A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 219
family decision against publishing Lady Susan was revoked is not clear,
though a reasonable guess would be that JEAL was attempting to forestall
a rival publishing plan from within the family. But in the light of this
change of heart, the paragraph (largely unaltered since Ed.1), and especially
this sentence, reads oddly and should have been emended.
‘He was makin’ himsell . . . and the fun’: Robert Shortreed accompanied
Scott on his early ballad-collecting expeditions into the Scottish Borders.
These ballads, Shortreed suggests, became the groundwork for much of
Scott’s later writing. The quotation is taken from Lockhart’s, Life of
Scott (1839), i. 266.
44 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ ... first composed in 1798: JEAL’s dating and other
information about the early drafts of P&P, S&S, and NA accords with
Cassandra Austen’s brief memorandum of composition, which may have
been drawn up soon after JA’s death, perhaps for Henry when he was
preparing his ‘Biographical Notice’ towards the end of 1817, though if
that is so, he seems not to have used it. It does, however, appear to have
been consulted by JEAL. There is only one slight discrepancy: Cassandra
records ‘North-hanger Abby [sic] was written about the years 98 &
99’. An illustration of the manuscript of Cassandra’s notes (now in the
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) is included in Minor Works, plate
facing p. 242.
Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy and their family: the Revd I. P. George Lefroy was
rector of Ashe from 1783. He had married Anne Brydges (1748/9–1804)
in 1778, and it is she, not her husband, who is the important figure in JA’s
life. ‘Madam Lefroy’, as she was known locally, became the great friend
and intellectual inspiration of the young JA, is mentioned often in her
early letters, is named in the spoof ‘History of England’ (Volume the
Second), as one of the advocates for Mary Queen of Scots, and played a
part in ending the early flirtation with her nephew Tom Lefroy (see note
to p. 48 below). She was a distant cousin of JA’s mother through their
common Brydges ancestry, and by her brother’s account ‘had an exquisite
taste for poetry . . . and she composed easy verses herself with great
facility’ (Egerton Brydges, The Autobiography, Times, Opinions, and Contemporaries
of Sir Egerton Brydges (2 vols., 1834), i. 5). These verses were
published as Carmina Domestica, ed. C. E. Lefroy (1812). Later in this
chapter JEAL includes JA’s poem ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’,
written in 1808 on the fourth anniversary of her sudden death in a riding
accident. The Austens and Lefroys were subsequently linked by marriage
when James Austen’s elder daughter Anna (JEAL’s half-sister)
married in 1814 Anne Lefroy’s youngest son Benjamin.
Sir Egerton Brydges . . . ‘ . . . cheeks a little too full’: Samuel Egerton
Brydges (1762–1837), the younger brother of Mrs Anne Lefroy (see note
above), was an antiquarian bibliographer and genealogist with an
excruciatingly pretentious and florid prose style. JA describes his novel
Arthur Fitz-Albini (1798) in uncomplimentary terms in a letter to
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