Jane Austen: The Facts and the Fiction

As Wordsworth republish James Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his Aunt Jane, Sally Minogue reflects on what we do and don’t know about Jane Austen.

 The year in which we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of Jane Austen seems also to be the year of saying what we like about Jane Austen, much of it arrant nonsense passed off as fact. A great virtue of the memoir written by her nephew James Austen-Leigh is his frank recognition of ‘the extreme scantiness of the materials out of which [the memoir] must be constructed’. (156) That scantiness hasn’t deterred subsequent biographers, but then biography is the art of speculation, especially where evidence is short and the life of the subject is distant. And it’s an interesting thing about Austen that the ‘big’ founding biographies about her all date from the mid-1970s and 1980s and are all written by men. Lord David Cecil’s empty account, A Portrait of Jane Austen, carried far on the wings of his aristocratic title. (I attended Cecil’s lectures at the end of his time in Oxford and ‘empty’ is the right word, though there was plenty of performative upper-classness.) Park Honan’s ‘Definitive Portrait’, Jane Austen: Her Life (1988) was a worthy and thorough account, much admired in its day, but has sunk without trace – sad since Honan himself was a reputed and accomplished literary critic. A further biography by John Halperin (1984) took a frankly loopy psychological perspective. It has taken the development of a female – rather than explicitly feminist – critical approach to Austen in the late 20^th and 21^st centuries to produce some interesting new ideas about and insights into her life and work. Claire Tomalin (1997) produced a standard and reliable biography looking at the wider context of Austen’s life, more in the mode of the earlier male biographies; Janet Todd (2013) did likewise with perhaps a feminist-informed slant. But Paula Byrne (2013), Helena Kelly (2016), and Lucy Worsley (2017) have seized on the importance of Austen’s female readership and highlighted aspects of her life that might appeal particularly to a younger demographic.  Nonetheless, all these biographies are dogged by the lack of documentary material that her honest nephew mentions. The bulk of her letters, which would have provided the basis for a biography, were famously destroyed, mainly by her sister Cassandra, but also by her niece.

A Memoir of Jane Austen 1871 edition

Nature of course abhors a vacuum and as the various forms of social media roam further and further away from dependence on authoritative sources, even the BBC in its recent Jane Austen: The Rise of a Genius has bitten off a large slice of poetic licence in what it presents as fact. Certainly each of its three episodes begins with the disclaimer that ‘few records of [her] life survive’, then goes on to say that ‘with the help of writers, experts and actors, we will piece the story back together’.  Piecing the story together involves sections of dramatic reconstruction interleaved with talking heads. Literary and cultural experts, such as Priya Atwal, and experienced writers with  understanding of narrative, such as Colm Toibin, are placed alongside actors who have played roles in adaptations of her work. All are given the same authority; all speak with great emphasis and sometimes exaggeration; everything they say is presented as though unchallengeable fact. The accompanying dramatic reconstructions show us amongst other things Jane Austen as a child ‘scarred by a near-death experience’; Austen (after we are told she was suffering from ‘writer’s block’ in the period after her father’s death), standing by a lake screaming as though about to throw herself in; Austen despairing at the news of the death of an apparent suitor; Austen at a printer’s correcting proofs and even altering the setting of type; Austen doing business in the offices of John Murray, her second publisher. Other than that of her childhood illness, none of these images are supported by any documentary evidence, and indeed most are either highly unlikely to be accurate, or are contradicted by the evidence we do have.  In one particular respect the ‘documentary’ concocts completely scenes showing Jane Austen falling in love with a young man in 1801 on a visit to Sidmouth. Writer Paula Byrne avers that ‘she meets a man and she falls in love – we know he was a clergyman’ then goes on to say ‘we don’t know anything about him, we don’t know what his name was’! Reporting that Cassandra says later this might have been the love of Jane’s life, Byrne then cries, ‘Something awful has happened – the love of her life has died’!  Cue image of Jane with her head in her hands in despair when she receives the black-sealed missive telling of his death. The germ of this story – which is all that it is – comes from Cassandra having told a niece in conversation many years after Jane’s death about such a man once in her sister’s life. Austen-Leigh does indeed give an account of it, in fact his is the first published mention of it. His account may even be the source of the documentary’s dramatization of it. But note the care with which he chooses his words:

