Memoir of Jane Austen

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

  a periodical paper called ‘The Loiterer’: a humorous weekly paper jointly founded and largely written by James and Henry Austen, with help from undergraduate friends. Like their father, both James and Henry were students at St John’s College, Oxford, though their association with the college was as ‘Founder’s kin’, through their mother Cassandra Leigh Austen. The paper ran for sixty issues, from 31 January 1789 to 20 March 1790, when James left Oxford, and was issued commercially, though its circulation was small, through booksellers in Oxford, Birmingham, Bath, Reading, and London. Its model was Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator, whose first series ran daily from March 1711 to December 1712. But later examples of its enduring format—a continuing, partly simulated and partly genuine interaction between readers and writers, a kind of conversation in print—can be found in the two popular periodicals conducted by Henry Mackenzie, The Mirror (1779–80) and The Lounger (1785–7). A more immediate precedent, and one nearer to home, was the forty-eight numbers of the Olla Podrida, edited by Thomas Monro of Magdalen College, Oxford, and published in book form in 1788. The Olla Podrida is mentioned in issue 9 of The Loiterer as among ‘the entertaining papers of our most celebrated periodical writers’; and it is among several college and schoolboy journals appearing in the late 1780s and early 1790s. It has been suggested that The Loiterer may contain JA’s first published piece, a letter to the editor signed by ‘Sophia Sentiment’, in issue 9 (28 March 1789), in which the writer complains of the absence of stories to interest women, ‘about love and honour, and all that’, from the first eight numbers of the periodical. JA was at this time 13 years old. But there is no extant family tradition of her authorship of the letter, and its style is very different from that of her juvenilia. As Claire Tomalin astutely observes: ‘The trouble with attributing this to her is that the letter is not an encouragement to The Loiterer to address women readers so much as a mockery of women’s poor taste in literature. “Sophia Sentiment” is more likely to have been a transvestite, Henry or James.’ (See A. Walton Litz, ‘The Loiterer: A Reflection of Jane Austen’s Early Environment’, Review of English Studies, NS 12: 47 (1961), 251–61; Sir Zachary Cope, ‘Who Was Sophia Sentiment? Was She Jane Austen.?’ Book Collector, 15 (1966), 143–51; John Gore, ‘Sophia Sentiment: Jane Austen.?’ Jane Austen Society Reports, 2 (1966–75), 9–12; Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen and William Hayley’, Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 25–6; Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (1997), 63. For a recent reassessment of the influence of the young James and Henry Austen’s journalism on JA’s early literary experiments, see Li-Ping Geng, ‘The Loiterer and Jane Austen’s Literary Identity’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (2001), 579–92.)

  Her second brother, Edward: R. W. Chapman, Memoir (1926), remained silent on this piece of family concealment. Edward was, in fact, the third brother, born in October 1767 (d. 1852) and adopted in 1783, at the age of 16, by his father’s distant cousin Thomas Knight II (1735–94) of Godmersham, who was childless. From him he eventually inherited estates at Steventon and Chawton in Hampshire and Godmersham in Kent, taking the name of Knight officially in 1812. The second brother was George, born in 1766, epileptic from childhood and possibly deaf and dumb and mentally handicapped. He is mentioned by his anxious parents in two surviving letters from 1770 (Austen Papers, 23, 27), and in 1788 there appear to be fears that the sickly young son of Mr Austen’s niece, Eliza Hancock (now de Feuillide), may have the same congenital defects (Austen Papers, 130). But Mrs Austen’s younger brother Thomas was also mentally handicapped, and he and George may have been boarded out together. Whatever the precise facts, George Austen never lived in his family, is not mentioned in JA’s letters, and is rarely glimpsed in other parts of the surviving family record. But he outlived his elder brother James (1765–1819) and his younger sister Jane, not dying until 1838. He was provided for by the family, and we find in 1827 Edward Knight making over to George’s use the whole of his own inheritance from their mother (Austen Papers, 334). (W. A. W. Jarvis, ‘Some Information about Jane Austen’s Clerical Connections’, Jane Austen Society Report (1976), 14–15; and Tucker, 115–17.)

