A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxxix
resembled those she attributed to Marianne Dashwood on leaving
Norland; but we have the negative evidence arising from the fact that
none of her letters are preserved between November 30, 1800, and
January 3, 1801, although Cassandra was at Godmersham during the
whole of the intervening month. Silence on the part of Jane to Cassandra
for so long a period of absence is unheard of: and according to
the rule acted on by Cassandra, destruction of her sister’s letters was a
proof of their emotional interest. 25
What is new in 1913 is the melodrama–– the fainting and the
association of Jane Austen’s behaviour with that of her hysterical
heroine Marianne Dashwood (whose sorrows and joys, her
narrator tells, ‘could have no moderation’) from the yet-tobe-published
Sense and Sensibility. 26 Summing up the family
traditions in 1948, R. W. Chapman presses them yet further:
Jane made the best of it. ... Jane’s local attachments were of extraordinary
strength; they were no small part of her genius. We cannot
doubt that the loss of her native county, and of the multitude of
associations which made up her girlish experience, was exquisitely
painful. Her feelings cannot have been less acute than Marianne’s on
leaving Norland, or Anne’s on leaving Kellynch. Her return to her
own country, eight years later, was the long-delayed return of an
exile. 27
Jane’s love of the local Hampshire countryside is partly drawn
from Fanny Caroline’s account, but Chapman takes it on himself
to strengthen the relationship of equivalence between author and
fictions by extending the link, arbitrarily made to Austen’s first
heroine by later generations of Austen-Leighs, to incorporate her
final heroine, Anne Elliot from Persuasion. It is, of course, the
kind of recognition a certain sort of biography delights in, where
fiction offers clues back to its author or demonstrably derives
directly from personal experience. In his opening chapter
Austen-Leigh had been at some pains to point out that if ‘Cassandra’s
character might indeed represent the “sense” of Elinor’,
25 William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life
and Letters. A Family Record (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1913), 155–6.
26 Sense and Sensibility, vol. 1, ch. 1.
27 R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen: Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948;
repr. 1949), 47.