A Memoir of Jane Austen

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
258
Explanatory Notes
142 ‘What should I do, my dearest E.’: from a letter to James Edward Austen,
16 December [1816]. For the full text, see Letters, no. 146. and Memoir,
pp. 122–4 above, where JEAL quotes more extensively from the same
letter, written to him by his aunt.
a letter . . . before her death: a letter known only from its publication here
by Henry Austen. JEAL subsequently draws on it, at pp. 120 and 130
above.
HENRY AUSTEN, ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833)
This is a rewriting by Henry Austen of his ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818.
Much of the original information remains, but there are omissions, alterations,
and additions. Henry Austen provided the new memoir to accompany Sense
and Sensibility, published by Richard Bentley as No. 23 in his ‘Standard
Novels’ series, dated 1833. Bentley had recently bought from Henry and
Cassandra Austen, as joint proprietors, the copyrights of the five novels (the
exception was P&P) which had remained in JA’s ownership at her death
(Austen Papers, 286–7), and he was now preparing the first edition of her
works since 1818. Henry subjoins to the memoir the date ‘October 5. 1832’,
and in a letter to Bentley of 4 October he describes it as ‘A biographical sketch
of the Authoress, which is to supersede that already publishd’. He continues:
‘I heartily wish that I could have made it richer in detail but the fact is that My
dear Sister’s life was not a life of event. Nothing like a journal of her actions or
her conversations was kept by herself or others.’ (For the full text of the letter,
see Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen: New Biographical Comments’, Notes and
Queries, 237 (1992), 162–3.) Bentley continued to issue Henry Austen’s
revised memoir in separate and collected edition printings of S&S until 1869,
after which it was rendered redundant by his publication of JEAL’s substantial
Memoir. Intended to replace the ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818, the fate of
the 1833 memoir since the late nineteenth century has been quite the opposite.
Regularly assumed by critics to be merely a reprint of the earlier piece (Brian
Southam dismisses it as a ‘slightly altered version’, in Jane Austen: The Critical
Heritage, vol. 1, 1811–70 (1968), 16), it saw no reprinting between the
1880s and 1997 and has largely dropped from critical view. But the 1833 text
remains significant in several ways. The biographical details retained since
1818 have been pruned and rephrased, their lighter and more intimate touches
(‘She was fond of dancing, and excelled in it’, the listing of her favourite
writers, the mention of her deathbed comic verses) giving way to a greater
formality and sobriety. The new material includes the anecdote recorded only
here of JA’s refusal of the invitation to meet Madame de Staël; finally, Henry
supplements what he now feels to be an inadequate record ‘of so talented a
woman’ with long passages extracted from ‘a critical journal of the highest
reputation’. As David Gilson has recently shown, the published criticisms
Henry draws on are from two sources–– Maria Jane Jewsbury in the Athenaeum
and Richard Whately in the Quarterly Review. In effect, Henry’s selection of
their critical perspectives as the summation of his second biographical study