  Henry… less success in life, than his brothers: another piece of discreet family censorship on JEAL’s part. He avoids mentioning the details of Henry Austen’s (1771–1850) colourful and varied career: that, after soldiering in the Oxfordshire Militia, he set himself up in London as an Army Agent, which led him into starting his own London bank, as well as several associated country banking partnerships. He went bankrupt in March 1816, with significant financial consequences for his brothers and his sister Jane. Immediately thereafter, he reverted to a boyhood plan and was ordained a clergyman the following December, becoming curate of Chawton. With the occasional fashionable clerical appointment, he remained a clergyman for the rest of his life and died in 1850. Henry acted informally as JA’s literary agent, and it is from his various smart London addresses that her letters show her conducting some of her dealings with publishers and printers. He was also the first to make public biographical information about JA, in his ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ (included in this collection), prefixed to the posthumously published NA and P (1818). According to family tradition (Life & Letters, 48), he was JA’s favourite brother. JA mentions that ‘Uncle Henry writes very superior Sermons’ in a letter to JEAL, 16 December 1816 (Letters, 323).

  Francis… G.C.B.: Knight Grand Cross of the Bath. The details of Francis (Frank) (1774–1865) and Charles Austen’s (1779–1852) distinguished naval careers can be found in William R. O’Byrne, A Naval Biographical Dictionary (1849; rev. edn., 1859–61). This can be further supplemented by Sailor Brothers. Another family production (its authors, John Henry Hubback and his daughter Edith, were Frank Austen’s grandson and great–granddaughter), this book provides unique anecdotes about Frank and Charles from family papers and oral tradition, and includes the story that Frank was ‘the officer who knelt at church’ (p. 17). It was in Sailor Brothers that JA’s five surviving letters to Frank were published for the first time, presumably the letters that cousin Fanny Sophia told JEAL he might see but not print. Tucker, 165–90, conveniently collects together in briefer space much of what is known. As the surviving letters make clear, JA wove into her novels details from her brothers’ naval experiences—notably the names of their ships in MP—and may have borrowed aspects of their characters for William Price in MP and for Captain Harville in P, who Frank much later described as bearing ‘a strong resemblance’ to himself (Letters, 217, 91; Austen Papers, 303).

  prizes: the money realized by the capture of an enemy ship (or cargo) as a prize of war and shared out among a ship’s officers. Depending on rank, substantial prize money could be won. Captain Wentworth in P, ch. 24, has made in the course of the war with France ‘five-and-twenty thousand pounds’ in salary and prizes.

  sister Cassandra… scarcely be exceeded: the closeness of the relationship between JA and Cassandra (1773–1845) has been the subject of much speculation by modern biographers, ranging through good sense, bizarre curiosity, and wild surmise. It is described by various family members as a deep and mutually sustaining emotional bond. It is also clear that it was decisively influential on the selective preservation of JA’s writings after her death and on the shape and content of the oral record as it passed down to nieces and nephews. For more consideration of Cassandra’s legacy, see the Introduction (pp. xxviii–xxxi). In this paragraph JEAL’s major source of supplementary information is his half-sister Anna, whose long letter of December 1864 recording her ‘recollections of Aunt Jane’ is included in this collection (as RAJ). In this letter is to be found the story, told to her by her grandmother, of Jane wishing to share Cassandra’s fate even if it meant having her head cut off. It is Anna’s daughter Fanny Caroline Lefroy who records in old age and from her mother’s recounting that Jane and Cassandra ‘were everything to each other. They seemed to lead a life to themselves, within the general family life, which was shared only by ea
ch other’ (Fanny C. Lefroy, ‘Family History’, HRO, MS 23M93/85/2, written c .1880–5, unpaginated).

  Mrs. Latournelle… at Reading: behind the impressive name of Mrs, or Madame, La Tournelle, she was plain Sarah Hackitt (Hackett), though still something of a colourful character, with almost Dickensian touches to her appearance: when JA encountered her she was a woman in her sixties with a cork leg (Gentleman’s Magazine for 1797, p. 983; and F. J. Harvey Darton (ed.), The Life and Times of Mrs Sherwood, 1775–1851 (1910), 123–34). Cassandra and JA attended Mrs La Tournelle’s Ladies Boarding School in the Abbey House, Reading, a private school for the daughters of the clergy and minor gentry, in 1785–6; they had previously been sent away together to be boarded by Mrs Ann Cawley, a family connection, in Oxford and Southampton in 1783, when JA was only 7. JEAL does not record this. (See T. A. B. Corley, ‘Jane Austen’s Schooldays’, Jane Austen Society Report (1996), 10–20.)

