Paperback. Light blue cover with gilt title.

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With an introduction by Dr Sally Minogue Jane Austen’s nephew James knew her fondly as Aunt Jane when he was a child, attended her funeral in Winchester Cathedral as a young man, and wrote this memoir of her some 50 years after her death, as her fame was growing. He could not have imagined Austen’s immense importance as a writer, and the curiosity about her, in today’s world. That is part of the charm of James Austen-Leigh’s memoir, which remains the touchstone for all later biographers. He highlights Jane’s special relationship with sister Cassandra, through her letters. He shows that her writing fell into two distinct periods of creativity with a barren patch in between. An amusing passage reveals the admiration of the Prince Regent for her work, and the irony of her response. This is a touching personal account from one who actually knew this great writer of our time. It includes the fascinating cancelled chapter of Persuasion, and is accompanied by the full text of The Watsons, Lady Susan and Sanditon.

Reviews:

• I liked reading a biography written closer to Jane Austen’s actual lifetime than any other can be – and by a family member who actually knew the great lady. It’s special to read descriptions written by a family member. Jane Austen’s pleasant character came over clearly. The way she conducted herself as she experienced her final illness was inspiring to me. I found it interesting, too, to find words and phrases here which I had mistakenly assumed to be modern colloquialisms. A case in point being the word ‘blab’.
• It’s nice to keep and read over. I like that the author knew Jane Austen and the book contains some of her letters.

A Memoir of Jane Austen is a biography of the novelist Jane Austen (1775–1817) published in 1869 by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh. A second edition was published in 1871 which included previously unpublished Jane Austen writings. A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen’s many relatives. However, it was the decisions of her sister, Cassandra Austen, to destroy many of Jane’s letters after her death that shaped the material available for the biography.

Austen-Leigh described his “dear Aunt Jane” domestically, as someone who was uninterested in fame and who only wrote in her spare time. However, the manuscripts appended to the second edition suggest that Jane Austen was intensely interested in revising her manuscripts and was perhaps less content than Austen-Leigh described her. The Memoir does not attempt to unreservedly tell the story of Jane Austen’s life. Following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public, but family members disagreed over just how much should be revealed; for example, regarding Austen’s romantic relationships.

The Memoir introduced the public to the works of Jane Austen, generating interest in novels which only the literary elite had read up until that point. It remained the primary biographical work on the author for over half a century