A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 261
Anna (Jane Anna Elizabeth) Lefroy (1793–1872), daughter of James Austen
and Anne Mathew, was born at Deane, Hampshire. Only 2 when her mother
died, she spent much of the next two years, until her father remarried, at
Steventon with her grandparents and aunts Jane and Cassandra. She married
Ben Lefroy, the son of a neighbour, in 1814, and bore him seven children, but
was widowed early (in 1829). She died in Reading. She was protective in later
years of her special relationship to Jane Austen, who had encouraged her early
attempts at writing fiction and, though the novel she was writing at Austen’s
death was later destroyed unfinished, she eventually earned a little money
from a novella, Mary Hamilton (1833) and two small books for children–– The
Winter’s Tale (1841) and Springtide (1842). At Cassandra’s death she inherited
Jane Austen’s unfinished manuscript ‘Sanditon’ and tried unsuccessfully to
finish it. In 1864 she wrote out for her half-brother her ‘Recollections of Aunt
Jane’.
158 the Goodneston Bridgeses: JA’s brother Edward Austen Knight was married
to Elizabeth Bridges of Goodneston Park, the sixth of Sir Brook
Bridges’s thirteen children. Lady Knatchbull, mentioned a few lines
later, was their eldest daughter, Fanny Austen Knight (for whom, see
note to p. 79 above).
159 Mrs Hunter of Norwich: Rachel Hunter (1754–1813). The novel here
referred to is Lady Maclairn, the Victim of Villany (1806). (See Deirdre
Le Faye, ‘Jane Austen and Mrs Hunter’s Novel’, Notes and Queries, 230
(1985), 335–6.)
the note . . . weeks afterwards: no. 76 in Letters, where Le Faye tentatively
dates it 29–31 October 1812. No original manuscript surviving, Le Faye
takes her text from that in Anna Lefroy’s ‘Recollections’, but adds a
further sentence from a copy taken by Anna’s daughter Fanny Caroline
(see Letters, 407, n. 4).
Nicholson or Glover: Francis Nicholson (1753–1844) and John Glover
(1767–1849), landscape painters.
160 Car of Falkenstein: a nonsensical name for the Alton coach, invented for a
mock-heroic story which Anna was at this time writing with JA’s
encouragement. Caroline refers to it in MAJA, 172 (‘it had no other
foundation than their having seen a neighbour passing on the coach,
without having previously known that he was going to leave home’).
Dr and Mrs Cooper at Bath: The Revd Dr Edward Cooper and his wife
Jane, Mrs Austen’s sister and JA’s aunt. See note to p. 26 above.
CAROLINE AUSTEN, My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir (1867)
Caroline Austen wrote her memoir of Aunt Jane apparently for family consumption,
‘that she herself should not be forgotten by her nearest descendants’,
though as revisions to the text (noted below) show, she took some trouble
in the crafting of it. It is described on the final page as ‘Written out’ ‘March