  the Miss Steeles… Madame D’Arblay: the vulgar Miss Steeles, Anne (Nancy) and Lucy, are to be found in S&S, where they are thus summed up on their earliest appearance: ‘This specimen of the Miss Steeles was enough. The vulgar freedom and folly of the eldest left her no recommendation, and as Elinor was not blinded by the beauty, or the shrewd look of the youngest, to her want of real elegance and artlessness, she left the house without any wish of knowing them better’ (ch. 21). Mrs Elton is to be found in E, and John Thorpe in NA. Madame D’Arblay is more commonly referred to by her unmarried name of Fanny or Frances Burney (1752–1840). One of her contemporary novelists most admired by JA, Burney has from the first provided a point of critical comparison, as, for example, in Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818. The ill-bred Brangtons are to be found in Burney’s first novel Evelina (1778); Mr Dubster and Tom Hicks appear in Camilla (1796). Critics now regard such characters as among the liveliest aspects of Burney’s social scene.

  It may be known… Vine Hunt: a sentence JEAL added in Ed.2. Himself a keen huntsman, it was, according to his daughter’s later account, his writing for private circulation his Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt (1865) which encouraged him to undertake the more ambitious task of a memoir of his aunt Jane (Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, James Edward Austen-Leigh [JEAL], A Memoir (1911), 261).

  One who knew and loved it well… Of Nature’s sketch book: JEAL’s father, James Austen, rector of Steventon from 1805 until his death in 1819. The verses are from ‘Lines written in the Autumn of 1817 after a recovery from sickness’, a 455-line poem to be found in an unpaginated leather-bound volume of James Austen’s occasional writings, copied out by JEAL, probably in the mid-1830s (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/2). In the version in this volume, line 2 of the quoted lines reads, ‘Although they may not come within the rule’. Working from another manuscript collection of James Austen’s verses (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/1), but missing the Autumn 1817 poem, R. W. Chapman offered an ingenious but incorrect attribution of these lines (Memoir (1926), 215–16).

  but the rooms… or whitewash: one of several expansions of the text between Ed. 1 and Ed. 2, by which JEAL deepens the impression of a bygone world to which JA now belongs. Since JEAL’s father James Austen moved into Steventon rectory with his young family in 1801, on his own father’s retirement to Bath, this also became JEAL’s childhood home, and in what follows he is drawing as much on his own early memories as establishing what JA’s might have been.

  Catharine Morland’s… ‘… back of the house’: in NA, ch. 1. In printed editions of the novel, the name is spelt Catherine. In a letter to Anna Lefroy, dated 8 July 1869, JEAL describes the disappointment of his recent visit to Steventon, a research trip to collect information and soak up the atmosphere: ‘All traces of former things are even more obliterated than I had expected. Even the terrace has been levelled, & its site is to be distinguished only by the finer turf on that place’ (HRO, MS 23M93/ 84/1). The old rectory had been demolished in 1824 and replaced by a more elegant new rectory on the opposite hill. Anna’s sketch facing this passage in Chapter 2, is drawn from a rather hazy memory of how things were.

  a family named Digweed: the Digweeds had been tenants of the Steventon manor house and estate since at least the early eighteenth century, renting it from the Knights of Godmersham. In JA’s time the manor house was inhabited by Hugh Digweed, his wife Ruth, and their four surviving sons—John, Harry, James, and William—who were much of an age with the Austen children (Fam. Rec., 14, 46). On Mr Knight’s death in 1794, his heir JA’s brother Edward (Knight from 1812) inherited the Steventon estate.

  The church… above the woody lane: the church of St Nicholas, stone-built and dating from the thirteenth century (Emma Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen and Steventon (1937), 6). In 1869 the ‘present rector’ was JEAL’s cousin the Revd William Knight, with whom he spent a night while collecting materials for the Memoir (Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, JEAL, A Memoir, 263). The fragment of verse is again James Austen’s, from a poem ‘To Edward On planting a lime tree on the terrace in the meadow before the house. January 1813’, to be found in the same volume as the verses quoted above, where it reads ‘the little spireless Fane, | Just seen above the woody lane’ (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/2). The Edward of the poem is James’s son, James Edward, the writer of the Memoir, known as Edward in the family.

  Mr. Knight… representatives of the family: JA’s father was a distant cousin of Thomas Knight, and the connection was strengthened by his adoption of the Austens’ third son Edward (see note to p. 16 above). While the Digweeds rented the larger part of the Steventon estate from Mr Knight, George Austen had use of a 200-acre farm as a further source of income (Fam. Rec., 14).

