A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
the Vine Hunt (1865) which encouraged him to undertake the more
ambitious task of a memoir of his aunt Jane (Mary Augusta Austen-
Leigh, James Edward Austen-Leigh [ JEAL], A Memoir (1911), 261).
21 One who knew and loved it well . . . Of Nature’s sketch book: JEAL’s father,
James Austen, rector of Steventon from 1805 until his death in 1819. The
verses are from ‘Lines written in the Autumn of 1817 after a recovery
from sickness’, a 455-line poem to be found in an unpaginated leatherbound
volume of James Austen’s occasional writings, copied out by
JEAL, probably in the mid-1830s (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/2). In the
version in this volume, line 2 of the quoted lines reads, ‘Although they
may not come within the rule’. Working from another manuscript collection
of James Austen’s verses (HRO, MS 23M93/60/3/1), but missing
the Autumn 1817 poem, R. W. Chapman offered an ingenious but incorrect
attribution of these lines (Memoir (1926), 215–16).
23 but the rooms . . . or whitewash: one of several expansions of the text
between Ed.1 and Ed.2, by which JEAL deepens the impression of a
bygone world to which JA now belongs. Since JEAL’s father James
Austen moved into Steventon rectory with his young family in 1801, on
his own father’s retirement to Bath, this also became JEAL’s childhood
home, and in what follows he is drawing as much on his own early
memories as establishing what JA’s might have been.
Catharine Morland’s ... ‘ . . . back of the house’: in NA, ch. 1. In printed
editions of the novel, the name is spelt Catherine. In a letter to Anna
Lefroy, dated 8 July 1869, JEAL describes the disappointment of his
recent visit to Steventon, a research trip to collect information and soak
up the atmosphere: ‘All traces of former things are even more obliterated
than I had expected. Even the terrace has been levelled, & its site is to be
distinguished only by the finer turf on that place’ (HRO, MS 23M93/
84/1). The old rectory had been demolished in 1824 and replaced by a
more elegant new rectory on the opposite hill. Anna’s sketch facing this
passage in Chapter 2, is drawn from a rather hazy memory of how things
were.
24 a family named Digweed: the Digweeds had been tenants of the Steventon
manor house and estate since at least the early eighteenth century, renting
it from the Knights of Godmersham. In JA’s time the manor house was
inhabited by Hugh Digweed, his wife Ruth, and their four surviving
sons–– John, Harry, James, and William–– who were much of an age with
the Austen children (Fam. Rec., 14, 46). On Mr Knight’s death in 1794,
his heir JA’s brother Edward (Knight from 1812) inherited the Steventon
estate.
The church . . . above the woody lane: the church of St Nicholas, stonebuilt
and dating from the thirteenth century (Emma Austen-Leigh, Jane
Austen and Steventon (1937), 6). In 1869 the ‘present rector’ was JEAL’s
cousin the Revd William Knight, with whom he spent a night while
collecting materials for the Memoir (Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, JEAL,