A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
specimen of her . . . handwriting is here given: at this point in Ed.1 JEAL
included a lithographic facsimile of the autograph manuscript of the
verses on Mr Gell and Miss Gill. This was replaced in Ed.2 with the last
few lines and signature of a letter to Anna Lefroy (Letters, no. 112), facing
the opening of ch. 3. Here as elsewhere I have restored the Ed.1
illustration.
satin stitch: an embroidery stitch, repeated in parallel lines to give a satiny
appearance.
79 housewife: JA gave the ‘housewife’ to her friend Mary Lloyd in January
1792 when the family moved from Deane parsonage to Ibthorp. Mary
did not become Jane’s sister-in-law until 1797. A ‘housewife’ was a cloth
sewing case for needles, pins, thread, etc., and was a common home-made
gift between women friends. ‘Minikin’ needles, as the word suggests,
would be very small. The accompanying poem is dated ‘Jan: ry 1792’. For
a description of the manuscript and its slight variants from the text
printed by JEAL, see David Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Verses’, Book Collector,
33 (1984), 30. Both bag and manuscript are still in the Austen-
Leigh family.
Two of her nieces were grown up . . . one of them was married: James
Austen’s elder daughter Anna was 24 and married since November 1814
at the time of JA’s death in July 1817. Caroline, his younger daughter,
and JEAL’s other chief assistant in the Memoir, was only 12. But Fanny
Knight, Edward Austen Knight’s eldest child, a few months older than
Anna, was also 24 and as yet unmarried. As Lady Knatchbull (she married
Sir Edward Knatchbull in 1820), she inherited the bulk of JA’s
letters to her sister Cassandra.
her religious principles: it was her brother Henry Austen who in his ‘Biographical
Notice’ (1818), first presented JA as ‘thoroughly religious and
devout’ and with opinions according ‘strictly with those of our Established
Church’. The novels offer little evidence of this, but Henry’s views
were quickly absorbed into JA’s nineteenth-century appraisal (see his
‘Biographical Notice’ in this collection). After several changes of career,
Henry Austen had become a Church of England clergyman in 1816.
81 so little: Ed.1 reads ‘nothing’.
was completed: Ed.1 reads ‘was written’. Here and in the change noted
above we see JEAL revising his text between editions to take account of
the light shed by the unfinished manuscript of The Watsons on JA’s
presumed creative inactivity during her residence in Bath. See note to
p. 59.
between February 1811 and August 1816: the dates are probably taken
from Cassandra Austen’s brief note on composition. See note to p. 44
above. What JEAL implies here has been of great significance to how
critics have viewed JA’s creative life. He suggests, in combination with
his earlier statement at pp. 43–4, that the novels as we know them were
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