A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
‘Jane’s had little in common with the “sensibility” of Marianne’
(p. 19). But Lord Brabourne played up the romance of a more
susceptible Aunt Jane, as did Austen-Leigh’s descendants. Now
Chapman adds the finishing touch, and Austen transforms from
Marianne Dashwood into Anne Elliot, enacting the whole gamut
of emotions from hysteria to settled melancholy. Implicitly, we
are told, Jane Austen’s total achievement as a writer is to be
explained in terms of the loss of Steventon. The trajectory of her
fiction is determined by her need for reconnection with her natal
environment. The suppression of those letters (which if they ever
did exist can only be allowed, in the interests of biographical
consistency, to witness to dispossession and a loss of self) and the
equally apocryphal transformation of great distress into something
greater, a temporary loss of consciousness (she fainted),
provide the kind of discontinuities the biographer can turn to
some purpose.
Why does this one distressing moment matter and why do
subsequent biographers embellish it so enthusiastically? 28 It
marks an end, but it might also mark a new beginning–– the move
to Bath and a wider social scene, with more variety and incident
to fuel the aspiring novelist’s imagination. But one purpose the
moment has consistently served has been to foreclose on the
future. The secret of, or clue to, Jane Austen’s creativity lies, we
are told, like DNA coding, in her original script. Though he
would not recognize it presented in these terms, this is Austen-
Leigh’s view, and it explains his erasure of even the idea of struggle
from his account of her writing life. ‘Whatever she produced’,
he asserts, ‘was a genuine home-made article’ (p. 90). An intermittent
subtext to his account links the careers of Jane Austen
and her contemporary Walter Scott. Not only was Scott the bestselling
novelist of the early nineteenth century, but the standards
he set for the production of fiction–– as saleable commodity and
as large-scale social panorama–– continued to shape the novel far
28 Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life, 220–3 and 350–2, pores over the episode, using it to
jump off in a quite different direction, to the robust (but unprovable) conclusion that
after fainting or not fainting Jane went off to Bath to have fun and it is because she was
too busy enjoying herself there that there is now a perceptible gap in the biographical
record.