A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
The Memoir is a rag-bag, not the shaped life of the historio- or
psycho-biographies of the late twentieth century, but an
undesigned and unprioritized assortment of textual states. These
range through the expansive contextualizing and ‘costume’ detail
of Chapter 2, with its tansey-pudding, minuets, and eulogy of
spinning; to the more relevant antiquarianism of Chapter 3, with
its letter of 1686 to ‘Poll’ (Mary Brydges), Jane Austen’s greatgrandmother,
and on to the digression on the Welsh ancestry of
the Perrot family which opens Chapter 4; and, in Chapter 9, the
roll-call of Jane Austen’s famous readers and the student recollections
of Sir Denis Le Marchant, Austen-Leigh’s brother-in-law.
The annotations to this edition give some sense of both the desultoriness
and the indulgence of Austen-Leigh’s clerical prosings.
Against their background noise, voices from letters (though
Austen-Leigh is careful to edit them), scraps of remembered
conversation, and an occasional sharp vignette convince of their
authenticity by the power of surprise–– ‘There is a chair for the
married lady, and a little stool for you, Caroline’ (p. 128). At such
moments, and there are many more of them in the unedited recollections
provided by Anna and Caroline, it is as if text, as an
aspect of its privacy (its recovery through private recollection),
gives up to the reader the trace of real presence–– Jane Austen’s
voice or look or gesture. In these cases, the partiality of the
Memoir is also its strength.
In significant ways the declared partiality of the family record
raises important issues concerning biographical truth and the
terms in which all biography functions. Writing to her brother
with memories and stories from the past, Caroline makes a distinction
between what she has to tell and what she gives for him
to print: ‘I should not mind telling any body, at this distance of
time–– but printing and publishing seem to me very different
from talking about the past’; and ‘this is not a fact to be written
and printed–– but you have authority for saying she did mind it’
(pp. 188 and 185). The stories she sketches here, got from Aunt
Cassandra and from her mother Mary Lloyd, refer respectively to
the marriage proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither in December
1802, and the Revd George Austen’s decision late in 1800 to leave