Bowdlerized Austen

In his Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England , Roger Sales tells about the formation of the “Austen industry.” The industry, Sales claims, started nearly as soon as Austen was in the grave. Her brother Henry’s memoir, published the year after her death, offers a conventionally pious and domestic Austen that is at odds with the satirical spirit of the novels.

When her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published his memoirs some decades later, he followed the same recipe. Sales’s makes his case quite persuasively by comparing the edited letters that Austen-Leigh included in his memoir with the full text. In one, Austen-Leigh leaves out “a level-headed description of financial transactions; the hope that somebody would not be ‘cruel enough to consent’ . . . to an invitation to dinner and an inquiry as to whether [Jane’s sister] Cassandra has had time to discover whether there is anybody who is more boring than a certain Sarah Mitchell.”

Austen’s letter closes with “Give my love to little Cassandra! I hope she found my Bed comfortable last night and has not filled it with fleas.” Austen’s nephew obligingly left out the part about the fleas.

Another of Austen-Leigh’s letters leaves out the following: “Austen complaining to a tradesman about the quality of some currant bushes that had been purchased earlier; the fact that it was [Jane’s brother] Henry rather than she who was fatigued by the journey; and some confidently given advice for one of her other brothers on the best roads to travel when coming to London.” With these omissions, her nephew “denies her strength, both of purpose and of physique, as well as not allowing her knowledge of the world beyond home.”

Austen-Leigh left off the end of this letter two, which makes reference to the elegant “naked Cupids over the Mantlepiece” in the drawing room at a London school, and Austen’s observation that these “must be a fine study for Girls,” in the absence of which “one should never have smelt instruction.”