A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
the literary remains in family hands for his own shaping. Chapman
was Secretary to the Delegates at Oxford University Press,
which had as recently as 1923 issued under its Clarendon imprint
his pioneering edition of the six novels–– not only the first accurate
text of Jane Austen’s novels, after the careless reprint history
of the nineteenth century, but the first major textual investigation
of the English novel as a genre.
Since 1926 there has been no serious editorial engagement
with the Memoir and little critical attention paid to it. 3 Yet James
Austen-Leigh here assembled a major work of Austenian biography
which stands unchallenged as the ‘prime source of all
subsequent biographical writings’. 4 This is even clearer when, as
in Chapman’s edition and in the edition printed here, the Memoir
is cut free from the manuscript writings which in 1871
threatened to overshadow it. What is left is an account of a life
shaped and limited by the recollections, affections, and prejudices
of a very few family members who knew her. But it is
worth dwelling on those drafts a little longer because, by attaching
Lady Susan and The Watsons to the Memoir text of 1871,
James Austen-Leigh, by this time an elderly and respectable
Victorian clergyman, may be said to have undermined his overt
purpose. ‘St. Aunt Jane of Steventon-cum-Chawton Canonicorum’,
as Austen-Leigh’s hagiographic portrait has been wittily
dubbed, is a comfortable figure, shunning fame and professional
status, centred in home, writing only in the intervals permitted
from the more important domestic duties of a devoted daughter,
sister, and aunt. ‘Her life’, her nephew summarized, ‘had been
passed in the performance of home duties, and the cultivation of
domestic affections, without any self-seeking or craving after
applause’ (p. 130). To such a meek spirit, writing was of no more
value than needlework, at which she equally excelled: ‘the same
hand which painted so exquisitely with the pen could work as
delicately with the needle’ (p. 79). Indeed, when Austen-Leigh
xv
3
An exception must be made for D. W. Harding’s edition, issued as an appendix to
Persuasion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965).
4
As stated by David Gilson in his introduction to the facsimile reprint of the 1870,
first edition of the Memoir (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. xiii.