Memoir of Jane Austen

This is the book that gave us Jane Austen. Published in 1870, two decades after her death, it was the first major attempt to preserve the memory of the world's most beloved novelist, written by the nephew who had known her as a child. James Edward Austen-Leigh gathered recollections from family members, transcribed letters, and rescued from drawers and cabinets the fragments and early drafts that would otherwise have been lost: the cancelled chapter of 'Persuasion,' the unfinished 'The Watsons,' a specimen of her childish stories, and the haunting last pages of the novel she never completed. The result is something more intimate than biography and more valuable than criticism. Here we see Austen not as a cultural monument but as a woman who wrote in the same small sitting room where the family gathered, who loved her nephews and nieces, who struggled with illness, and who left behind a literary legacy that her family initially struggled to understand. For anyone who has ever wanted to sit in the same room as Jane Austen and hear her relatives speak, this memoir is the closest thing we have.