A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 231
conventionally approved account of the past (as the gradual, Whiggish
progress towards liberty and the defeat of Stuart absolutism) by setting
up history as a pro-Stuart tragedy. Its climax and conclusion is the execution
of Charles I in 1649, and its heroine is his grandmother Mary, Queen
of Scots, ‘one of the first Characters in the World’, also executed, in
1587. (See ‘The History of England’, in Catharine and Other Writings, ed.
Doody and Murray, 136; and Christopher Kent, ‘Learning History with,
and from, Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen’s Beginnings, 59–72.) JA’s contrasted
presentation of Mary and Elizabeth I, the one vulnerable, beautiful,
and innocent, the other unattractive and severe, resembles that in
Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or A Tale of Other Times (1783–5). JEAL is
unnecessarily po-faced in accounting for his aunt’s hilarious exercise in
political uncorrectness. In MAJA, his sister Caroline presents the same
detail with less qualification.
the ‘Spectator’ downwards: see note to p. 16 above. In MP, ch. 16, Samuel
Johnson’s periodical papers, under the general title of The Idler (1758–
60), are described as among the heroine Fanny Price’s precious collection
of books.
Richardson’s works . . . living friends: Henry Austen in his ‘Biographical
Notice’ (1818) recorded that his sister’s ‘favourite moral writers were
Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse’, while Richardson, and particularly
his last novel Sir Charles Grandison, ranked highest with her for
fiction. JA’s juvenilia are peppered with references to Richardson’s
novels; in ‘Jack and Alice’, in Volume the First, Grandison’s models of
male and female perfection offer a precise point of departure for the
parody. In 1977 a manuscript play ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, previously
attributed to Anna Lefroy, though transcribed in JA’s hand, was reassigned
to JA. See Jane Austen’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, ed. Brian
Southam (1980). In Grandison, members of the aristocracy (Lady L.,
Lady G.) are referred to by initials only, a convention of the novel-inletters
designed to suggest the authenticity of what was recorded and the
consequent need to hide ‘real’ identities. Lady L. and Lady G. are Sir
Charles’s two sisters; the younger, Charlotte, marries Lord G. on April
11 (vol. 4, letter 16), while Caroline, the elder sister, is married to the Earl
of L., an event narrated retrospectively at vol. 2, letter 25. The cedar
parlour is at Selby House, one of the idealized domestic settings of the
novel.
Johnson in prose . . . stood high: JEAL echoes his uncle Henry Austen’s
account (see previous note). Samuel Johnson is referred to as ‘my dear D r
Johnson’ in Letters, 121, while Fanny Price reads The Idler (see note
above). George Crabbe’s metrical Tales (1812) are among Fanny Price’s
reading (MP, ch. 16), and her name may be taken from Crabbe’s earlier
poem The Parish Register (1807), a moralistic study of various levels of
village life, in which Fanny Price is a ‘lovely’ and ‘chaste’ young girl.
William Cowper (see notes to pp. 37 and 69) is much quoted in JA’s