of real presence—Jane Austen’s voice or look or gesture. In these cases, the partiality of the Memoir is also its strength.

  In significant ways the declared partiality of the family record raises important issues concerning biographical truth and the terms in which all biography functions. Writing to her brother with memories and stories from the past, Caroline makes a distinction between what she has to tell and what she gives for him to print: ‘I should not mind telling any body, at this distance of time—but printing and publishing seem to me very different from talking about the past’; and ‘this is not a fact to be written and printed —but you have authority for saying she did mind it’ (pp. 188 and 185). The stories she sketches here, got from Aunt Cassandra and from her mother Mary Lloyd, refer respectively to the marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither in December 1802, and the Revd George Austen’s decision late in 1800 to leave Steventon and move to Bath. A century and more later, the boundaries between the private and public knowledge of Jane Austen no longer obtain. The living links with the past and the other sensitivities by which Austen-Leigh and his associates were bound are severed; and the ‘right to privacy’ of Jane Austen, her immediate family, and neighbours would now strike us as a surprising if not an absurd concept, easily overtaken by the competing ‘rights’ of history (in the form of accurate scholarship), or just the vaguer, modern ‘right to know’. Biographers have since Austen-Leigh’s time equipped themselves to probe the silences and evasions in these prime sources. It is now in terms of its secrets and lies that Austen-Leigh’s Memoir might seem to be most profitably approached.

  We now know that her nieces and nephew did not tell us the whole truth about Jane Austen and her family as they knew it. The existence of a second brother, the handicapped but long-lived George Austen, is concealed, and Edward, the third brother, is presented as the second (p. 16). There is no reference to the jailing of Jane’s aunt Mrs Leigh Perrot on a charge of shoplifting in Bath. Neither piece of discretion is surprising; both are matters of honour and, for the time, of good taste. Austen-Leigh was his great-uncle Leigh Perrot’s heir, adding Leigh to his name on his great-aunt’s death in 1837. But the excitement and publicity of the imprisonment and trial, occurring only a year before the Austens moved to Bath, must have continued to hang in the air and to affect the family’s social standing in the city. For this reason and others, we long to know more of Jane Austen’s impressions of life there. As David Gilson tells us, Mrs Leigh Perrot’s trial has the doubtful distinction of being ‘the only public event involving a member of the novelist’s family of which significant contemporary documentation survives’.20 Over all the texts gathered in this collection, there hangs silence on this matter.

  The suppression of such circumstantial facts, it might be argued, is a limitation of frankness rather different from the unwillingness to probe the inner life of the biographical subject. It is evident, for example, from the fragments of correspondence which remain that nephew and nieces did speculate about the extent of Jane Austen’s romantic attachments —to Tom Lefroy in the winter of 1795–6, to the Revd Blackall two years later, about the abortive seaside romance, and the proposal from her friends’ brother Harris Bigg-Wither. There is confusion over how many attachments there may have been—seaside and other romantic clergymen blur and multiply. We detect disagreements, too, over who at this distance still needed to be protected, as well as over what it is proper to expose in public. One of the important revisions between the first and second editions of the Memoir deepens the sense that Jane Austen did, like most of us, experience romantic love and the pain of its loss. The sentence in the first edition which reads ‘I have no reason to think that she ever felt any attachment by which the happiness of her life was at all affected’ is removed from the second edition which now hints, though with conscious insubstantiality, at two possible romantic episodes before concluding: ‘I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness’ (p. 29). The shift is small but it sanctions the reader’s closer identification with the human subject of the Memoir.

  In particular, the Tom Lefroy affair was not forgotten in family memory—Caroline had her version ‘from my Mother, who was near at the time’, while Anna, a Lefroy by marriage, has her own more highly charged story of events, coloured by internal family politics. As she does on other occasions, Caroline presses for discretion; Anna is generally less prudish. What the brother and sisters did not have access to, because they were now in Knatch-bull hands, were the important letters from Jane to Cassandra in which she records the brief relationship and something of her feelings. Significantly or not, these are the first surviving letters. But it is possible to make out, without their excited mock-serious communications, that the attachment was more earnest and its end more painful than Austen-Leigh allows. In the late 1860s Tom Lefroy was still living. Though his death, only months before publication of the Memoir, provided an opportunity to reconsider the story for the second edition, Austen-Leigh retained intact the guarded, even cryptic, paragraph which appeared in the first.21

  This sense of reserve towards the subject of a posthumous biography is not just a matter of family respect, though the lines between what is accounted as for private or public knowledge will obviously be drawn differently depending on where the biographer stands. Rather, it is indicative of a discretion which separates mid-Victorian biographers from the prying accountability of our modern need-to-know stance. Reticence was a matter of moral responsibility for the Victorian biographer, but that does not mean that attention to the limits of what can or should be made known need prevent discerning speculation, or that the moral reading of a life cannot become its imaginative reading. One of the earliest and most insightful readers of the Memoir was the novelist Margaret Oliphant, whose review of the first edition appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for March 1870. Oliphant refuses to have any truck with Austen-Leigh’s idealized portrait of a selfless spinster aunt, grateful sister, and uncomplaining daughter. To her mind Jane Austen the novelist is an altogether harder and more brilliant individual, the author of ‘books so calm and cold and keen’, whose portrayal of human behaviour is ‘cruel in its perfection’. It follows that the sentimentality of her painted domestic environment will not do. She names the Austen family ‘a kind of clan’, their happy circle more like a prison, and ‘this sweet young woman’ of Austen-Leigh’s construction a stifled figure, ‘fenced from the outer world’.22 But, though she questions the relevance and truth of his portrait, she does not suggest that the biographer should examine deeper into the details of the life. A little over ten years later, in ‘The Ethics of Biography’ (1883), she warned against ‘that prying curiosity which loves to investigate circumstances, and thrust
itself into the sanctuaries of individual feeling’.23 The partiality of Jane Austen’s Victorian biography is explicable, then, not only in terms of the fragmentariness of the record and the prejudices and loyalties of the family, but also as a more principled rejection of that kind of disclosure which invades ‘the sanctuaries of individual feeling’, places immune from pursuit and exposure.