A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Introduction
family recollection. His purpose is far removed from that served
by Anna and Caroline’s whimsical conjuring of childhood memories.
Now he supplements biography with professional critical
assessment, incorporating passages from contemporary reviews.
The larger motive for Henry’s two notices, as it is for Austen-
Leigh’s Memoir, is our conventional assumption that books need
authors. His first notice, written within months of Jane Austen’s
death, prefaces the posthumously published Northanger Abbey
and Persuasion. Up to this point the novels had been published
anonymously, or, more accurately, they had followed one another
as an accumulating set of textual alliances–– for example, Mansfield
Park: A Novel. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility and
Pride and Prejudice. In writing and reading the biographies of
writers we may be tempted to work back from the writings to the
subject and to find in the fiction the coherence that eludes ‘real’
experience. But another of the questions literary biography sets
out to examine, if not to answer, is why books need authors. Why
do the self-governing, independent states of fiction require to be
referred back to a figure who fashioned them? Henry Austen’s
biographical notices cannot answer the question but, standing at
the beginning of the Jane Austen life project, they help us to
formulate it.