A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxiii
inherited many papers belonging either to Jane or Cassandra. She
shared information, recollections, and copies of Aunt Jane’s letters
with her cousin James Edward. Another promising source of
memories and archival materials should have been Fanny Knight,
now Lady Knatchbull (1793–1882), Edward Austen Knight’s first
child who, just three months older than Anna, was Jane Austen’s
eldest niece. At the division of their aunt Cassandra’s papers after
her death in 1845, Fanny had inherited the bulk of those letters
from Jane to her sister that Cassandra had chosen to preserve.
But by the 1860s Fanny’s memory was confused, she was senile,
and other family members were unable or reluctant to trace the
whereabouts of the letters. His cousin, Fanny’s sister, Elizabeth
Rice (1800–84), wrote to Austen-Leigh at this time: ‘it runs in her
head that there is something she ought to do till her brain gets
quite bewildered & giddiness comes on which of course is very
alarming–– I really do not think that it is worth your while to
defer writing the Memoir on the chance of getting the letters for
I see none.’ 12 Lady Knatchbull’s daughter Louisa returned the
same reply to requests for letters, adding ‘I only wish the
“Memoirs” had been written ten years ago when it would have
given my Mother the greatest pleasure to assist, both with letters
and recollections of her own’. 13
The gap which these unforthcoming letters and recollections
suggest for our retrospective understanding of Austen-Leigh’s
account is worth considering. Fanny Knight has been represented
to posterity as the favourite niece, in Jane Austen’s own words
‘almost another Sister’ (to Cassandra, 8 October 1808). 14 It was a
bond strengthened by the death of her mother when Fanny was
only 15. As Anna Lefroy, another motherless niece, records in her
‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’: ‘Owing to particular circumstances
there grew up during the latter years of Aunt Jane’s life a great &
affectionate intimacy between herself & the eldest of her nieces;
12
NPG, RWC/HH, fo. 23, National Portrait Gallery, London, a file of correspondence
between R. W. Chapman and Henry Hake, containing typescripts made from
‘letters addressed to James Edward Austen-Leigh about the date of the composition &
publication of the Memoir and preserved by him in an album’.
13
NPG, RWC/HH, fo. 25.
14
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Le Faye, 144.