A Memoir of Jane Austen

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xxxviii
Introduction
‘young persons’. It is perhaps worth remembering that the home
from which the sensitive young Jane Austen was so swiftly exiled
was also that to which the baby James Edward (aged 2 years) was,
by the same decision, introduced. But after this brief paragraph
he leaves the matter. His source was his younger sister Caroline,
not then born, but subsequently in receipt of the details from
their mother Mary Lloyd Austen ‘who was present’. Caroline
wrote to James Edward:
My Aunt was very sorry to leave her native home, as I have heard my
Mother relate–– My Aunts had been away a little while, and were met
in the Hall ˆon their returnˆ by their Mother who told them it was all
settled, and they were going to live at Bath. My Mother who was
present.[sic] said my Aunt Jane was greatly distressed–– All things
were done in a hurry by Mr. Austen & of course that is not a fact to be
written and printed–– but you have authority for saying she did mind
it–– if you think it worth while–– (p. 185)
Caroline’s disjointed, repetitive note-making unintentionally
raises the painfulness of the story, but the raw elements of her
version, smoothed out in her brother’s more circumspect delivery,
also convey the rush, the shock, and the distress of the event
in a wholly convincing way. We almost hear Mrs Austen delivering
her great news in the hall (to Jane and Martha Lloyd, the two
aunts who had been away, and not to Jane and Cassandra, as is
here implied). There was also another version, recorded by Fanny
Caroline Lefroy in her manuscript ‘Family History’; she got it
from her mother Anna Lefroy, aged 7 at the time of the incident.
Repeating the story in 1913 in Life and Letters, Austen-Leigh’s
son and grandson transform it into drama and embellish it with
what will become a familiar psychological coda–– the mystery of
the non-existent letters. This is their version:
Tradition says that when Jane returned home accompanied by Martha
Lloyd, the news was abruptly announced by her mother, who thus
greeted them: ‘Well, girls, it is all settled; we have decided to leave
Steventon in such a week, and go to Bath’; and that the shock of the
intelligence was so great to Jane that she fainted away. Unfortunately,
there is no further direct evidence to show how far Jane’s feelings