A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
likely was it that, in spite of their strong mutual affection, he
should have any knowledge of the intimate and private feelings of
an aunt whose years, at the time of her death, numbered more
than twice his own.’ 33 In defending the partiality of her father’s
‘life’ of Jane Austen, Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh hoped also to
adjust its cultural impact. If the Memoir had the immediate effect
of awakening general public interest in an author virtually forgotten
outside select critical circles, it had done so, or so it seemed in
1920, on terms too narrow and comfortable. Certainly, Austen-
Leigh’s complacent presentation of his aunt had an incalculable
influence on the popularization and critical reading of her novels
far into the twentieth century. It was not seriously disturbed until
1940, when D. W. Harding, a psychologist rather than a literary
critic, detected beneath the cosy domesticity a ‘regulated hatred’,
declaring that her ‘books are . . . read and enjoyed by precisely
the sort of people whom she disliked’. 34
One of the most comfortable ingredients of all was the frontispiece
portrait of the author, based on a slight watercolour sketch
made by her sister Cassandra in about 1810. After family consultation,
Austen-Leigh commissioned a professional artist, James
Andrews of Maidenhead, to execute a portrait from the sketch,
and this then provided the model for a steel engraving. Its difference
from Cassandra’s original is evident to the most cursory
glance. Her crude pencil and watercolour likeness is sharp-faced,
pursed-lipped, unsmiling, scornful even, and withdrawn; in its
Victorian refashioning, the face is softer, its expression more pliant,
and the eyes only pensively averted. The greater attention to
detail and finish in costume and seating (the chair the figure
occupies is now elegantly Victorian) serves to assimilate the face
to a whole, where in Cassandra’s representation it expresses an
energy at odds with its unformed context. As visual biographies
the two tell quite different stories, whatever claim either might
make to be representing a human original. At the time of the
Memoir’s writing, Cassandra’s sketch was the property of Cassy
33
Id., Personal Aspects of Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1920), 4–5.
34
D. W. Harding, ‘Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen’,
Scrutiny, 8 (Mar. 1940).
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