A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
Cassandra’s Legacies
The major ingredients of the Memoir, as well as its reverent colouring,
are owed, in one way or another, to Cassandra Austen.
The closeness of the relationship between Jane and Cassandra has
been the subject of much speculation among modern biographers,
ranging through good sense, bizarre curiosity, and wild
surmise. It is undisputed that theirs was the deepest and most
sustaining emotional bond that either made; and as the guardian
of her sister’s reputation and material effects, Cassandra is the
key to what tangibly remains. The sisters lived in close companionship,
not unusually for the period sharing a bedroom at Steventon
and again at Chawton. But they spent weeks and months
apart, often when one or other was staying at the home of another
of the large Austen family. It is this regular round of visits–– to
Godmersham to the Edward Austen Knights, to London to
Henry Austen’s various fashionable addresses–– which accounts
for the majority of the surviving letters, addressed from Jane to
Cassandra. It was with Cassandra that Jane discussed her work in
any detail; Cassandra was her chief heiress and executor of her
will. As such she was almost solely responsible for the preservation
(and the destruction) and subsequent distribution among
brothers, nieces, and nephews of the letters, manuscripts, and
memories. She decisively shaped–– not only through stewardship
of the archive but through conversation–– what was available to
the next generation. The point is significant (though surely
unsurprising) that, through Cassandra’s management, and not
least through her apportioning of the inheritance, the nieces and
nephews individually knew rather less than we might expect.
Writing to James Edward in 1864 Anna speculates: ‘There may be
other sources of information, if we could get at them–– Letters
may have been preserved’ (p. 162), but she does not know this
with any certainty. A few years later she concludes: ‘The occasional
correspondence between the Sisters when apart from each
other would as a matter of course be destroyed by the Survivor––
I can fancy what the indignation of Aunt Cass a . would have been
at the mere idea of its’ being read and commented upon by any of