  Mr. Austen’s powers of teaching: from 1773 George Austen supplemented his clerical income and the needs of his ever growing family by taking as boarders in the rectory private paying pupils from good families. The success of the scheme may have led to overcrowding at Steventon and caused the need to send Cassandra and Jane away to school, if only temporarily (Fam. Rec, 23, 39; Tucker, 31–2). In his ‘Biographical Notice’ of his sister, Henry Austen recalled how their father was ‘not only a profound scholar, but possessing a most exquisite taste in every species of literature’ (see p. 137 in the present collection).

  then no assessed taxes: beginning in 1784, with fixed taxes on such items as horses, hackney coaches, windows, and candles, the prime minister, William Pitt, managed a highly lucrative taxation policy. In a letter of 24 January 1813 JA writes to Cassandra of a journey she took with a Mrs Clement and her husband ‘in their Tax-cart’, an open cart used mainly for work purposes, on which was charged only a reduced duty (Letters, 198).

  employed on farm work: the reference is to a passage in P&P, ch. 7, where Mrs Bennet discusses with her daughter Jane whether the horses are available for private pleasure (to draw the coach) or for work on the farm. In the fictional case, the comparative economic restriction that the inability to keep dedicated coach horses suggests serves to further Mrs Bennet’s matchmaking schemes. The passage anticipates Mary Crawford’s failure to appreciate the difference between city and country living and that horses are needed for harvesting when she wants her harp transported (MP, ch. 6).

  Edward and Jane Cooper: the children of Jane Leigh Cooper, Mrs Austen’s sister, and the Revd Dr Edward Cooper. Mrs Jane Cooper died in October 1783 from the typhus fever infecting Mrs Cawley’s Southampton household in which JA, Cassandra, and their Cooper cousin Jane were then boarding. JA, too, was severely ill with it. Of the two cousins, Edward (1770–1833) wrote dull sermons, which are mentioned unenthusiastically in JA’s letters to Cassandra on 17–18 January 1809 and again on 8–9 September 1816, where she writes: ‘We do not much like Mr Cooper’s new Sermons:—they are fuller of Regeneration & Conversion than ever—with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible Society’ (Letters, 322). His sister Jane (1771–98) maintained throughout her short life the intimacy with JA and Cassandra established in their schooldays. She is mentioned as joining in the Austen family theatricals at Christma
s 1788–9 (Austen Papers, 138, in a letter of Eliza de Feuillide), when she may have spoken the ‘epilogue’ to The Sultan, written by James Austen for ‘Miss C … in the character of Roxalana’ (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/2), and she is the dedicatee of JA’s spoof sentimental novel ‘Henry and Eliza’ in the collection of juvenile writings known as Volume the First (see note to p. 39). After the death of her father in August 1792, she was married from her aunt and uncle’s at Steventon a few months later, in December. For her own early death in a carriage accident, see Fam. Rec., 98. The conjecture that JA may have acquired an early acquaintance with Bath on visits there to the Coopers is probably derived from Anna Lefroy’s memory that ‘Cassandra in her childhood was a good deal with Dr. & Mrs. Cooper at Bath’ (see p. 160 in this collection). Cassandra and Jane Cooper were of course nearer in age to each other and more likely companions in childhood. Following Mrs Cooper’s death, the family left Bath in 1784, at which time JA was 8 and hardly likely to be storing topographical impressions for a future novel. Her first recorded visit there is in November 1797, to the Leigh Perrots, though earlier visits may well have occurred (Fam. Rec., 95). JA did not live permanently in Bath until her father retired there in 1801.

  Count de Feuillade: Jean-François Capot de Feuillide (not Feuillade) was a captain in the French army and probably not a count. He married JA’s cousin Eliza Hancock in 1781; their son, Hastings, was born in 1786 and, sickly for most of his short life, died in 1801. The ‘Comte’ was guillotined in February 1794, having attempted to bribe an official to favour the Marquise de Marboeuf, then on trial. It was the Marquise who was accused of trying to produce famine by laying down arable land to pasture. According to family tradition, Eliza was with her husband in France until his arrest, barely escaping with her life. Henry Austen married his cousin Eliza de Feuillide on 31 December 1797. JEAL’s Memoir appears to be the only record for the family tradition that Henry and Eliza subsequently visited France during the Peace of Amiens (1802–3), hoping to recover her French property, and that they fled in what sounds like a frightening repetition of past events. Eliza, lively, fashionable, and irreverent, was one of JA’s most colourful connections and a significant influence on her teenage years; the spoof epistolary novel ‘Love and Freindship’, dated at the end as finished on ‘June 13th 1790’, is dedicated ‘To Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide’. Eliza died in 1813 (Fam. Rec., 34–7, 72–3, 123).