Again alluding to best-selling novelists such as Burney and Edgeworth, or indeed Walter Scott, Henry contends that Austen’s works “may live as long as those which have burst on the world with more éclat.” Nor, for the same reason, did he notice the existence of the three juvenile notebooks: “Volume the First,” “Volume the Second,” and “Volume the Third.” Instead, he confined his attention to the books that his sister had “sent into the world,” comparing them boldly to those of the then far more highly regarded Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth (both novelists whom Austen herself admired profoundly).
He did not mention Austen’s manuscript fiction-“Lady Susan,” “The Watsons” and Sanditon”-having no intention of seeing it into print. One of his aims was to draw the attention of his readers to his sister’s previously published novels: the “merits” of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma are proclaimed in the first paragraph. Like all biographers, Henry Austen had an agenda. While preserving his own anonymity, describing himself only as the “biographer” and as “the relator of these events,” he made his sister’s identity public for the first time, expressing his hope, in the opening paragraph, that “a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than mere curiosity.”
The first words that the fortunate first readers of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion read at the end of 1817 were not by Jane Austen but by her favourite brother Henry, her elder by four years, in a prefatory “Biographical Notice of the Author,” dated 13 December.
It’s my pleasure to introduce Peter’s guest post on Henry Austen’s memoir of Jane Austen. The first was on “Jane Austen and Canada: from Anna Lefroy to Joan Austen-Leigh” and the second was on “Jane Austen and America: The first fifty years from 1817 to the late 1860s.” Last June, he gave two excellent lectures at the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
0 kommentar(er)
