A Memoir of Jane Austen

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OXFORD WORLD’ S CLASSICS
A MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN
AND OTHER FAMILY RECOLLECTIONS
JAMES EDWARD AUSTEN-LEIGH (1798–1874), the only son of Jane
Austen’s eldest brother James and his second wife Mary Lloyd, was born
at Deane parsonage, Hampshire, and moved the short distance to Steventon
rectory in 1801, aged 2, when his father became rector there on his
grandfather’s retirement to Bath. Thus he spent his childhood and youth
in the same house in which Jane Austen had spent hers. After school at
Winchester he went to Exeter College, Oxford, was ordained in 1823,
and, like his father and grandfather, became a country clergyman. As a
schoolboy he wrote verses and even began a novel, which Jane Austen
encouraged. He represented his father at her funeral in 1817. Upon his
great-aunt Jane Leigh Perrot’s death in 1836 he inherited the estate of
Scarlets, taking the name of ‘Leigh’ in addition to Austen. In 1852 he
became vicar of Bray, near Maidenhead, where he lived until his death. A
keen huntsman, it was his late success as a published writer with Recollections
of the Vine Hunt (1865) which encouraged him to begin the Memoir
in the Spring of 1869, in which he drew upon the memoirs of his sisters
Anna Lefroy and Caroline Austen, and of his uncle Henry Austen.
KATHRYN SUTHERLAND is Professorial Fellow in English at St Anne’s
College, Oxford. She has published widely on fictional and non-fictional
writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Her editions
include Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (for Penguin Classics). She is
currently completing a critical study of Austen under the title Jane
Austen’s Textual Lives.