A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 207
decisively influential on the selective preservation of JA’s writings after
her death and on the shape and content of the oral record as it passed
down to nieces and nephews. For more consideration of Cassandra’s
legacy, see the Introduction (pp. xxviii–xxxi). In this paragraph JEAL’s
major source of supplementary information is his half-sister Anna,
whose long letter of December 1864 recording her ‘recollections of Aunt
Jane’ is included in this collection (as RAJ). In this letter is to be found
the story, told to her by her grandmother, of Jane wishing to share Cassandra’s
fate even if it meant having her head cut off. It is Anna’s daughter
Fanny Caroline Lefroy who records in old age and from her mother’s
recounting that Jane and Cassandra ‘were everything to each other. They
seemed to lead a life to themselves, within the general family life, which
was shared only by each other’ (Fanny C. Lefroy, ‘Family History’, HRO,
MS 23M93/85/2, written c.1880–5, unpaginated).
Mrs. Latournelle . . . at Reading: behind the impressive name of Mrs, or
Madame, La Tournelle, she was plain Sarah Hackitt (Hackett), though
still something of a colourful character, with almost Dickensian touches
to her appearance: when JA encountered her she was a woman in her
sixties with a cork leg (Gentleman’s Magazine for 1797, p. 983; and F. J.
Harvey Darton (ed.), The Life and Times of Mrs Sherwood, 1775–1851
(1910), 123–34). Cassandra and JA attended Mrs La Tournelle’s Ladies
Boarding School in the Abbey House, Reading, a private school for the
daughters of the clergy and minor gentry, in 1785–6; they had previously
been sent away together to be boarded by Mrs Ann Cawley, a family
connection, in Oxford and Southampton in 1783, when JA was only
7. JEAL does not record this. (See T. A. B. Corley, ‘Jane Austen’s
Schooldays’, Jane Austen Society Report (1996), 10–20.)
20 the Miss Steeles . . . Madame D’Arblay: the vulgar Miss Steeles, Anne
(Nancy) and Lucy, are to be found in S&S, where they are thus summed
up on their earliest appearance: ‘This specimen of the Miss Steeles was
enough. The vulgar freedom and folly of the eldest left her no recommendation,
and as Elinor was not blinded by the beauty, or the shrewd
look of the youngest, to her want of real elegance and artlessness, she left
the house without any wish of knowing them better’ (ch. 21). Mrs Elton
is to be found in E, and John Thorpe in NA. Madame D’Arblay is more
commonly referred to by her unmarried name of Fanny or Frances Burney
(1752–1840). One of her contemporary novelists most admired by
JA, Burney has from the first provided a point of critical comparison, as,
for example, in Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818. The illbred
Brangtons are to be found in Burney’s first novel Evelina (1778); Mr
Dubster and Tom Hicks appear in Camilla (1796). Critics now regard
such characters as among the liveliest aspects of Burney’s social scene.
21 It may be known . . . Vine Hunt: a sentence JEAL added in Ed.2. Himself
a keen huntsman, it was, according to his daughter’s later account, his
writing for private circulation his Recollections of the Early Days of