A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
particular, sustains Austen-Leigh’s account, with its emphasis on
well-regulated domesticity and family harmony. The Austens
were a close-knit and talented family. ‘[U]ncommon abilities . . .
seem to have been bestowed, tho’ in a different way upon each
member of this family’, wrote their cousin Eliza de Feuillide in
1792. 29 Their closeness, strengthened by marriages between
cousins and within a small circle of long-time friends, and by the
recurrence across generations of the same Christian names, can
disorientate the reader attempting to separate the various threads
of connection. It also impresses on our modern sensibilities an
apprehension of confinement, of too much accord and correspondence.
Austen-Leigh contributes much to this. Quoting
from Anna Lefroy’s manuscripts, Constance Hill, one of the
earliest non-family biographers, writes that Henry, Jane’s fourth
brother, ‘was the handsomest of the family, and, in the opinion of
his own father, the most talented. There were others who formed
a different estimate, but, for the most part, he was greatly
admired.’ 30 At last we glimpse a chink in the family’s public presentation.
But in the Memoir this other Henry’s story is not told.
Here he is the brother who ‘cannot help being amusing’ (p. 63),
who acts informally and generously as his sister’s literary agent,
entertains her in London, and in the autumn of 1815 is nursed by
her through a serious illness. That he was also an unsuccessful
opportunist who managed to entangle various members of his
family in debt, that his eventual bankruptcy may have had profound
consequences for Jane’s late publication plans and the
course of her final illness–– none of this is conveyed by Austen-
Leigh’s preliminary sketch, in which Henry ‘had perhaps less
steadiness of purpose, certainly less success in life, than his
brothers’ (p. 16). But hints in Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s ‘Family
History’ suggest that Anna, fiercely attached to her aunt, handed
down within the family a more critical account, certainly of the
bankruptcy and its effects on the family and Jane’s health.
29 Austen Papers 1704–1856, ed. Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (London: Spottiswoode,
Ballantyne, and Co., 1942), 148.
30 Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends (1902; London: John
Lane, 1904), 48.