A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
authoritative presentation of Brontë as herself the respectable
and unpushy lady novelist. Austen-Leigh quotes (at p. 97), via
Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë’s now famous denunciation of Jane
Austen’s quiet art; but Gaskell’s elevation of the ideal domestic
woman, modest spinster daughter of a country parson, one not
‘easily susceptible’ to ‘the passion of love’ in which her novels
abound, 10 is clearly instructive for his later presentation of an
equally saintly heroine whose emotional and intellectual life never
ranged beyond the family circle, and whose brushes with sexual
love were so slight as to warrant hardly a mention. Where
Gaskell’s Brontë walks ‘shy and trembling’ (p. 91) through the
London literary scene, Austen-Leigh’s Aunt Jane refuses any and
every public notice with an energetic determination that transforms
rural Hampshire into a farther retreat than Siberia, let
alone Gaskell’s exaggeratedly remote Yorkshire parsonage. Jane
Austen lived (we are told), with unnecessarily shrill emphasis, ‘in
entire seclusion from the literary world: neither by correspondence,
nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary
authors’ (p. 90). Austen-Leigh’s biography presents
what it cannot (or will not) know about creative genius in terms of
a withdrawal of imaginative speculation, a deflection of enquiry
into anything as intense, familially disruptive, or counter-social as
writing. When he equates Jane Austen’s literary creativity with
her other forms of manual dexterity–– her use of sealing wax, her
games with cup and ball and spilikins–– he conceals within
domestic pastime what must also have been a profoundly
undomesticated, self-absorbed activity. Beyond a certain point
the familial perspective is irrelevant, even dishonest.
Origins
The decision to prepare a biography of Jane Austen was taken by
the family in the late 1860s. Admiral Sir Francis Austen, her last
10
Mrs Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1975), 443. For a recent, metabiographical examination of the treatment
of Charlotte and Emily Brontë by their biographers, see Lucasta Miller, The Brontë
Myth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).