page_title: A Memoir of Jane Austen
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: A Memoir of Jane Austen / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page from the second edition of A Memoir of Jane Austen
context_page_description: A Memoir of Jane Austen is a biography of the novelist Jane Austen 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 A second edition was published in 1871 which included previously unpublished Jane Austen writings.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.
context_section_description: The Memoir is a "rag-bag, not the shaped life of the historio- or psycho-biographies of the late twentieth century, but an undesigned and unprioritized assortment" of detail, such as descriptions of clothing, a "eulogy of spinning", and a digression on the Welsh ancestry of some Austen relations. Nor does the biography aim to tell the unvarnished truth. For example, the family hid the existence of a second brother, the handicapped George Austen, and described Edward Austen as the second brother instead of the third. They also omitted the arrest and jailing of Mrs. Leigh Perrot, Jane Austen's aunt, for shoplifting in Bath. According to 19th-century biography standards, "neither piece of discretion is surprising".
  Jane Austen herself is described as "a comfortable figure, shunning fame and professional status, centred in home, writing only in the intervals permitted from the important domestic duties of a devoted daughter, sister, and aunt". However, the manuscripts published alongside the biography suggest another portrait, one of a struggling author who endlessly revised and of a "restless and sardonic spirit".
caption: Title page from the second edition of the Memoir (1871)
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