A Memoir of Jane Austen

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INTRODUCTION
The Business of Biography
When in 1926 Robert Chapman published his edition of James
Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography of his aunt Jane Austen the
Times Literary Supplement chiefly welcomed its reissue not for
the life it recorded but for the manuscripts described in it.
Under the heading ‘Manuscripts of Jane Austen’, it concentrated
on that feature of the Memoir which ‘makes it necessary
to the complete Austenian . . . the particular account, in Mr
Chapman’s introduction, of the manuscripts of Jane Austen’s
letters and of her other writings’. The reviewer continued:
‘Here we may find . . . the last word about Jane Austen manuscripts,
which not only is a thing to welcome for its own sake
but may help to bring to light other manuscripts which are
known to exist, or to have existed, but have been lost to sight’. 1
In 1926 the manuscript notebook of juvenilia, Volume the First,
was known outside Austen family circles only by the two scenes
of the spoof play ‘The Mystery’, printed by Austen-Leigh in
1871 and perhaps written as early as 1788 (when Jane Austen
was 12 or 13). After 1871 and Austen-Leigh’s second edition of
the Memoir, enlarged with early or unfinished manuscript drafts
of several ‘new’ Jane Austen works (the cancelled chapter of
Persuasion, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and a synopsis of Sanditon),
there was no further printing of such material until the
1920s; readers had to wait until 1951 for the first publication of
Volume the Third, the last of the juvenile manuscript books.
There was an important exception to this silence, in the edition
in 1884 of Jane Austen’s Letters by her great-nephew Lord Brabourne,
which brought to public light eighty-four autograph
letters in the possession of Lord Brabourne’s mother, Jane
Austen’s niece, Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull), and a minor
1
Times Literary Supplement, 17 Mar. 1927, p. 177.