A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
and Henry Austen’s marriage to glamorous cousin Eliza, Mrs
Lefroy’s attempt at matchmaking during the visit of the Revd
Samuel Blackall to Ashe, the writing of ‘First Impressions’ (the
early version of what would become Pride and Prejudice), and its
rejection by the London publisher Thomas Cadell; in the later
years, between 1801 and 1804, almost all the romantic interest in
Jane Austen’s life of which we have any hints at all. We simply do
not know the extent of Cassandra’s careful work of destruction
and whether it is this that accounts for the unyielding nature of
the evidence–– in particular, the difficulty we have in recovering
anything more satisfactory than a partial and unconfiding life of
Jane Austen. Lord Brabourne’s description of the letters he edits
as the ‘confidential outpourings’ of one soul to another is, from
the evidence, wildly inaccurate, but perfectly explicable in terms
of family rivalry–– his claims to marketing another Jane Austen.
Equally, Caroline’s account of Cassandra’s pruning of the correspondence
may suggest secrets hidden and confidences suppressed,
but it is just as likely that what remains is not atypical
within a larger, censored record but fully representative of it.
Cassandra may have chosen to preserve and apportion with such
care these letters and not others chiefly because their addressees
and internal details were of particular value to one branch of the
family or another. It might be that there never was a confiding
correspondence to hold back; on the other hand, there might have
been.
Biography is suspicious of gaps and silences; the form has
tended to assume a correlation between biology and chronology,
to the extent that any break in this ‘natural fit’ supposes the
suppression of information. This is all the more so when documentation
is not available for periods of obvious psychological
interest–– love affairs and deaths–– when events appear, inexplicably
to hindsight, not to have been recognized as ‘eventful’ and
therefore simultaneously translated into narrative form. Literary
biography in particular is bound to the twinned assumptions that
a life can be written and that its writing is pre-given, part of the
natural fit, according to which its texts must already exist and be
recoverable as the chronology of thought and feeling attending a