A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
unattractive nervousness which at times descends into massive
condescension and complacency–– when confronting the absence
of improvements in domestic arrangements, furniture, meals, and
general living conditions during Jane Austen’s lifetime. At such
moments he comes perilously close to her own Mr Collins. Less
specifically, however, the social anxiety his biography registers
offers a valuable insight into a family who were, much like the
fictional society of the novels, insecurely positioned in what has
been described as ‘pseudo-gentry’––in some cases upwardly
mobile and with growing incomes and social prestige, and in
others in straitened circumstances, but, in either case, aspiring to
the lifestyle of the traditional rural gentry. 31
According to his daughter’s later account, Austen-Leigh began
the Memoir on 30 March 1869 and it was finished, in a little over
five months, early in September. During that time he made a
short visit to Steventon to fix what impressions he could still
trace of his own and his aunt’s early home, and he corresponded
with his sisters and cousins in the hope of collecting further
information. The Memoir was published on 16 December 1869,
though dated 1870, in a relatively modest edition of around a
thousand copies. 32 It is, as its title states, a memoir (‘a record of
events, not purporting to be a complete history, but treating of
such matters as come within the personal knowledge of the
writer, or are obtained from certain particular sources of information’:
OED, s.v. 3a). To some extent, its discontinuous narrative
guarantees authenticity. As Austen-Leigh’s daughter notes: ‘It
could not relate that which none of them knew, respecting the
details of her earlier life, nor could it describe many facts given in
letters not then before him, to which later writers have had
access.’ Most importantly, this is Aunt Jane as her nieces and
nephew came to know her in the Chawton years. ‘Of her earlier
and gayer experiences, he probably knew nothing, and still less
31
On the ‘pseudo-gentry’, see David Spring, ‘Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social
World: Literary Criticism and Historians’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Jane Austen: New
Perspectives (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers Inc., 1983), 61–3.
32
Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir (privately
published, 1911), 263–4.