More
than three years ago, I wrote at length about the profound hypocrisy of (the 75
year old) James Edward Austen-Leigh (aka JEAL), in his engaging in a variety of rather
outrageous authorial deceits and misrepresentations in his 1870 Memoir of Jane
Austen.
Not a
few of his shenanigans involved his working overtime to make his own financial benefactor,
Aunt Leigh-Perrot, and her husband, James Leigh-Perrot, look like the
wonderfully generous people they most definitely were not.
Hard
to say which is more noteworthy in this regard: JEAL’s “selective editing” of
letters, his complete silence about the trial of Mrs. Leigh-Perrot in Bath for
shoplifting, or his masterpiece, twisting himself into a pretzel to rationalize
the disinheritance of Mrs. Austen by her brother, Mr. Leigh-Perrot.
Here
are all those gory details about JEAL’s Leigh-Perrot-related misrepresentations
in the Memoir that I was aware of when I last addressed this issue in January
2010:
Well,
now I have a short but telling footnote to add to what I blogged back then,
which I might just call the Hyper-Hypocrisy
edition of JEAL’s Memoir. To wit:
On
April 28, 1818, less than a year after Jane Austen's death, and about a year
prior to James Austen's own sad demise, James wrote the following to his son,
JEAL:
"I
must now tell you some news at which you will surely be surprised, for I was.
My Aunt [Leigh-Perrot] has withdrawn the Annuity of L100 a year which she and
my Uncle had allowed me for these eight or nine years past. The ostensible
reasons are her poverty & my
having L200 a year to support T. Leigh—of which I certainly clear more than
half, but who is very unlikely to live long. The real reasons I leave you to
guess….”
I am
unaware of what “real reasons” James Austen was so sarcastically hinting at (was
James’s sin one of omission or commission, that so irked his capricious rich aunt?);
and I am also not quite sure whether James was taking self-serving advantage of
funds he received to support T. Leigh (does anyone know who T. Leigh was, and
what that care involved?)—and can you also hear the echo of Fanny Dashwood in
James’s complaint that poor T. Leigh would not live long enough to provide
James a satisfactorily long-lasting income stream?:
“My
mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said, with such
perpetual claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father, because,
otherwise, the money would have been entirely at my mother's disposal, without
any restriction whatever. It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that
I am sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for all the
world."
But
the hypocrisy of Aunt Leigh-Perrot and James Austen is small potatoes, compared
to what I will now show you, i.e., JEAL’s response to his father, written 3
days later on May 1, 1818.
“My
dear Father…
I am
very sorry and certainly surprised at this last motion of Mrs. L. Perrot, but I
have long thought too meanly of her, to
be much astonished at any fresh instance of want of feeling or of hypocrisy…”
So let’s
see---Aunt Leigh Perrot was a heartless hypocrite in 1818, when he was 23. Funny
how she improved so much by the time he was 75, after JEAL inherited Scarlets from her decades earlier!
Two cynical
dialogs come to mind, inspired by P&P:
“…I dare not hope that Aunt Leigh-Perrot is
improved in essentials."
"Oh,
no!" said JEAL. "In essentials, I believe, she is very much what she
ever was."
OR
“Will
you tell me how long you have admired your Aunt Leigh-Perrot?"
"It
has been coming on so gradually over the past thirty years, that I hardly know
when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first inheriting her
beautiful grounds at Scarlets."
Now,
if the above were just a personal family matter, and had no impact outside the
circle of the Austen family, that would be none of my or anyone else’s
business. But we have here in JEAL the author of the highly influential Memoir
which set the tone for Austen scholarship which still widely echoes today, 143
years later. And the kinds of misrepresentations he wrote about the
Leigh-Perrots helped to preserve the central myth launched by Henry Austen,
i.e, that JA did not write about real people in her novels.
It
becomes clear that at the top of the list of those real people Henry Austen was
thinking about in 1818 (at practically
the same instant in history when JEAL was referring to Mrs. Leigh-Perrot as a heartless hypocrite) were the Leigh-Perrots!
Just imagine what generations of Austen readers familiar with actual Austen
family history might have discerned, beginning more than a century ago, in JA’s
novels, had JEAL and his ilk not led them all down a garden path in a fairyland
of Austen family harmony.
Badly
done, JEAL.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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