A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
sequence of events. Commenting on the paucity of textual clues
to Jane Austen’s response to the emotional crises of 1796–8,
David Nokes despairingly asks: ‘Why do we have no letters from
this period? It can hardly be because Jane Austen did not write
any . . . It can only be that Cassandra . . . chose to destroy them
. . . she preferred to obliterate the memory of a period of such
distress.’ A favoured strategy among recent biographers has been
to reconstitute empathetically such ‘destroyed’ textual traces.
Accordingly, Nokes tells us that ‘Cassandra received the news [of
Tom Fowle’s death] with a kind of numbness. Outwardly, she was
strangely calm . . . Upon Jane the influence of this change in her
sister’s disposition was no less profound for being, at first at least,
unacknowledged and unperceived.’ 19 It is the biographer’s duty,
in the interests of recording the complete life, to recover not only
what must have existed and been destroyed but what only appears
to be ‘unacknowledged and unperceived’. Biography’s texts are
thus almost endlessly recessive.
Partiality and Evasion, or Secrets and Lies
xxxi
The family members whose labours around 1870 chiefly constructed
the public record of Jane Austen–– James Edward, his
two sisters, and their cousin Cassy Esten–– were alive equally to
the fortuitous and the ethical dimensions of their task. The failings
of memory and the shadow of old age as it falls across a later
generation ensure that the Memoir opens on a note of elegy which
contends perilously with annihilation: ‘the youngest of the
mourners’ at the funeral, now in old age, will attempt ‘to rescue
from oblivion’, ‘aided by a few survivors’, a life ‘singularly barren’
(pp. 9–10). Old age recovers childhood impressions of a life,
itself empty of event, cut short in its middle years–– the reader
should not be deaf to the effects of an irony which runs throughout
the Memoir. Accidents of survival, both personal and documentary,
constitute what is known, while a more purposive
dimension distinguishes what is known from what can be told.
19
David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 169–71.