A Memoir of Jane Austen - Composition

Composition

In the late 1860s, the Austen family decided to write a biography of Jane Austen. The death of Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving sibling, and the aging of those who had any memory of her prompted the family to gather their papers and to begin recording their memories. Public interest in Jane Austen was also developing and the family became concerned that an outsider or another branch of the family would produce a biography. James Edward Austen-Leigh, as the son of the eldest branch, "in a spirit of censorship as well as communication", thus began the project. With the help and support of his sisters and Jane Austen's nieces, he collected materials. The biography was largely the work of James Edward Austen-Leigh, his half-sister Jane Anna Elizabeth Austen Lefroy and, his younger sister Caroline Mary Craven Austen, and their cousin Cassy Esten. As Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland points out in her "Introduction" to the Oxford edition of the Memoir, however, Austen-Leigh’s biography is specific to the Steventon or Hampshire Austens, for whom Jane Austen is "nature-loving, religious, domestic, middle class". The Godmersham or Kentish Austens viewed Jane Austen as more "inward and passionate...gentrified, improved willy-nilly by contact with her fine relations". Moreover, as Caroline wrote, "the generation who knew her is passing away". Much of the biography is based on the memories of those who had only known Jane Austen when they were children and she was their older aunt; the rest is based on written records passed down through the family.

As Sutherland explains, "the major ingredients of the Memoir, as well as its reverent colouring, are owed, in one way or another, to Cassandra Austen." Cassandra was the executor of Jane’s will and was responsible for the preservation and destruction of all remaining letters and manuscripts after Jane’s death. According to Caroline Austen, one of Jane Austen's nieces, Cassandra "looked over and burnt the greater part, (as she told me), 2 or 3 years before her own death—She left, or gave some as legacies to the Nieces—but of those that I have seen, several had portions cut out". Thus, while writing the Memoir, Austen-Leigh did not have access to large numbers of Jane Austen's letters. Furthermore, the rest had been scattered as bequests; a complete collection of Jane Austen's letters was only gathered in 1932.

There may have been disagreements between the descendants regarding how much information to keep private, particularly with regards to Jane Austen's romances. For example, the first edition of the Memoir states "I have no reason to think that she ever felt any attachment by which the happiness of her life was at all affected". This sentence was removed from the second edition and two romantic attachments are hinted at, with the conclusion "I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness". This kind of reticence was not isolated to the Austen family, however—it was typical of mid-Victorian era biography.