Bray Vicarage:
Sept. 7, 1869.
Postscript printed at the end of the first edition; omitted from the second.
Since these pages were in type, I have read with astonishment the strange misrepresentation of my aunt’s manners given by Miss Mitford in a letter which appears in her lately-published Life, vol. i. p. 305. Miss Mitford does not profess to have known Jane Austen herself, but to report what had been told her by her mother. Having stated that her mother ‘before her marriage’ was well acquainted with Jane Austen and her family, she writes thus:—‘Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.’ The editor of Miss Mitford’s Life very properly observes in a note how different this description is from
‘every other account of Jane Austen from whatever quarter.’ Certainly it is so totally at variance with the modest simplicity of character which I have attributed to my aunt, that if it could be supposed to have a semblance of truth, it must be equally injurious to her memory and to my trustworthiness as her biographer. Fortunately I am not driven to put my authority in competition with that of Miss Mitford, nor to ask which ought to be considered the better witness in this case; because I am able to prove by a reference to dates that Miss Mitford must have been under a mistake, and that her mother could not possibly have known what she was supposed to have reported; inasmuch as Jane Austen, at the time referred to, was a little girl.
Mrs. Mitford was the daughter of Dr. Russell, Rector of Ashe, a parish adjoining Steventon, so that the families of Austen and Russell must at that time have been known to each other. But the date assigned by Miss Mitford for the termination of the acquaintance is the time of her mother’s marriage. This took place in October 1785, when Jane, who had been born in December 1775, was not quite ten years old. In point of fact, however, Miss Russell’s opportunities of observing Jane Austen must have come to an end still earlier: for upon Dr. Russell’s death, in January 1783, his widow and daughter removed from the neighbourhood, so that all intercourse between the families
ceased when Jane was little more than seven years old.
All persons who undertake to narrate from hearsay things which are supposed to have taken place before they were born are liable to error, and are apt to call in imagination to the aid of memory: and hence it arises that many a fancy piece has been substituted for genuine history.
I do not care to correct the inaccurate account of Jane Austen’s manners in after life: because Miss Mitford candidly expresses a doubt whether she had not been misinformed on that point.
Nov. 17, 1869.