A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
On the Marriage . . . in her Youth: JA mentions this verse in a letter of 29
November 1812, jokingly referring to her brother James’s ‘great
improvement’ to it (Letters, 196–7). No surviving manuscript is presently
known, and Chapman prints the version from the Memoir as the most
authoritative text in Minor Works, 444. But a variant text suggests that
two versions were in circulation in the family. In the other version:
Camilla good humoured & merry & small
For a Husband it happened was at her last stake;
& having in vain danced at many a ball
Is now very happy to Jump at a Wake.
This version is taken from the diary, now in Hampshire Record Office,
of Stephen Terry, father-in-law to Anna Lefroy’s fourth daughter Georgiana
(printed in Letters, 409, n. 7). It is possible that James Austen’s
improvements included the changes, for discretion’s sake, to ‘Maria’ and
the more flattering ‘handsome, and tall’. If so, his children kept both
versions alive–– one for private enjoyment and the other perhaps for more
public circulation. The occasion of the verse was the engagement of
Urania Wallop (her mother was Camilla) to the elderly Revd Henry
Wake. The title is supplied in the Memoir.
at the play last night . . . in Isabella: an extract from a letter to Anna
Lefroy, 29 November 1814 (no. 112 in Letters). JA is at this time staying
in London at her brother Henry’s. The play was David Garrick’s Isabella;
or the Fatal Marriage (1776).
‘So, Miss B. is actually married . . . in print’: again, from a scrap of an
undated letter to Anna Lefroy, of February or March 1815 (no. 118 in
Letters).
75 In measured verse I’ll now rehearse: no manuscript of these verses is
known, and all other printings derive from JEAL’s. Caroline suggested in
her letter of 1 April [1869?] (see the Appendix, p. 185) that her brother
include the poem by way of ‘stuffing’, as a harmless piece unlikely to
embarrass the family or compromise their aunt’s mature reputation. It is
taken to be written for Anna Austen (later Lefroy) and to reflect the
‘mercurial and excitable’ aspects of her character in youth (Life & Letters,
241). As such, the dating within the family is closer to 1810 than the
15 July 1817 (three days before she died) confidently but inexplicably
attached to it by Doody and Murray in Catharine and Other Writings, 233.
The geography of the poem–– ‘Ontario’s lake’, in fact the smallest of the
five Great Lakes, ‘Niagara’s Fall’, and ‘transatlantic groves’ (groves
beyond the Atlantic)–– represents a popular, even hackneyed, setting for
romantic adventure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
See, for example, Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (1793) and
Mary Brunton, Self-Control (1810), to which JA makes amused reference
in a letter to Cassandra: ‘I am looking over Self Control again . . . an
excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature
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