A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
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her mother, but also for the intensity of her feelings for her elder
sister; there may have been something infantilizing in Cassandra’s
influence. Tomalin suggests that their relationship was not unlike
that of many couples (‘sisters can become couples’), while Terry
Castle’s sensationalized review of the letters, proclaimed ‘the
primitive adhesiveness–– and underlying eros–– of the sister–sister
bond’, provoking heated discussion and rejection of the dual
charges of incest and lesbianism. The details of what strikes the
modern reader as an odd practice (fostering-out) can be made to
yield far-reaching consequences. But it is also worth considering
how far biographers, too, might carry baggage from one project
to another: is it possible that Tomalin’s reading of Jane Austen’s
early life is in any way influenced by her earlier reading of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s jealous pursuit of the love her mother denied
her? 24
One moment of suspected intense repressed emotion has
proved irresistible to all biographers. It is when Jane Austen hears
the news that she is to lose her natal home, Steventon rectory, and
be uprooted to Bath. The event must have occurred late in
November or early in December 1800. Austen-Leigh provides
the first public statement. He writes:
The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons
of strong feeling and lively imagination; and Jane was exceedingly
unhappy when she was told that her father, now seventy years of age,
had determined to resign his duties to his eldest son, who was to be his
successor in the Rectory of Steventon, and to remove with his wife and
daughters to Bath. Jane had been absent from home when this resolution
was taken; and, as her father was always rapid both in forming
his resolutions and acting on them, she had little time to reconcile
herself to the change. (p. 50)
His account is brisk but compassionate, and a little distant. He
hints at his subject’s strength of attachment, her exclusion from
the decision-making process, and her powerlessness to reverse it,
but he also notes that such is ‘generally’ the feeling of imaginative
24 Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997), 6–7 and 211. Castle,
‘Sister-Sister’, p. 3. See also Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
(1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 14 ff.