ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner; none of the morbid sensibility or exaggeration of feeling, which not unfrequently accompanies great talents, to be worked up into a picture.  Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible women only by that peculiar genius which shines out clearly enough in her works, but of which a biographer can make little use.  The motive which at last induced me to make the attempt is exactly expressed in the passage prefixed to these pages.  I thought that I saw something to be done:  knew of no one who could do it but myself, and so was driven to the enterprise.  I am glad that I have been able to finish my work.  As a family record it can scarcely fail to be interesting to those relatives who must ever set a high value on their connection with Jane Austen, and to them I especially dedicate it; but as I have been asked to do so, I also submit it to the censure of the public, with all its faults both of deficiency and redundancy.  I know that its value in their eyes must depend, not on any merits of its own, but on the degree of estimation in which my aunt’s works may still be held; and indeed I shall esteem it one of the strongest testimonies ever borne to her talents, if for her sake an interest can be taken in so poor a sketch as I have been able to draw.

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.