A Memoir of Jane Austen

More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.com
Fore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com
xxxiv
Introduction
The suppression of such circumstantial facts, it might be
argued, is a limitation of frankness rather different from the
unwillingness to probe the inner life of the biographical subject.
It is evident, for example, from the fragments of correspondence
which remain that nephew and nieces did speculate about the
extent of Jane Austen’s romantic attachments–– to Tom Lefroy in
the winter of 1795–6, to the Revd Blackall two years later, about
the abortive seaside romance, and the proposal from her friends’
brother Harris Bigg-Wither. There is confusion over how many
attachments there may have been–– seaside and other romantic
clergymen blur and multiply. We detect disagreements, too, over
who at this distance still needed to be protected, as well as over
what it is proper to expose in public. One of the important revisions
between the first and second editions of the Memoir deepens
the sense that Jane Austen did, like most of us, experience
romantic love and the pain of its loss. The sentence in the first
edition which reads ‘I have no reason to think that she ever felt
any attachment by which the happiness of her life was at all
affected’ is removed from the second edition which now hints,
though with conscious insubstantiality, at two possible romantic
episodes before concluding: ‘I am unable to say whether her feelings
were of such a nature as to affect her happiness’ (p. 29). The
shift is small but it sanctions the reader’s closer identification
with the human subject of the Memoir.
In particular, the Tom Lefroy affair was not forgotten in family
memory–– Caroline had her version ‘from my Mother, who was
near at the time’, while Anna, a Lefroy by marriage, has her own
more highly charged story of events, coloured by internal family
politics. As she does on other occasions, Caroline presses for
discretion; Anna is generally less prudish. What the brother and
sisters did not have access to, because they were now in Knatchbull
hands, were the important letters from Jane to Cassandra in
which she records the brief relationship and something of her
feelings. Significantly or not, these are the first surviving letters.
But it is possible to make out, without their excited mock-serious
communications, that the attachment was more earnest and its
end more painful than Austen-Leigh allows. In the late 1860s