A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxv
The discrepancy between Anna Lefroy’s confidence in Fanny
Knight’s reverence for her aunt’s memory and the details of
Fanny’s own late outburst, both recovered across a fifty-year gap,
exposes something important about biographical truth–– it is not
just that Anna’s sense of what Fanny will remember and hold
dear is sharply at odds with what Fanny does indeed retain as
significant, but that the two impressions are based on different
readings of the same basic ingredients–– the long visits to Godmersham,
the value placed on talent and cleverness, social
distinctions, and the Knights’ powers of patronage within the
wider Austen family.
In other words, Austen-Leigh’s memoir of his aunt is not just a
family production, it is the production of a particular family view
of Jane Austen, and against it might be set other, different family
recollections and therefore different Aunt Janes. Here we have
Jane Austen as remembered by the Steventon or Hampshire
Austens, for whom she is nature-loving, religious, domestic, middle
class. The Godmersham (Knight-Knatchbull) or Kentish
Jane Austen was not to be made public until 1884. When in that
year Lord Brabourne, Fanny’s son and Jane’s great-nephew, published
his mother’s collection of Jane Austen letters, he attached
to them a short introduction whose chief purpose appears to be to
oust Austen-Leigh’s biography and assert his rival claims to the
more authentic portrait. Not only is Brabourne’s Jane Austen
located in Kent as often as in Hampshire, she is a more emotional
figure, inward and passionate, and of course more gentrified,
improved willy-nilly by contact with her fine relations. These
letters, mainly Jane’s correspondence with Cassandra, ‘contain’,
he promises, ‘the confidential outpourings of Jane Austen’s soul
to her beloved sister, interspersed with many family and personal
details which, doubtless, she would have told to no other human
being’. More pointedly, these letters ‘have never been in [Mr.
Austen-Leigh’s] hands’ and they ‘afford a picture of her such as
no history written by another person could give’. To settle the
matter of significance, the collection is dedicated to Queen
Victoria and proceeds by way of a hundred-page biographical
prelude, just under half of which situates its subject in relation to