A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 205
honour, and all that’, from the first eight numbers of the periodical. JA
was at this time 13 years old. But there is no extant family tradition of her
authorship of the letter, and its style is very different from that of her
juvenilia. As Claire Tomalin astutely observes: ‘The trouble with attributing
this to her is that the letter is not an encouragement to The Loiterer
to address women readers so much as a mockery of women’s poor taste in
literature. “Sophia Sentiment” is more likely to have been a transvestite,
Henry or James.’ (See A. Walton Litz, ‘The Loiterer: A Reflection of Jane
Austen’s Early Environment’, Review of English Studies, NS 12: 47 (1961),
251–61; Sir Zachary Cope, ‘Who Was Sophia Sentiment? Was She Jane
Austen?’ Book Collector, 15 (1966), 143–51; John Gore, ‘Sophia Sentiment:
Jane Austen?’ Jane Austen Society Reports, 2 (1966–75), 9–12;
Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen and William Hayley’, Notes and Queries,
232 (1987), 25–6; Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (1997), 63. For a
recent reassessment of the influence of the young James and Henry
Austen’s journalism on JA’s early literary experiments, see Li-Ping
Geng, ‘The Loiterer and Jane Austen’s Literary Identity’, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction, 13 (2001), 579–92.)
Her second brother, Edward: R. W. Chapman, Memoir (1926), remained
silent on this piece of family concealment. Edward was, in fact, the third
brother, born in October 1767 (d. 1852) and adopted in 1783, at the age
of 16, by his father’s distant cousin Thomas Knight II (1735–94) of
Godmersham, who was childless. From him he eventually inherited
estates at Steventon and Chawton in Hampshire and Godmersham in
Kent, taking the name of Knight officially in 1812. The second brother
was George, born in 1766, epileptic from childhood and possibly deaf
and dumb and mentally handicapped. He is mentioned by his anxious
parents in two surviving letters from 1770 (Austen Papers, 23, 27), and in
1788 there appear to be fears that the sickly young son of Mr Austen’s
niece, Eliza Hancock (now de Feuillide), may have the same congenital
defects (Austen Papers, 130). But Mrs Austen’s younger brother Thomas
was also mentally handicapped, and he and George may have been
boarded out together. Whatever the precise facts, George Austen never
lived in his family, is not mentioned in JA’s letters, and is rarely glimpsed
in other parts of the surviving family record. But he outlived his elder
brother James (1765–1819) and his younger sister Jane, not dying until
1838. He was provided for by the family, and we find in 1827 Edward
Knight making over to George’s use the whole of his own inheritance
from their mother (Austen Papers, 334). (W. A. W. Jarvis, ‘Some Information
about Jane Austen’s Clerical Connections’, Jane Austen Society
Report (1976), 14–15; and Tucker, 115–17.)
Henry . . . less success in life, than his brothers: another piece of discreet
family censorship on JEAL’s part. He avoids mentioning the details of
Henry Austen’s (1771–1850) colourful and varied career: that, after soldiering
in the Oxfordshire Militia, he set himself up in London as an