A Memoir of Jane Austen

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
256
Explanatory Notes
to the verses, described by Caroline Austen, as late as 1871, as an unlucky
allusion, was removed from his ‘Memoir’ of 1833, perhaps under family
pressure. See Caroline’s letter appended to this edition at pp. 190–1; and
Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen’s Verses and Lord Stanhope’s Disappointment’,
Book Collector, 37 (1988), 86–91. The verses were first
printed in Sailor Brothers, 272–3. R. W. Chapman includes them in
Minor Works, 450–2, from a manuscript version possibly in James
Austen’s hand but under his own title ‘Venta’ (the Roman name for
Winchester). Doody and Murray offer a version of the text, from a
second manuscript (they speculate it is Cassandra’s hand, from JA’s dictation,
now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library), in
Catharine and Other Writings, 246.
‘a kind sister to me, Mary’: these and JA’s last words are recorded in
Caroline’s account, presumably from Mary Lloyd Austen’s witnessing of
the final moments (MAJA, 182). They are the more poignant for the
reservations JA felt towards James’s second wife, partly on account of her
ungenerous treatment of Anna, James’s daughter by his first wife. As
recently as 22 May, JA had noted in her letter to her old friend Anne
Sharp, former governess at Godmersham, that Mary ‘is in the main not a
liberal-minded Woman’ (Letters, 340–1). Mary had been nursing JA for
perhaps a month or more, as James’s June letter to JEAL at Oxford
makes clear (Life & Letters, 392–3). JEAL’s restrained account of the
deathbed, at which he was not present, can also be supplemented by
Cassandra’s stoical and tender letter, written only two days after, on 20
July 1817, to her niece Fanny Knight (Letters, 343–6). JEAL was presumably
ignorant of this letter’s existence.
132 had actually destroyed . . . facilitated: cf. Caroline Austen to JEAL, 1 April
[1869?], writing to encourage him in compiling the Memoir: ‘I am very
glad dear Edward that you have applied your-self to the settlement of this
vexed question between the Austens and the Public. I am sure you will do
justice to what there is–– but I feel it must be a difficult task to dig up the
materials, so carefully have they been buried out of sight by the past
generation’ (see the Appendix, pp. 186–7).
the happiest individuals . . . have no history: cf. ‘for the happiest women,
like the happiest nations, have no history’, George Eliot, The Mill on the
Floss (1860), book 6, ch. 3; and Proverbs 49.
133 prefixed to these pages: a reference to the passage from Sir Arthur Helps,
The Life of Columbus (1869), used as epigraph to the Memoir.
Miss Mitford . . . Life, vol. i. p. 305: see note to p. 13 above. Mitford in a
letter of 3 April 1815, to Sir William Elford. The passage continues: ‘and
a friend of mine, who visits her now, says that she has stiffened into the
most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of “single blessedness” that
ever existed, and that, till “Pride and Prejudice” showed what a precious
gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in
society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin upright piece of