William Austen-Leigh – författare

Chawton House is famous today as the home of Jane Austen's brother Edward, who was adopted by a wealthy relative, Thomas Knight, and inherited his Hampshire estate. Edward offered the former bailiff's cottage close to the great house to his mother, who lived there with her unmarried daughters Jane and Cassandra. The house is now a study centre and library, for women's writing especially, but when this book was published in 1911 the building was still the Knight family home. Montagu Knight, the grandson of Edward, supplied material from the archives of the manor, while the book was largely written by his cousin William Austen Leigh, the son of Jane's nephew and memorialist. It covers the history of the manor from the Norman Conquest to the death of the second Edward in 1879, and, apart from the Austen connection, is a fascinating illustrated history of a typical English parish.

A beautiful biography, thoroughly researched from family records, this biography looks past the success of her books to see the real women. Studying her personal correspondence to friends and family. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Since 1870-1, when J. E. Austen Leigh published his Memoir of Jane Austen, considerable additions have been made to the stock of information available for her biographers. Of these fresh sources of knowledge the set of letters from Jane to Cassandra, edited by Lord Brabourne, has been by far the most important. These letters are invaluable as mémoires pour servir; although they cover only the comparatively rare periods when the two sisters were separated, and although Cassandra purposely destroyed many of the letters likely to prove the most interesting, from a distaste for publicity.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[vi] 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.The Memoir must always remain the one firsthand account of her, resting on the authority of a nephew who knew her intimately and that of his two sisters. We could not compete with its vivid personal recollections; and the last thing we should wish to do, even were it possible, would be to supersede it.