A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxvii
and when Austen-Leigh printed it he did so from a different copy
and without his express permission.
One thing is clear, that without the Godmersham perspective
Austen-Leigh’s account cannot give proportionate space to the
part played by Cassandra Austen in her sister’s life. But it was
Cassandra herself who had done much to obscure and fragment
the record. As Caroline Austen observed to her brother: ‘I am
very glad dear Edward that you have applied your-self to the
settlement of the vexed question between the Austens and the
Public. I am sure you will do justice to what there is–– but I feel it
must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have
they been buried out of our sight by the past generat[ion]’
(pp. 186–7). She herself supplied her brother with an intimate
picture of Aunt Jane’s daily routine at Chawton Cottage, punctuated
with the kind of inconsequential visual detail that only a
child would store up as significant. As my annotations to the
Memoir point out, Austen-Leigh drew heavily on Caroline’s essay,
and when he does so his prose comes to life. Like him, Caroline
was the child of James Austen’s second wife, the Austens’ family
friend Mary Lloyd, and Caroline came into possession of her
mother’s pocket books, in which over many years she kept a brief
diary of events as they occurred. Mary Lloyd Austen had been at
her sister-in-law’s bedside when she died, having travelled to
Winchester to help nurse her. Caroline thus had her mother’s
recollections, written and spoken, to draw on as well as her own.
As one of the unmarried nieces she also spent much time with
Aunt Cassandra in her later years. On the strength of this, their
older half-sister Anna reminds James Edward, Caroline must
have some unique knowledge: ‘Caroline, though her recollections
cannot go so far back even as your’s, is, I know acquainted with
some particulars of interest in the life of our Aunt; they relate
to circumstances of which I never had any knowledge, but were
communicated to her by the best of then living Authorities, Aunt
Cassandra’ (p. 162).