Introduction

And, after all, we have lives enough of Jane Austen .

Virginia Woolf, A ROOM OF ONE's OWN, 1928

'To be burned', Cassandra Austen wrote in 1843 on a bundle of letters sent between Jane and herself over many years. She later told her niece Caroline that she had indeed burnt 'the greater part' of her sister's letters. Even among those letters which remained, as Caroline Austen noted, several 'had portions cut out'. What dark secrets of Jane Austen's life were lost forever on Cassandra's bonfire? What shocking admissions or scandalous remarks could have been thought so discreditable that they must be consumed in the flames? None at all, we are assured by later members of the Austen family. There was nothing in the least shameful in any of the letters which Cassandra chose to burn. It was merely that aunt Jane was given to expressing herself in rather too 'open and confidential' a manner. After all, had not aunt Jane herself written in Persuasion that 'no private correspondence could bear the eye of others'? Cassandra had merely been acting in a spirit of sisterly tact when she chose to suppress some of Jane's private confidences.

Tact was the polite term which the Austens often invoked to justify their habit of suppressing awkward or embarrassing facts. It was tactful to make no mention of Jane's 'mad' brother George, sent away from home as an infant and never afterwards referred to. It was tactful to pass over the details of Jane's aunt Leigh-Perrot's trial for grand larceny at Taunton assizes. Above all, it was tactful to censor the evidence of Jane Austen's scabrous and invective wit. Three days before she died, Jane Austen wrote a short satiric poem. She had been unwell for several months, confined to her bed with fevers and frequent backache, and had been recently moved from her home at Chawton to lodgings in Winchester, where she could be attended by Mr Lyford, the Surgeon -in-Ordinary at the County Hospital. It was St Swithin's day - 15 July - and the Winchester races had just begun. St Swithin was buried in Winchester and the coincidence of these two facts - the races and the saint's shrine - provided her with comic material. But the real themes of this curious little six-stanza poem are death and immortality. Jane Austen pictured the saint leaping from his shrine to curse the depraved subjects of Winchester for idling their time away at the races. 'When once we are buried you think we are dead/But behold me immortal!' Three days later, in the early hours of 18 July 1817, Jane Austen died, aged forty-one. Cassandra copied out this last poem and even underlined those words, 'When once we are buried you think we are dead/But behold me immortal!' But the version of immortality which this poem represented was not of a kind that recommended itself to later members of the Austen family. Knowing that she was about to die, having made out her will and taken Holy Communion with her brothers, Jane Austen had spent her last conscious hours dictating a satiric incantation which took the form of a malediction. 'By vice you're enslaved/You have sinned and must suffer ./You shall meet with your curse in your pleasures.' The last words she ever wrote took the form of a curse.

The fate of this last poem is indicative of how the family dedicated themselves to idealizing Jane Austen's posthumous reputation. Her brother Henry had the bad taste to mention it in the 'Biographical Notice' which he published shortly after her death, even exaggerating the poem's proximity to the hour of her demise. 'The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour,' he wrote. But Jane's niece Caroline Austen and nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh were horrified that such 'light and playful' verses should be remembered as the last things their aunt had composed. Caroline protested that 'the joke about the dead saint, & the Winchester races, all jumbled up together, would read badly as amongst the few details given, of the closing scene'. Accordingly, all references to the poem were deleted from subsequent editions of Henry's 'Biographical Notice'. James Edward Austen-Leigh made no mention of it in his Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), and it was omitted by William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh from their book Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913.

Instead, the family preferred to cherish the memory of Jane celebrated in some elegiac verses composed by her eldest brother James. '. Not a word she ever penn'd/Which hurt the feelings of a friend,' he wrote (this of the woman who had once exhorted Cassandra to 'Abuse everybody but me'). James went on: 'And not a line she ever wrote/Which dying she would wish to blot.' This claim was true, though hardly in the way that James Austen intended it. It was not Jane Austen who wished to blot out scandalous lines or censor satirical thoughts. But there were many other Austens who did wish to blot them out. Caroline Austen disapproved of the notion that any of Jane's early satirical writing should be published; 'one knows not how it might be taken by the public,' she wrote. She similarly deplored the thought of publicizing anything about Jane Austen's emotional life. 'I should not mind telling any body, at this distance of time,' she wrote to her brother, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1867, 'but printing and publishing seem to me very different from talking about the past.' In his Memoir of 1870, Austen-Leigh was accordingly discreet: 'I have no reason to think that she ever felt any attachment by which the happiness of her life was at all affected,' he wrote. Jane Austen's great-nephew, Lord Brabourne, was inspired by similar feelings of family delicacy when he published the first bowdlerized edition of Jane Austen's Letters in 1884. 'No malice,' he insisted, ever 'lurked beneath' Jane Austen's wit. Where this was not the case, Brabourne sought to make it so by carefully omitting from his edition any malicious reflections that Cassandra had allowed to escape the flames. Henry Austen's unfortunate reference to his sister's final poem was carefully censored, but another sentence from his 'Biographical Notice' was widely proclaimed: 'Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget.' That was how the Austen family were determined to remember her. Discreetly, they adjusted the records of her life in efforts to ensure that that was how the world should remember her too.

This family tradition of producing censored versions of Jane Austen's life and works has had its inevitable effect on subsequent biographies, most of which have been based upon the tactful memoirs of later Austens. 'Family disagreements, to say nothing of family quarrels, were unknown to them,' wrote Elizabeth Jenkins in Jane Austen: A Biography (1938), exactly as the Austens themselves would have wished. 'They were a devoted family,' wrote David Cecil in A Portrait of Jane Austen (1978), preferring to gloss over the fact that one Austen son was excluded from the family entirely, while another son was sent away for adoption by wealthier relations. Tact is a commendable quality, and a biographer who insists on challenging such benign assertions may risk appearing as not merely tactless but as impertinent and prurient. But there are more important qualities than delicacy, as Jane Austen's own writings suggest. Much as she may admire a proper sense of discretion, her strongest commendations are always bestowed on frankness and openness. Yet it is these very qualities that have been chiefly absent from traditional accounts of her life. What is a biographer to make of the strange silences created by the family policy of censorship: blank years, for which no letters exist; mysterious gaps in the family record? How should we interpret these enigmatic lacunae? In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen comments on the joy with which Fanny Price seizes upon a 'scrap of paper' containing a brief message from Edmund Bertram. 'Two lines more prized had never fallen from the pen of the most distinguished author - never more completely blessed the researches of the fondest biographer. The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's. To her, the hand-writing itself, independent of anything it may convey, is a blessedness.' The distinguished author of these lines would understand the frustrations of a biographer who well knows that so many of his subject's most revealing letters have been deliberately destroyed.

During my researches for this book, I made several discoveries concerning the circumstances of the Austen family which may help to piece together some of the missing elements in Jane Austen's life and work. If the portrait which emerges is less saintly and serene than the one with which most readers are familiar, it has at least, I hope, the virtue of greater authenticity. I have, as Jane Austen once wrote, 'endeavoured to give something like the truth with as little incivility as I could'. Often the most beguiling of literary forms, biography may also be the most complacent. Unlike a novel, which relies upon the arts of invention and surprise to tease our expectations with a narrative whose conclusion is unknown, a biography is a story whose plot and characters are often disconcertingly familiar. In a sense, a...