Many years after [Jane’s] death, some circumstances induced her sister Cassandra to break through her habitual reticence … She said that, while staying at some seaside place, they became acquainted with a gentleman, whose charm of person, mind and manners was such that Cassandra thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her sister’s love. When they parted, he expressed his intention of soon seeing them again; and Cassandra felt no doubt as to his motives. But they never met again. Within a short time, they heard of his sudden death. I believe that, if Jane ever loved, it was this unnamed gentleman; but the acquaintance had been short, and I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness. (44)

‘I am unable to say’ – a meticulousness which is the very opposite of the impulse of those in The Rise of a Genius, who are only too able to say what cannot be known. [1]

1870 Engraving of Steventon Rectory, birthplace of Jane Austen

Why, my reader might be thinking, does any of this matter? The programme makers may be defended in that they are trying to give a 21^st century take on Jane Austen’s life, and indeed the three part series was made by Ali Naushahi, who has seen Austen as ‘a cultural outsider, a rebel writing under economic duress and a still-vital feminist voice’. (hyphenonline.com, review by Leila Latif, 13 June 2025) Naushahi grew up in a working-class British-Pakistani family, and in a Guardian piece she notes, ‘though separated by culture, time and geography, like Austen I understood early the brutality of economics and just how vulnerable a family can become when its financial foundation is shaken.’ The novels for her ‘captured the emotional cost of a world in which women had limited options and where marriage was more often an economic contract than a love story’. (theguardian.com, May 30 2025). I sympathise with this position entirely and am glad that such a fresh approach to Austen comes to us through the auspices of the BBC. But much as I applaud the cultural breadth at the root of the programme, it doesn’t justify the large liberties taken with the facts.

At the other end of the spectrum is James Austen-Leigh’s Memoir and its stubborn sticking to what can be known. While at times this can make for an account which does not give Jane Austen her full due as a complicated and complex woman and writer, its great virtue is that it can provide a baseline for all subsequent accounts. This is, certainly, a loving nephew’s account, made at the end of his life when he is likely to be rosy-eyed. And it is of a piece with its time, in the late 1800s, over fifty years after her death. But that is also its charm. There is a straightness, a naïvety almost, as the writer self-deprecatingly questions his own fitness to write such an account. Perhaps his memory will fail him? Then there is his inexperience as a writer? And, most important of all to him, there is that ‘scantiness’ of documentary material. Austen-Leigh gives us a timely reminder of the importance of verification. Commenting about a localized matter in a postscript that was in the first edition of his Memoir but was removed from the second (restored in this publication), he writes: ‘All persons who undertake to narrate from hearsay things which are supposed to have taken place before they were born are liable to error, and are apt to call in imagination to the aid of memory.’ (158)

Within his strict provisos, the Memoir still has much to offer the contemporary reader. Austen-Leigh adds his own anecdotal memories to those of family history to give us a sense of what it was actually like to know Jane Austen and to have her as an aunt. It might seem oddly domestic that his main praise is reserved for her being good at spillikins and ‘marvellous’ with ‘cup and ball’. (88) But he also gives insight into the pleasure and security of her life at Steventon, and to the correspondingly great disruption of her father giving up his living there and the family’s beginning a peripatetic life:

The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling and lively imagination; and Jane was exceedingly unhappy when she was told that her father, now seventy years of age, had determined to resign his duties to his eldest son, who was to be his successor in the Rectory of Steventon, and to remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. Jane had been absent from home when this resolution was taken; and, as her father was always rapid both in forming his resolutions and in acting on them, she had little time to reconcile herself to the change. (64)

