A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xvii
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
have 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
5 Memoir, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. viii. The advertisement
for the Steventon Edition of the novels, printed in the second volume of Letters of
Jane Austen, ed. Edward, Lord Brabourne (2 vols., London: Richard Bentley and Son,
1884), attaches the notice of the Memoir in brackets after Lady Susan, The Watsons, &c.
6 Terry Castle, ‘Sister-Sister’, London Review of Books, 3 Aug. 1995, p. 3.
7 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (9 vols., New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1954–78), vi. 23, Eliot to Blackwood, 20 Feb.1874.