A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
enough to understand it, the flow of native homebred wit, with all the fun
& nonsense of a clever family who had but little intercourse with the
outer world’ (Lefroy MS, quoted in Fam. Rec., 69).
There must have been more dancing: this marks the beginning of a long
section, added to Ed.2, explaining late eighteenth-century manners and
customs. The inserted passage ends six pages later at: ‘nor can I pretend
to tell how much of what I have said is descriptive of the family life at
Steventon in Jane Austen’s youth.’ In his ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818,
Henry Austen writes of his sister: ‘She was fond of dancing, and excelled
in it.’
To gallop . . . caught no cold: the lines are probably by Walter Scott. They
occur in slightly different form in his novel The Antiquary (1816), ch. 11:
‘When courtiers gallop’d o’er four counties | The ball’s fair partner to
behold, | And humbly hope she caught no cold.’
33 Sir Charles and Lady Grandison . . . at their own wedding: a reference to
Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), vol.
vi, letter 53.
lappet: a kind of flap.
Gloves immaculately clean . . . performance: in Fanny Burney’s novel
Camilla, book 2, ch. 2, the vulgar Mr Dubster is prevented from dancing
with Camilla, much to her relief, because he has lost one of his gloves.
The name of ‘Miss J. Austen, Steventon’ is printed in the list of
subscribers to Camilla; and JA refers to the novel in an early letter to
Cassandra (Letters, 6).
Hornpipes, cotillons, and reels: all lively country dances. Where hornpipes
would be of English origin and reels Scottish or Irish, the cotillon would
have been a modified version of a French peasant dance, its name deriving
from the French word for ‘petticoat’. See Letters, 330, where JA
writes to her niece Fanny Knight: ‘Much obliged for the Quadrilles,
which I am grown to think pretty enough, though of course they are very
inferior to the Cotillons of my own day.’
34 the concoction of home-made wines: JA writes in her letters of ‘brewing
Spruce Beer again’ (a drink made from sugar and the green tops of the
Spruce, a variety of fir-tree); and she asks her friend Alethea Bigg for the
recipe for ‘orange Wine’ (Letters, 156 and 328). Extracts from the letter to
Alethea Bigg (no. 150) are included by JEAL in ch. 11 of the Memoir.
a little girl . . . leaving her chamber: middle-class children’s books of the
1780s and 1790s regularly taught the value of practical self-sufficiency, of
self-denial, and the rejection of excessive idleness and luxury. JEAL is
probably remembering R. L. and Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons
(1801), where Lucy must make her bed before she is allowed breakfast.
Music: according to Caroline Austen’s memories: ‘Aunt Jane began her
day with music–– for which I conclude she had a natural taste; as she thus
kept it up–– tho’ she had no one to teach; was never induced (as I have