A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
xliii
Another aspect of the Memoir’s persistent familism is its preoccupation
with genealogy. In fact, genealogy seems to have been
a favourite Austen family pastime, and the appearance in the
novels of names taken from the concealed, maternal line is evidence
that Jane shared the pleasure in some degree. The complicated
transference and transformation of names within the
family–– Leigh to Leigh Perrot, Austen to Knight, Austen to
Austen-Leigh–– would obviously stimulate what was in any case a
convention of Victorian biography and a gentle clerical pursuit.
Genealogy provides a scaffold for and helps plug the gaps in the
record of the individual life. It assists Austen-Leigh in his selfconscious
work of ‘book-making’ around the otherwise scanty
figure of his aunt; and it also witnesses to his anxiety to secure the
status of the Austen family. How else do we account for the ‘very
old letter’ from Eliza Brydges to her daughter Mary, Jane
Austen’s maternal great-grandmother, included in Chapter 3?
Austen-Leigh’s explanation that anything two hundred years old
and incorporating domestic details ‘must possess some interest’
(p. 44) is hardly compelling; nor are the letter’s contents. But its
circumstances give it significance. It was clearly a cherished family
heirloom, handed down through the Leigh and Austen families.
Anna Lefroy drew her brother’s attention to its present
whereabouts as he was collecting his materials. Not only does the
Chandos letter (Mary Brydges was the daughter of James
Brydges, eighth Lord of Chandos, and the sister of the first
Duke) remind the reader of Jane Austen’s distant aristocratic
pretensions, it also gives a favourable gloss to the standing of her
more immediate family. As Austen-Leigh is at pains to point out,
Mary Brydges’s father was a penniless aristocrat, while her
grandmother was the widow of a rich merchant. In registering
the periodic adjustments between rank and trade by which English
society was secured in the course of the early modern period,
he simultaneously underpins the fluid social group, comprising
minor gentry, the professions, rentiers, clergymen, and trade,
whose membership encompassed the diversely positioned Austen
family in the late eighteenth century. Austen-Leigh’s snobbish
streak runs fairly wide through the Memoir, a recognizable if