A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
likeness prefixed to this volume has been taken: Cassandra’s sketch, a lightly
executed pencil-and-watercolour portrait, is the only authentic representation
known to exist. It is dated c.1810, soon after the move to Chawton,
and is held in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The steel-engraved
portrait, the Memoir’s frontispiece, is taken from a Victorian likeness,
executed by a Mr Andrews of Maidenhead, after Cassandra’s original.
The differences between the two are marked and provide the clearest
indication of JEAL’s purpose with regard to the selective account of his
aunt that he chose to make public. He commissioned Andrews’s
enhancement of Cassandra’s portrait and sanctioned the transformation
of its sharp-faced, unsmiling original into something altogether softer
and more compliant. Ed.2 was first issued without the portrait, but the
reference to it at this point in the text led to enquiries for it, and it was
included in later printings.
linger in my memory: compare with this the Revd Fulwar William Fowle’s
memory of hearing JA sing and play the piano: ‘I well remember her
singing–– & “The yellow haired Laddie” made an impression upon me,
which more than half a century has had no power to efface,’ in a letter of
9 January 1870, acknowledging a copy of the Memoir. JEAL and Caroline
were his cousins. For a fuller extract, see the Appendix (HRO, MS
23/M93/66/2/1). JA’s letter of 27–8 December 1808 records her plan to
have a piano when they move to Chawton, ‘Yes, yes, we will have a
Pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 Guineas–– & I will practise
country dances, that we may have some amusement for our nephews &
neices, when we have the pleasure of their company’ (Letters, 161). There
are music manuscript notebooks held by the Jane Austen Memorial Trust
at Chawton Cottage containing music written out by JA.
knew something of Italian: JEAL owed this information to Anna Lefroy,
in her letter of 16 April [1869?] (see the Appendix, p. 183).
71 Goldsmith, Hume, and Robertson: Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England
(4 vols., 1771) was in its full and its abridged form of 1774 his most
successful history, and a popular schoolroom text. The unabridged 1771
edition is recorded among the books JA is known to have read, and a
family copy, with the signature ‘James Austen, Steventon’, has been preserved
in the family and includes marginal comments in JA’s hand.
David Hume, The History of England (6 vols., 1759–62), the front free
endpaper of vol. 1 bearing the inscription ‘Jane Austen 1797’ (perhaps a
gift from her uncle James Leigh Perrot), descended to JEAL and now has
his bookplate. (see David Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Books’, Book Collector,
23 (1974), 27–39). William Robertson was the author of many histories,
including History of Scotland (2 vols., 1759).
his grandmother Mary: in her early spoof ‘History of England from the
reign of Henry the 4 th to the death of Charles the 1 st . By a partial,
prejudiced, and ignorant Historian’, written out according to her own
dating in November 1791, when she was not quite 16, JA inverted the