I was intrigued to know more about Jane Austen's nephew and biographer James Edward Austen Leigh after noting the addition of Leigh to his surname. Jane's brother Edward took the surname of Knight due to his inheritance from a relative, so I was curious to see if this was the case here as well. 

 

Born in 1798, he was named after his father, Jane's eldest brother James, but the family called him by his middle name Edward. His mother was Mary Lloyd, sister of Jane's close friend Martha. He had two sisters, an elder half-sister Anna by his father's first marriage, and younger sister Caroline.

Like Jane, Edward spent the first 25 years of his youth at Steventon after his father James inherited the living from his father Rev. George Austen when he retired to Bath. When Jane later moved to Chawton she was close enough to visit Steventon often. 

 

Edward was thought charming by others and greatly esteemed by his headmaster in his youth who wrote to his father: "To the very favourable reports which I have had the pleasure of making to you from time to time on the conduct of your excellent son, I can add nothing".

 

When Edward was still at school, he was let in on the secret that his aunt Jane was the author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. He wrote her the following verse:

​

To Miss J. Austen
 
No words can express, my dear Aunt, my surprise
Or make you conceive how I opened my eyes,
Like a pig Butcher Pile has just struck with his knife,
When I heard for the very first time in my life
That I have the honour to have a relation
Whose works were dispersed through the whole of the nation.
 
I assure you, however, I’m terribly glad:
Oh dear, just to think (and the thought drives me mad)
That dear Mrs. Jennings’s good-natured strain,
Was really the produce of your witty brain
That you made the Middletons, Dashwoods and all,
And that you (not young Ferrars) found out that a ball
May be given in cottages never so small.
And though Mr. Collins so grateful for all
Will Lady de Bourgh his dear patroness call,
‘Tis to your ingenuity really he owed
His living, his wife, and his humble abode.  

 

The news of aunt Jane's authorship fuelled Edward, and his sisters Anna and Caroline, to write and they would ask her for advice. In his early 70s, Edward published his memoir of his dear aunt Jane, with a fond reflection of her: 

 

“Though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not forgotten that Aunt Jane was the delight of all her nephews and nieces.  We did not think of her as being clever, still less as being famous: but we valued her as one always kind, sympathising and amusing.” 

 

 

So where does the Leigh come from? Leigh was not added to Edward's surname until 1837 when he was nearly 40 after he inherited from his great aunt Mrs Jane Leigh-Perrot, who was childless. Like Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, Mrs Leigh-Perrot was not a fan of the clergy and so did not take well to Edward following his father into the clergy. However, her snobbishness was appeased when he married Emma Smith, sister of Sir Charles Smith of Suttons, and niece of Mrs. Chute of the Vine, in 1828.

 

Edward's memoir was not his only published work. Also later in life he published "Recollections of the early days of the Vine Hunt, and of its founder William John Chute, Esq., M.P., of the Vine" in 1865. His knowledge coming from his marriage and close connection to the Chute family.