Jane Austen’s writing desk, with letter to Cassandra

The words used in the Rise of a Genius documentary about this event (spoken by the actor Samuel West) are ‘It screws her up’. Austen-Leigh’s restraint is both more eloquent and more balanced. He also gives a good all-round view of the life and times of the Austen family, the different fortunes of the siblings and the implications of these, and while he does not knowingly point up gender differences, they are there for us to see in the different circumstances of Jane and her older sister Cassandra from those of their several brothers. And it is to this Memoir that we owe all subsequent accounts of the extremely close relationship between Jane and Cassandra: ‘Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded’. (35) Some of Jane’s letters to Cassandra are included, and the nephew’s account of Cassandra’s close attendance on Jane in her last days is most affecting. In Jane’s own words, she was ‘my dearest sister, my tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse’. (136)

This Memoir also takes into account the burgeoning reputation of Jane Austen the writer, just taking off as it is being written. Austen-Leigh could have had no idea of how great that reputation would become, but he is already aware of the curiosity of a wider public, while feeling that he cannot quite answer to it. His own comments on the novels are acute and interesting, and furthermore he gives both a close account of the final unfinished work, Sanditon, and even more interestingly, the cancelled last chapter of Persuasion, which Austen revised to the much more satisfactory ending we read now. She was already ill at that time, yet she had the energy and critical acumen to see that what she had written was not right, and had to be replaced. She replaced it with one of the most powerfully restrained endings in all English fiction.

The Jane Austen Suffrage Banner from 1908

Austen’s own ending was distressingly premature, and must have been painful and frightening, away from home seeking medical help in Winchester, though she was always attended by the loving Cassandra. But we know, as she could have not, the way in which her writing has touched, and undoubtedly changed, so many people’s lives. The modesty of her nephew’s memoir reminds us of the reticence of her cultural milieu, and indeed of her own writing manner. Irony was her mode – in its very nature, dependent as much on what is not said as what is said. Let’s hope that’s not lost in this anniversary year, when there seems to be such a determined effort to make Austen fit into the 21^st century. We have come a long way from seeing her as the circumscribed writer working on ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory … with so fine a brush’, as she teasingly characterized herself in an 1816 letter to a nephew. That letter is quoted in full by Austen-Leigh (130) and the context makes it clear that Jane Austen’s irony is fully in play here. But neither does she address wider social, political or feminist issues directly in the way that the women writers who succeeded her did (Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell). She didn’t talk about or represent servants, poverty (except in the undeniably snobbish way in which Fanny Price judges her home when she returns to it from the splendours of Mansfield Park), slavery, Empire, or even the Napoleonic Wars except insofar as they allowed the seductive role of the redcoat in some of her plots. If she had been centrally concerned about those things, she would have written of them directly. Instead they appear as hidden subtexts in the lacunae of the writing – spaces in the text rather than the text itself. We as 21^st century readers are free to search out meaning in those spaces but we can’t with any certainty impute an intention to Jane Austen when we do so. She speaks to us from her century – and we hear her from ours.

Wordsworth Editions publish all of Jane Austen’s works. Our edition of the Memoir is here: A Memoir of Jane Austen – Wordsworth Editions

A selection of the many biographies:

Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, Collins, 2014

David Cecil, A Portrait of Jane Austen, Constable, 1978

Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life, Duckworth, 1988

Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, Knopf Doubleday, 2018

Janet Todd, Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels, Andre Deutsch, 2013

Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, Penguin, 2012

Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, Hodder, 2018

janeaustensociety.org.uk has information on all things Austen, and in particular it is celebrating the 250^th anniversary on its website and highlighting related events.

[1] For an extremely thorough consideration of any possible truth in this story, see Azar Hussain, ‘ “Nameless and Dateless”: Jane Austen’s Unknown Suitor’ at jasna.org

Main image: Grave of Jane Austen in the Nave of Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, Hampshire. Credit: Ian Dagnall / Alamy

Image 1 above: Title page of the 1871 edition of the Memoir. Credit: The History Collection / Alamy

Image 2 above: 1870 Engraving of Steventon Rectory, the birthplace of Jane Austen. Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy

Image 3 above: Jane Austen’s writing table and a letter to her sister Cassandra [Jane Austen House museum] Credit: Roger Bamber / Alamy

Image 4 above: The Jane Austen Suffrage Banner from 1908. Credit: History collection 2016 / Alamy