AUSTEN (JANE)

Autograph letter signed ("Yours affec.ey/ J. Austen") to "My Dear Anna [Lefroy]", [Chawton], Thursday [December? 1816]

Footnotes

'YOUR GRANDMAMA IS VERY MUCH OBLIGED TO YOU FOR THE TURKEY': A REDISCOVERED JANE AUSTEN LETTER WRITTEN AT THE TIME OF HER LAST CHRISTMAS.

Anna Austen Lefroy (Jane Anna Elizabeth Austen, 1793-1872), the author's niece, was the daughter of Jane's brother James, and his first wife Anne Mathew. As a child she was very close to her aunt, and after her mother's death she stayed with Jane for two years at Steventon, before her father remarried. Anna married Benjamin Lefroy in 1814 and the following August the couple moved to Wyards, a farmhouse a mile from Chawton. Anna and Jane were frequent correspondents throughout the author's life and the letters they exchanged are often very revealing. Anna also became an important contributor to the Austen life story through the so-called Lefroy MS.

Despite the support and encouragement of her aunt, Anna's own literary ambitions remained largely frustrated. But she did contribute to a continuation of an early Austen story called Evelyn, as well as the author's unfinished Sanditon, the manuscript of which she inherited. Although she never managed to complete the novel she was writing, the progress of which she shared with her aunt, Anna did publish two children's books, The Winter's Tale: To Which is Added Little Bertram's Dream (1841) and Springtide (1842). An anonymous story called Mary Hamilton, written by "A Niece of the late Miss Austen" and published in a periodical in 1834, has also been attributed to her (see https://jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number19/sabor-james-cavan.pdf).

"Grandmama", the grateful recipient of the turkey, is Jane's mother and Anna's grandmother, Cassandra Austen (1739-1827), who was living at Chawton with her daughters and was to survive Jane by some ten years despite her own ill health.

The year before Jane had spent Christmas sending out presentation copies of Emma, but by the autumn of 1816 she was visibly unwell with what is now thought to have been Addison's Disease. Although she made little of her illness to her friends, and sacrificed her own needs for comfort to those of her mother, she did talk to her sister Cassandra of her backaches, nausea and tiredness. Few letters from that period are known (or were perhaps written), but on December 16, her birthday, she wrote at length to her brother Edward, barely mentioning her own situation. Apart from the present letter, only a New Year note survives from that Christmas of 1816, which was to be Jane's last. In January 1817 she recovered sufficiently to start work on Sanditon, but by the end of March she had stopped writing, was moved to Winchester in May, and on 18 July she died.

Our letter is on paper watermarked [Ga]ter [18]15, from the Hampshire firm of John and William Gater, Up Mills, West End, South Stoneham. The Morgan Library has several Jane Austen letters on Gater's paper, one to Cassandra from the same period, 8 January 1817, the remainder from 1808-1809. This, along with the fact that Anna Lefroy moved to Wyards in 1815 and that Jane was in London rather than Chawton that December, helps to confirm that our letter was written the following Christmas.

The text of the letter was first published by R.W. Chapman in Jane Austen's Letters to her Cassandra and Others, OUP, 1932 & 1952 (no. 185), and was taken from a copy in the possession of Miss Mary Isabella Lefroy, Anna's grand-daughter, who donated the manuscript of Sanditon to King's College, Cambridge. Chapman describes the version he saw thus: "Copy by Anna Lefroy (on paper with watermark dated 1854), who adds: 'This note was written the winter of 1816 & the original is in the possession of W. Chambers Lefroy the Grandson of the Receiver'".

Dierdre Le Faye (Jane Austen's Letters, OUP, 2011, no. 147(C) and note on p.461) still found the "original MS untraced", and records the copy and the comment as being by Anna's daughter Fanny-Caroline Lefroy, made in her mother's volume of family history notes, the Lefroy MS. It was also transcribed in Fanny-Caroline Lefroy's own family history manuscript. The original autograph letter offered here was rediscovered last year in a box containing papers of a descendant of the Lefroy family.

Provenance: Anna Lefroy; and thence by decent to the present owner.