A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
Cassandra, 25 November 1798 (Letters, 22). His account of JA is not the
earliest published notice, as Henry Austen’s pieces included here show; it
appears in his Autobiography (1834), ii. 41.
Mary Brydges: JA’s mother, the former Cassandra Leigh, shared with
Anne Brydges Lefroy a common ancestor in Mary Brydges, who married
Theophilus Leigh (c.1643–1725) as his second wife in November 1689,
making her JA’s great-grandmother. Mary Brydges was a daughter of
James Brydges, eighth Lord of Chandos and ambassador at Constantinople,
and Eliza Chandos, who wrote the ‘curious letter of advice and
reproof’ included here. With the injection of mercantile wealth from
Eliza’s family, in the next generation their son, Mary’s brother, was able
to live in great magnificence. He became the first Duke of Chandos and
was Handel’s patron. It was in compliment to the first Duke’s wife
Cassandra that this unusual name entered the Leigh family and was
continued by generations of Austens. Writing to her brother as he was
collecting materials for the Memoir Anna Lefroy drew his attention to
‘the original of Poll’s letters . . . in the possession of Mrs. George
Austen–– it was given to her at Portsdown’ (NPG, RWC/HH, fo. 2). The
letter must have been a cherished heirloom, handed down through the
Leigh and Austen families. Portsdown Lodge, near Portsmouth, became
the home of Frank Austen, and Mrs George Austen would be the wife of
Frank’s son George. JEAL’s inclusion of this letter to JA’s greatgrandmother
can only be explained as symptomatic of that social anxiety
which surfaces in the Memoir at various points and was itself a major
feature of JA’s novels. Writing of her fictional society, David Spring has
adopted Alan Everitt’s useful term ‘pseudo-gentry’ to describe the group
comprising trade, the professions, rentiers, and clergymen whose concerns
propel her novels. It is a group whose membership in reality can be
extended to the diversely positioned Austens themselves. The ‘pseudogentry’
are characteristically insecure–– in some cases upwardly mobile
and with growing incomes and social prestige, and in others in straitened
circumstances; but in either case aspiring to the lifestyle of the traditional
rural gentry. The Chandos letter not only serves to remind the reader
of JA’s distant aristocratic pretensions, but internally it registers the
periodic readjustment of relations between rank and trade. JA was not
without her own snobbish streak, while her brother Henry was downright
opportunistic. (See Agnes Leigh, ‘An Old Family History’,
National Review, 49 (1907), 277–86; D. J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the
Peerage’, PMLA, 68 (1953), 1017–31; and David Spring, ‘Interpreters of
Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians’, in Janet
Todd (ed.), Jane Austen: New Perspectives, (1983), 53–72, esp. 61–3.)
45 bring y r bread & cheese even’: live within your means.
out run the Constable: fall into debt.
a dead lift: an extremity, a hopeless situation.
know our beginning . . . who knows his end: cf. Psalm 39: 4.