A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 213
Watsons, hopes to impress by the extreme lateness of his dinner hour––
‘For whether he dined at eight or nine . . . was a matter of very little
consequence.’ The barely genteel Watsons, however, are discovered
dining inelegantly early, at three.
31 Dos est . . . Virtus: Adam von Bremen, an eleventh-century theologian, in
his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (‘German Church History’),
of which an edition was published in Hanover in 1846. It should
read ‘Dos est magna parentum Virtus’ (‘excellence is the great legacy of
parents’).
furmity, or tansey-pudding: furmity or frumenty, a dish of wheat boiled in
milk with spices and sugar; tansy-pudding, traditionally eaten at Easter,
flavoured with the bitter herb tansy. Mrs Austen thanks her sister-in-law
Mrs Walter for her ‘receipt for potato cakes’ on 12 December 1773
(Austen Papers, 30). In a letter to Cassandra, then staying at Godmersham
Park, JA jokes of her own good housekeeping, which she defines as pleasing
‘my own appetite’, mentioning her favourite dishes–– ‘ragout veal’
and ‘haricot mutton’ (17 November 1798, Letters, 20). At Chawton, after
1809, Martha Lloyd shared the housekeeping with Cassandra, and her
manuscript recipe book from that time survives. See Maggie Black and
Deirdre Le Faye, The Jane Austen Cookbook (1995).
‘ . . . costly to rear’: when in her seventies and living at Chawton Cottage,
Mrs Austen, according to family tradition, still kept the kitchen garden
and dug her own potatoes: ‘I have heard my mother [Anna Lefroy] say
that when at work she wore a green round frock like a day labourer’
(Fanny Caroline Lefroy, ‘Family History’, in Fam. Rec., 158).
32 A small writing-desk . . . in the closet: in the Lefroy Manuscript, the
Austen family history that Anna Lefroy embarked on in the 1850s but
left uncompleted, is included a description from her own childhood
memories, perhaps refocused in later conversations with her aunt Cassandra,
of the two modest rooms and their cheap furniture–– a dressing
room and smaller bedroom–– which JA and Cassandra shared at Steventon
in the 1790s. Its defensive tone, though not its detail, is echoed by
JEAL: ‘ . . . one of the Bed chambers, that over the Dining room, was
plainly fitted up, & converted into a sort of Drawing room . . . This room,
the Dressing room, as they were pleased to call it, communicated with
one of smaller size where my two Aunts slept; I remember the commonlooking
carpet with its chocolate ground that covered the floor, and some
portions of the furniture. A painted press, with shelves above for books,
that stood with its back to the wall next the Bedroom, & opposite the
fireplace; my Aunt Jane’s Pianoforte–– & above all, on a table between the
windows, above which hung a looking-glass, 2 Tonbridge-ware work
boxes of oval shape, fitted up with ivory barrels containing reels for silk,
yard measures, etc. I thought them beautiful, & so perhaps in their day, &
their degree, they were. But the charm of the room, with its scanty
furniture and cheaply papered walls, must have been, for those old
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