A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
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.
If we look in James Austen-Leigh’s memoir for the kinds of
encounter with the individual life that we have come to expect
from literary biographies of the twentieth century we will be
disappointed. While his account remains the printed authority
for so much of what we know, it is marked by a lack of candour
that frustrates reinterpretation. There are several reasons for this,
but all can be summed up by the family constraints on its construction.
The details of the life of no other famous individual are
so exclusively determined through family as are those of Jane
Austen. Not only is it the case that surviving letters, manuscripts,
8 John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 17.
9 Emma, vol. 3, ch. 13; and Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape,
1984), 38.