![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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