A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Tucker
Explanatory Notes
George Holbert Tucker, A History of Jane Austen’s Family
(1983; revised 1998)
S&S Sense and Sensibility (1811)
P&P Pride and Prejudice (1813)
MP Mansfield Park (1814)
E Emma (1816)
NA Northanger Abbey (1818)
P Persuasion (1818)
References to the Jane Austen Society Reports are to articles as they are paginated
in the collected volumes, where these exist: 1949–65; 1966–75; 1976–85;
and 1986–95.
J. E. AUSTEN-LEIGH, A Memoir of Jane Austen
The text of the Memoir printed here follows the second, expanded edition of
1871, with minor misprints and errors corrected. I have, however, made certain
changes. I have omitted the bulk of the manuscript writings which JEAL
appended to this enlarged edition–– the cancelled chapter of Persuasion, Lady
Susan, and the unfinished novels The Watsons and Sanditon (the last mainly
paraphrased by JEAL); and I have restored some features of the first edition
text of 1870–– namely, the set of five illustrations and the second postscript,
dated 17 November 1869. In this, I follow the example of R. W. Chapman who
edited the 1871 Memoir for the Clarendon Press in 1926. Chapman retained
the cancelled chapter of Persuasion but omitted the other manuscript writings.
He also restored the illustrations and second postscript and supplied running
titles for each of the chapters, drawn from JEAL’s own chapter head notes. I
have adopted these, together with the frontispiece portrait of JEAL added to
the 1926 edition. In other respects this is a reprint of the 1871 Memoir,
collated against the 1870 edition for misprints and to record the substantial
changes made between the two editions. The most important of these textual
changes and expansions are signalled and described in the notes which follow.
It is worth mentioning that neither JEAL nor his assistants in the Memoir were
overly concerned to reproduce accurately the documents which they transcribed
or quoted. Among the Austen family, there was much passing around
of copies and much making of further copies of JA’s letters and unpublished
writings, and I alert the reader in the notes which follow to the more significant
differences between JEAL’s texts and the earlier, often autograph, copies
published more recently. Such changes are particularly marked in his treatment
of JA’s letters, where not only was JEAL not concerned to follow scrupulously
the original text (or perhaps he was not supplied with a wholly
accurate copy), but he had a tendency to correct or improve grammar and
sentence structure. In addition, as a near family member, he was sensitive to
the substance of his material, and occasionally he omits or alters details which
might still, in 1871, have caused offence to the living or cast JA or others in an