A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
describes her writing it is her penmanship and the look of the
page that concerns him, as it concerns her brother Henry (‘Every
thing came finished from her pen’) and niece Caroline, who
records somewhat curiously that ‘Her handwriting remains to
bear testimony to its own excellence’ (p. 171). But the unpublished
manuscripts speak a different story–– of long apprenticeship,
experiment and abandonment, rewriting and cancellation,
and even of a restless and sardonic spirit. They provide unassailable
evidence to upset some of Austen-Leigh’s chief statements
about Jane Austen the author; considered by the light
of these irreverent works her steady moral sense looks more
ambiguous, her photographic naturalism (‘These writings are
like photographs . . . all is the unadorned reflection of the natural
object’ (p. 116) ) less trustworthy. The unpublished writings
challenge Austen-Leigh’s image of the writer who is first and
foremost ‘dear Aunt Jane’, whose novels are the effortless
extensions of a wholesome and blameless life lived in simple
surroundings:
[Steventon] was the cradle of her genius. These were the first objects
which inspired her young heart with a sense of the beauties of nature.
In strolls along those wood-walks, thick-coming fancies rose in her
mind, and gradually assumed the forms in which they came forth to
the world. In that simple church she brought them all into subjection
to the piety which ruled her in life, and supported her in death.
(pp. 24–6)
On the contrary, the manuscript pieces, both early and late, show
a rawer, edgier, social talent (of the major Romantic-period
writers she is the least ‘natural’), and reveal that the artlessness of
the finished works is the result of laboured revision, of painful
inner struggle, rather than unconscious perfection. Bound
together, they irresistibly implied a new Austen novel; once read,
they even suggested a new Jane Austen. Chapman reminds us
that, ‘by inadvertence or cunning’, the publisher Richard Bentley
had the spine of the second edition of the Memoir printed to read
Lady Susan &c; and this is how it was subsequently issued in the
six-volume Steventon set of Jane Austen’s Novels (1882), where