A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
exception in the printing in 1895 of Charades . . . by Jane Austen
and her Family.
But in the 1920s Chapman was busy distinguishing life from
works and extending the Jane Austen canon beyond the six major
novels on which her reputation so far rested. He had published or
was planning separate and handsomely produced editions of the
non-canonical writings that Austen-Leigh had chosen, after family
consultation, to stretch out his biography, and it did not seem
impossible that more manuscripts might come to light, especially
as materials in family ownership were now beginning to appear in
the auction rooms. Chapman was particularly concerned at this
time with tracing Volume the First and the whereabouts of surviving
Jane Austen letters. This explains his slant on the Memoir in
his brief introduction: its importance to him is as a frame on
which to hang the extant literary remains and as a guide to the
reconstruction of writings which may or may not still exist. Even
now this aspect of Austen-Leigh’s work cannot be disregarded;
in some cases the Memoir provides the only documentary
authority–– for certain letters and for the mock panegyric to Anna
Austen (‘In measured verse I’ll now rehearse’). 2 But more subtly
at work on Chapman’s own Austenian ambitions in 1926 was the
influence of later generations of the family as biographers and
keepers of the archive. In 1913 James Edward’s grandson Richard
Arthur Austen-Leigh had published with his uncle William
Austen-Leigh an expanded biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and
Letters. A Family Record, enlarging the 1871 account with
materials drawn from other branches of the family. Substantially
updated and largely rewritten by Deirdre Le Faye in 1989, A
Family Record remains the ‘authorized’ reference or ‘factual’
biography. The absence of biographical notice or speculation
from Chapman’s introduction and appended notes to his edition
of the earlier Austen-Leigh memoir not only registers a reticence
to engage critically with what in 1926 was still family business, it
was also the prudent act of a scholar and publisher eager to claim
2 e.g. those letters printed as nos. 111, 118, and 131, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed.
Deirdre Le Faye (3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the verses to
Anna Austen, see p. 75 of the Memoir and note.