A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 211
60/3/2), contains specimens of James’s prologues and epilogues dating
back to the 1780s, with notes of the members of the family who took the
relevant roles in family theatricals. Another cousin, the sensible Philadelphia
Walter, writes of the performances expected to take place at Steventon
over Christmas 1787: ‘My uncle’s barn is fitting up quite like a
theatre, & all the young folks are to take their part.’ She describes Eliza
de Feuillide, whom she is seeing again after a gap of ten years: ‘The
Countess has many amiable qualities . . . Her dissipated life she was
brought up to–– therefore it cannot be wondered at . . . ’ Philadelphia,
who kept her letters from her exotic, Frenchified cousin, is our main
source of information on Eliza. The Christmas theatricals being planned
in 1787 included Hannah Cowley’s Which Is the Man? (1783) and David
Garrick’s Bon Ton (1775), and Eliza clearly fancied herself in the leading
female roles (Austen Papers, 125–8). According to James Austen’s additional
verses for that year, the play eventually performed, with Eliza
playing the heroine, was Susannah Centlivre’s The Wonder! A Woman
Keeps a Secret! (1714).
Cassandra . . . a young clergyman: this was Tom Fowle (1765–97), Mr
Austen’s former pupil at Steventon rectory and therefore a childhood
friend. He accompanied his kinsman Lord Craven to the West Indies and
died of yellow fever off St Domingo in February 1797. He was buried at
sea. Cassandra and he may have become engaged around the time that he
officiated at the marriage of Jane Cooper and Captain Thomas Williams
in December 1792. On his death he left Cassandra £1,000, which
invested would have helped to give her a very limited independence.
Some details can be found in letters written in May and July 1797 from
Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter (Austen Papers, 159, 161).
Her reviewer . . . January 1821: Richard Whately (1787–1863), later
Archbishop of Dublin, in an unsigned review of NA and P in the Quarterly
Review, 24 (January 1821), 352–76. The passage quoted here occurs
at pp. 366–7. JEAL returns to this important early critical assessment of
JA’s work in Chapter 8 of the Memoir.
29 In her youth . . . to affect her happiness: this is one of the significant
revisions to the text of the Memoir made between Ed.1 and Ed.2. Ed.1
reads at this point: ‘She did not indeed pass through life without being
the object of strong affection, and it is probable that she met with some
whom she found attractive; but her taste was not easily satisfied, nor her
heart to be lightly won. I have no reason to think that she ever felt any
attachment by which the happiness of her life was at all affected.’ There
the paragraph ends, and JEAL moves at once to his description of
domestic life and home comforts at Steventon almost a century before.
The details of two romantic episodes, still insubstantial, and quite deliberately
so (‘one passage of romance . . . imperfectly acquainted . . .
unable to assign name, or date, or place, though . . . on sufficient authority’),
which he included in Ed.2, he owed to his sister Caroline Austen.