A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
and other material witnesses remained largely in family hands for
a hundred years after her death, but there is no non-fictional
evidence for a ‘self ’ other than that constructed within the
bounds of family. No diaries or personal writings have come
down to suggest the existence of an inner life, a self apart. If there
is no autobiographical record, there is also very little by way of a
non-familial social or public record. The archive of her later publisher
John Murray has yielded nothing but the barest details of a
professional relationship conducted with respect and good will
on both sides–– no hints of literary parties at which Miss Austen
might have been a guest. Henry Austen, in his second, 1833
‘Memoir’, can only mention as noteworthy the meeting with
Germaine de Staël which did not take place, while the introduction
to the Prince Regent’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke,
becomes significant chiefly as it is transformed into the comic
‘Plan of a Novel’. What are left are family memories, which if not
totally consensual in the ‘facts’ they collectively register, are sufficiently
convergent and mutually endorsing to determine the
biographical space as only familial. The modern biographer, for
whom the interest of a life generally increases in proportion to its
inwardness, is defeated by this absence of a resistant private voice.
The comparison that Austen-Leigh invites us to make is with
Charlotte Brontë, and it is more interesting than at first appears.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of her friend and fellow-novelist had
been published as recently as 1857, setting a standard for the
simultaneous memorializing and effacing of its difficult subject,
the female writer, that proved influential on Austen-Leigh. In
Chapter 7 he compares his aunt’s seclusion from the literary
world with the details Gaskell revealed of Brontë’s shunning of
public applause. That the Jane Austen we encounter in Austen-
Leigh’s account is as inadequate to the novels we now read as is
Gaskell’s Brontë can be explained in each case by the Victorian
biographer’s project of domestication. But there is an added twist
whereby the novelist whom Brontë found too ‘confined’, and
from whose ‘mild eyes’ shone the unwelcome advice ‘to finish
more, and be more subdued’, becomes liable to a biographical
constraint which in some part derives from Gaskell’s earlier
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