A Memoir of Jane Austen

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xxxvi
Introduction
sanctuaries of individual feeling’. 23 The partiality of Jane
Austen’s Victorian biography is explicable, then, not only in
terms of the fragmentariness of the record and the prejudices
and loyalties of the family, but also as a more principled rejection
of that kind of disclosure which invades ‘the sanctuaries of
individual feeling’, places immune from pursuit and exposure.
Speculation and Context
To the mind and sensibilities of the modern biographer, ‘sanctuaries
of individual feeling’ can seem like caves of repression.
Areas once out of bounds to ethical enquiry have become compelling
sites of exploration to the clinically charged post-Freudian
enquirer. Our validation is that by probing we rescue and in some
way restore the life of the biographee now in our charge. In recent
times this rescue-work has been seen as a special trust laid upon
the female or feminist biographer by her female subject. So, for
example, Claire Tomalin examines the Memoir account (p. 39) of
Mrs Austen’s system of child-rearing for clues to explain what
she diagnoses as Jane Austen’s emotional defensiveness in adult
life. It was Mrs Austen’s practice to breast-feed each of her
numerous babies for the first three or four months of life and then
foster-out the baby to a woman in the village for the next year or
longer (until she/he was able to walk). In Austen’s adult letters
we encounter, by Tomalin’s reading, not the passionate confidante
of Brabourne’s description, but ‘someone who does not
open her heart’, a woman potentially traumatized by very early
weaning and associated emotional withdrawal. Tomalin concludes
that ‘in the adult who avoids intimacy you sense the child
who was uncertain where to expect love or to look for security,
and armoured herself against rejection’. The early severance of a
maternal bond will account not only for a subsequent guardedness
in matters of feeling (the absence of acknowledged romantic
attachment), and for the formality in Jane Austen’s relations with
23 M. O. W. Oliphant, ‘The Ethics of Biography’, Contemporary Review, 44
(1883), 84.