A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
108 ‘as tiresome in fiction as in real society’: the three preceding references are
to Walter Scott’s anonymous review, in the Quarterly Review, 14 (Oct.
1815), 188–201, at pp. 194, and 200. Of Elizabeth Bennet’s change of
heart, he wrote: ‘The lady . . . does not perceive that she has done a
foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and
grounds belonging to her admirer.’
Wilkie’s pictures: the Scottish painter, Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841),
noted like the Dutch painters of the Delft School for the high degree of
realism in his domestic representations.
109 ‘. . . full maturity and flavour without them’: closing a long quotation from
Whately’s review, Quarterly Review, 24 (Jan. 1821), 352–76, at pp. 362–3.
110 Southey . . . to Sir Egerton Brydges: Robert Southey (1774–1843), poet
and biographer, whose early revolutionary sympathies soon gave way to
political and social conservatism. He was made Poet Laureate in 1813. In
view of the comparison JEAL has already set up between JA and Charlotte
Brontë, Southey’s opinion of Austen’s novels might be compared
with the well-known advice he gave Brontë when she applied to him
about publishing her writings: ‘Literature cannot be the business of a
woman’s life, and it ought not to be’ (included in Gaskell’s Life, ch. 8).
Southey records his views on JA in a letter of 8 April 1830, in Brydges,
Autobiography (1834), ii. 269. For Brydges and his connection with the
Austen family, see note to p. 44 above.
A friend of hers . . . Rev. Herbert Hill: JA’s friend Catherine Bigg (see note
to p. 54) had married Herbert Hill (1749–1828) in October 1808. Hill was
Chaplain to the British factory or trading settlement in Oporto (not
Lisbon), Portugal, between 1774 and 1801. Southey visited his uncle Hill
there in 1775. Some of JA’s later letters mention visits to Catherine at
Streatham, where Hill became rector in 1810 (e.g. Letters, 274).
S. T. Coleridge: the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
His opinion of JA’s novels, to be found in Specimens of the Table Talk of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (2nd edn., 1836)
(in Collected Works, 14 (2), ed. Carl Woodring (1990), 80 n.), is all the
more remarkable in view of his open contempt for the modern female
novelist. In Lecture 11 of his 1818 Lectures on European Literature he
notes that ‘Women are good novelists . . . because they rarely or never
thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. In the jumble of the two
lies the secret of the modern novel . . . ’ (Collected Works, 5 (2), ed. R. A.
Foakes (1987), 193).
Miss Mitford: see note to p. 13 above.
Sir J. Mackintosh: Sir James Mackintosh (1760/5–1832), political and
moral philosopher and historian, author of Vindiciae Gallicae (1791),
History of England (1830), and Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1830).
111 Madame de Staël: (1766–1817), born in Paris Anne Louise Germaine
Necker, the daughter of a Swiss banker Jacques Necker, Louis XIV’s