A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xxxv
Tom Lefroy was still living. Though his death, only months
before publication of the Memoir, provided an opportunity to
reconsider the story for the second edition, Austen-Leigh
retained intact the guarded, even cryptic, paragraph which
appeared in the first. 21
This sense of reserve towards the subject of a posthumous
biography is not just a matter of family respect, though the lines
between what is accounted as for private or public knowledge will
obviously be drawn differently depending on where the biographer
stands. Rather, it is indicative of a discretion which separates
mid-Victorian biographers from the prying accountability of
our modern need-to-know stance. Reticence was a matter of
moral responsibility for the Victorian biographer, but that does
not mean that attention to the limits of what can or should be
made known need prevent discerning speculation, or that the
moral reading of a life cannot become its imaginative reading.
One of the earliest and most insightful readers of the Memoir was
the novelist Margaret Oliphant, whose review of the first edition
appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for March 1870.
Oliphant refuses to have any truck with Austen-Leigh’s idealized
portrait of a selfless spinster aunt, grateful sister, and
uncomplaining daughter. To her mind Jane Austen the novelist is
an altogether harder and more brilliant individual, the author of
‘books so calm and cold and keen’, whose portrayal of human
behaviour is ‘cruel in its perfection’. It follows that the sentimentality
of her painted domestic environment will not do. She
names the Austen family ‘a kind of clan’, their happy circle more
like a prison, and ‘this sweet young woman’ of Austen-Leigh’s
construction a stifled figure, ‘fenced from the outer world’. 22 But,
though she questions the relevance and truth of his portrait, she
does not suggest that the biographer should examine deeper into
the details of the life. A little over ten years later, in ‘The Ethics
of Biography’ (1883), she warned against ‘that prying curiosity
which loves to investigate circumstances, and thrust itself into the
21
See p. 48 in this edition and my note for further details.
22
[M. O. W. Oliphant], ‘Miss Austen and Miss Mitford’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 107 (1870), 290–1, 300, 304.