A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
pattens in the sloppy lane between Steventon and Deane, JA’s physical
appearance, JA’s accompanying Cassandra to the Abbey School) from Anna’s
recollections (Memoir, 18, 36, 70), and he quotes extracts from her letter,
as ‘the testimony of another niece’ (p. 73), on JA’s gift for storytelling and
amusing young children. At some point Anna’s third daughter, Fanny Caroline
Lefroy, made copies of her mother’s recollections, and these copies were
used by the next generation of biographers. Constance Hill, in her Jane
Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends (1902; 2nd edn., 1904), 194–6, quoted,
with some discrepancies, perhaps derived from Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s transcription,
the central section of Anna Lefroy’s letter (her long-running joke
with JA over the novels of Mrs Hunter of Norwich); R. W. Chapman, from
another copy made by Fanny Caroline, extracted Anna’s reproduction of JA’s
spoof letter addressed to Mrs Hunter, and included it in his edition of JA’s
letters (no. 76 in Letters, ed. Le Faye). The Austen-Leigh archive holds the
final autograph copy of Anna’s ‘Recollections’, but she also wrote some draft
notes for the letter and these stayed with her Lefroy descendants. They were
sold, together with Anna Lefroy’s attempt at a continuation of Sanditon, to
America in December 1977 and have since been transcribed and edited, as
Jane Austen’s Sanditon: A Continuation by her Niece; together with ‘Reminiscences
of Aunt Jane’ by Anna Austen Lefroy, ed. Mary Gaither Marshall (1983).
It is clear from her transcriptions that Mary Marshall did not know of the final
copy of the letter in the Austen-Leigh archive, though she speculates about
the status of the drafts from which she works: ‘[a] number of deletions and
additions have been made in the manuscript, both at the time of writing and
after a later reading; therefore it is probably a copy of the letter she sent to
Edward’ (p. 149). Anna’s two draft versions of the ‘Recollections’ differ in
some respects from the Austen-Leigh copy, itself a conflation and reordering
of the two, most particularly in elaborating on JA’s trustworthiness as a confidant,
as told to Anna by her cousin Fanny Knight. (‘Time however, as it
always does, brought new impressions, or modification of the old ones; in the
latter years of Aunt Jane’s life there grew up an especial feeling between
herself & her eldest niece of that family [the Knights]–– a confidence placed on
one side meeting with sympathy & sound advice on the other–– The particular
circumstances were never fully known to me, & would not be to the present
purpose but the matter was never really revealed to Aunt Cassandra–– “To tell
Aunt Jane anything I once observed is the same thing as to tell Aunt C. you are
mistaken was the reply Aunt Jane is entirely to be trusted[”]–– They were so
much to each other those Sisters! They seemed to live a life to themselves, &
that nobody but themselves knew. I will not say their true but their full feelings
& opinions upon any subject’ (draft recollections, ed. M. G. Marshall, pp.
159–60).) This detail is omitted from the final copy of the letter in the Austen-
Leigh archive, though it finds its way into Fanny Caroline’s manuscript
‘Family History’ (HRO, MS 23M93/85/2). Deirdre Le Faye, ‘Anna Lefroy’s
Original Memories of Jane Austen’, Review of English Studies, NS, 39 (1988),
417–21, first provided a full transcription of the manuscript in the Austen-
Leigh archive.