A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxxiii
Steventon and move to Bath. A century and more later, the
boundaries between the private and public knowledge of Jane
Austen no longer obtain. The living links with the past and the
other sensitivities by which Austen-Leigh and his associates were
bound are severed; and the ‘right to privacy’ of Jane Austen, her
immediate family, and neighbours would now strike us as a
surprising if not an absurd concept, easily overtaken by the competing
‘rights’ of history (in the form of accurate scholarship), or
just the vaguer, modern ‘right to know’. Biographers have since
Austen-Leigh’s time equipped themselves to probe the silences
and evasions in these prime sources. It is now in terms of its
secrets and lies that Austen-Leigh’s Memoir might seem to be
most profitably approached.
We now know that her nieces and nephew did not tell us the
whole truth about Jane Austen and her family as they knew it.
The existence of a second brother, the handicapped but longlived
George Austen, is concealed, and Edward, the third brother,
is presented as the second (p. 16). There is no reference to the
jailing of Jane’s aunt Mrs Leigh Perrot on a charge of shoplifting
in Bath. Neither piece of discretion is surprising; both are matters
of honour and, for the time, of good taste. Austen-Leigh was
his great-uncle Leigh Perrot’s heir, adding Leigh to his name on
his great-aunt’s death in 1837. But the excitement and publicity
of the imprisonment and trial, occurring only a year before the
Austens moved to Bath, must have continued to hang in the air
and to affect the family’s social standing in the city. For this
reason and others, we long to know more of Jane Austen’s
impressions of life there. As David Gilson tells us, Mrs Leigh
Perrot’s trial has the doubtful distinction of being ‘the only public
event involving a member of the novelist’s family of which
significant contemporary documentation survives’. 20 Over all the
texts gathered in this collection, there hangs silence on this
matter.
20 David Gilson, Introduction to Sir F. D. MacKinnon, Grand Larceny, Being the
Trial of Jane Leigh Perrot, Aunt of Jane Austen (1937); repr. in Jane Austen: Family
History (5 vols., London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), volumes are
unnumbered.