A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
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superintendence of the household supplies of tea, sugar, and
wine; her stories about fairyland. From Caroline, who got it from
her mother who was present, we also have the account of Jane
Austen’s final illness and death. Anna’s memories reached back
further, to Steventon days, and they are touchingly quirky. For
her, aunts come in pairs, mysteriously distinguishable only by a
forgotten detail of their bonnets, which otherwise were perfectly
alike as to ‘colour, shape & material’. Anna, sent to Steventon at
the age of two to be comforted after her mother’s death, remembers
things that relate to her–– the fuss made over her likely
memory of hearing an early version of Pride and Prejudice read
aloud, and in later years the co-operative storytelling that so
exasperated Aunt Cassandra. Anna’s recollections are the more
persuasive and haunting for being voiced–– her memory of
Grandpapa enquiring ‘Where are the Girls? Are the Girls gone
out?’ (p. 157) is the freshest, most startling, and most authentic
detail the family biographies have to offer.
In contrast are Henry Austen’s two formal notices of his sister
from 1818 and 1833. ‘Short and easy will be the task of the mere
biographer’, an opening remark from his 1818 ‘Biographical
Notice’, strikes the reader rather differently now. Himself
recently refashioned as a clergyman of the Church of England,
Henry first suggested that Jane Austen’s religion be considered as
relevant–– a conventional gesture on his part, perhaps, but it has
had far-reaching critical consequences. Here and in his later piece
Henry gives the briefest details of a writer’s life, habits of composition,
and literary debts, and he sets the hagiographic tone for
his nephew. But it was thanks to Henry’s airy reference to the
deathbed verses, ‘replete with fancy and vigour’ (p. 138), that
his primmer Victorian relatives found themselves defending Aunt
Jane from the potential charge of unseemly frivolity. It is also in
Henry’s two accounts that the long-running myth begins of
effortless artistic originality, the morally irreproachable spinster
who, entirely unconsciously, produced exquisitely finished novels
(‘Every thing came finished from her pen . . .’ (p. 141) ). His
second account is the more considered–– he removes all mention
of those deathbed verses–– and it is less narrowly grounded in