A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
M r Cooper’s new Sermons:–– they are fuller of Regeneration & Conversion
than ever–– with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible
Society’ (Letters, 322). His sister Jane (1771–98) maintained throughout
her short life the intimacy with JA and Cassandra established in their
schooldays. She is mentioned as joining in the Austen family theatricals
at Christmas 1788–9 (Austen Papers, 138, in a letter of Eliza de Feuillide),
when she may have spoken the ‘epilogue’ to The Sultan, written by James
Austen for ‘Miss C . . . in the character of Roxalana’ (HRO, MS 23M93/
60/3/2), and she is the dedicatee of JA’s spoof sentimental novel ‘Henry
and Eliza’ in the collection of juvenile writings known as Volume the First
(see note to p. 39). After the death of her father in August 1792, she was
married from her aunt and uncle’s at Steventon a few months later, in
December. For her own early death in a carriage accident, see Fam. Rec.,
98. The conjecture that JA may have acquired an early acquaintance with
Bath on visits there to the Coopers is probably derived from Anna
Lefroy’s memory that ‘Cassandra in her childhood was a good deal with
D r . & M rs . Cooper at Bath’ (see p. 160 in this collection). Cassandra and
Jane Cooper were of course nearer in age to each other and more likely
companions in childhood. Following Mrs Cooper’s death, the family left
Bath in 1784, at which time JA was 8 and hardly likely to be storing
topographical impressions for a future novel. Her first recorded visit
there is in November 1797, to the Leigh Perrots, though earlier visits
may well have occurred (Fam. Rec., 95). JA did not live permanently in
Bath until her father retired there in 1801.
27 Count de Feuillade: Jean-François Capot de Feuillide (not Feuillade) was
a captain in the French army and probably not a count. He married JA’s
cousin Eliza Hancock in 1781; their son, Hastings, was born in 1786 and,
sickly for most of his short life, died in 1801. The ‘Comte’ was guillotined
in February 1794, having attempted to bribe an official to favour the
Marquise de Marboeuf, then on trial. It was the Marquise who was
accused of trying to produce famine by laying down arable land to pasture.
According to family tradition, Eliza was with her husband in France
until his arrest, barely escaping with her life. Henry Austen married his
cousin Eliza de Feuillide on 31 December 1797. JEAL’s Memoir appears
to be the only record for the family tradition that Henry and Eliza subsequently
visited France during the Peace of Amiens (1802–3), hoping to
recover her French property, and that they fled in what sounds like a
frightening repetition of past events. Eliza, lively, fashionable, and
irreverent, was one of JA’s most colourful connections and a significant
influence on her teenage years; the spoof epistolary novel ‘Love and
Freindship’, dated at the end as finished on ‘June 13th 1790’, is dedicated
‘To Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide’. Eliza died in 1813 (Fam. Rec.,
34–7, 72–3, 123).
28 prologues and epilogues . . . vigorous and amusing: the volume of James
Austen’s occasional writings, copied out by JEAL (HRO, MS 23M93/