A Memoir of Jane Austen

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The text printed here of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir
of Jane Austen is that of the second edition of 1871, but with
significant omissions. Issuing it less than a year after the first
edition, Austen-Leigh expanded the second edition in several
ways, incorporating in the main body of his text further correspondence,
family papers, and biographical recollections, much
of it material which had only lately come to light. He also printed
for the first time, and as a sequence of appendices to the biography,
important fragments of unfinished or early drafts of his
aunt Jane Austen’s works. Those expansions which form part of
the body of the text of the second edition (described in the preface
as a ‘narrative . . . somewhat enlarged’, ‘a few more letters’,
and ‘a short specimen of her childish stories’) are retained here.
But the appended Chapter 12, consisting of the cancelled chapter
of Persuasion, and Chapter 13, extracts from and a synopsis of
Sanditon, still under the title of ‘The Last Work’, are omitted;
omitted, too, are Lady Susan and The Watsons, both also published
for the first time in 1871 as an appendix to the Memoir. In
addition, I have restored some elements which were present in
the first edition of 1870 but removed from the second edition:
namely, the second postscript, dated 17 November 1869, defending
Jane Austen from the attack in Mary Russell Mitford’s newly
published Life, and the set of five illustrations––a portrait of Jane
Austen, a facsimile of her handwriting, and family drawings of
Steventon Parsonage, Steventon Manor House, and Chawton
Church––an important feature of the first and of subsequent
editions, but unaccountably left out of the second. The effect of
these cuts and expansions is to deepen the work as memoir and
family record, an impression which the publisher’s calculated
marketing of the second edition did something to obscure. As
Austen-Leigh remarked of the new edition to his American correspondent
Susan Quincy: ‘It will be smaller & less expensive
than the former edition, being made to range with, & to form an