Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record

E-text prepared by Thierry Alberto, Emmy, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected.
The title page lists the authors as Austen-Leigh. The text omits the hyphen. This was retained.
In the interests of maintaining the integrity of the Austen letters, archaic or unusual spellings were retained as was inconsistent capitalization. For example: expence, acknowlegement; d'Arblay, D'Arblay.
More detailed notes will be found at the end of the text.




Some further correspondence, and many incidents in the careers of two of her brothers, may be read in Jane Austen's Sailor Brothers , by J. H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback; while Miss Constance Hill has been able to add several family traditions to the interesting topographical information embodied in her Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends . Nor ought we to forget the careful research shown in other biographies of the author, especially that by Mr. Oscar Fay Adams.
During the last few years, we have been fortunate enough to be able to add to this store; and every existing MS. or tradition preserved by the family, of which we have any knowledge, has been placed at our disposal.
It seemed, therefore, to us that the time had come when a more complete chronological account of the novelist's life might be laid before the public, whose interest in Jane Austen (as we readily acknowledge) has shown no signs of diminishing, either in England or in America.