A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 259
set the terms on which readers encountered JA’s writings in the midnineteenth
century. (See David Gilson, ‘Henry Austen’s “Memoir of Miss
Austen”’, Persuasions, 19 (1997), 12–19, and ‘Jane Austen and the Athenaeum
Again’, Persuasions, 19 (1997), 20–2.)
150 Madame de Staël would be of the party: Henry Austen is our only source
for this story of JA’s refusal to meet the French intellectual and novelist
Germaine de Staël (for whom see note to p. 111 above). By 1815 JA and de
Staël were both publishing with John Murray; but the date to which
Henry Austen assigns the meeting that never was, summer 1814 (‘soon
after the publication of MP’), was after de Staël’s departure from England.
If we are to credit the story, then we must set it back a year, possibly
to JA’s London visit of October 1813.
151 fastest since she died: the whole of this long quoted paragraph is digested
from Maria Jewsbury’s article, ‘Literary Women. No. II. Jane Austen’,
Athenaeum, 200 (27 Aug. 1831), 553–4, which Henry Austen selectively
adapts (see Gilson, ‘Jane Austen and the Athenaeum Again’, 20–2). What
looks like a grammatical error at p. 152 (‘the fellows to whom may be met
in the streets’) is also to be found in the Athenaeum version.
153 evidently a Christian writer: this paragraph is taken from Richard Whately’s
unsigned review of NA and P in the Quarterly Review, 24 (Jan. 1821),
352–76 (at pp. 359–60). There are slight differences in the wording in the
Quarterly, and Whately writes ‘Miss Austin’ throughout.
Cœlebs: a reference to Hannah More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1808), a
hugely popular moral novel setting out the duties of a model wife.
154 Madame D’Arblay . . . Miss Porter: For D’Arblay and Edgeworth, see
notes to pp. 20 and 72 above. Amelia Opie (1769–1853) was the author
of domestic novels, Adeline Mowbray (1804) and Simple Tales (1806);
Jane Porter (1776–1850) contributed successfully to the vogue for the
historical novel with The Scottish Chiefs (1810).
ANNA LEFROY, ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’ (1864)
HRO, MS 23M93/97/4, ‘Items found interleaved in the published works and
related papers of R. A. Austen-Leigh, 1872–1961’. Anna Lefroy’s letter to her
brother JEAL is item 23M93/97/4/104, and described as ‘found in p. 291’. It
forms an irregular booklet of fourteen pages (approx. 16.5 × 10.8 cm), made
up of three small sheets (pp. 1–6) and two larger sheets, folded down
the centre to make pp. 7, 8, 13, 14 (sheet 4) and pp. 9, 10, 11, 12 (sheet 5). The
left-hand edges of sheets 1–3 are wrapped round the centrefold and stitched
lightly to the back at p. 14. I reproduce for this edition the text as it appears in
this fair-copy manuscript, though for ease of reading I have not recorded
erased words or page breaks. I have, however, retained irregularities of orthography
and punctuation. JEAL took some details (JA and Cassandra walking in