[2] A family project, the biography was written by James Edward Austen-Leigh but owed much to the recollections of Jane Austen's many relatives.

Following the Victorian conventions of biography, it kept much private information from the public, but family members disagreed over just how much should be revealed; for example, regarding Austen's romantic relationships.

The Memoir introduced the public to the works of Jane Austen, generating interest in novels which only the literary elite had read up until that point.

This sentence was removed from the second edition and two romantic attachments are hinted at, with the conclusion "I am unable to say whether her feelings were of such a nature as to affect her happiness".

Based on a "slight watercolour sketch" made by Cassandra around 1810, Andrews produced a professional portrait that served as a model for a steel engraving.

Her crude pencil and watercolour likeness is sharp-faced, pursed-lipped, unsmiling, scornful even, and withdrawn; in its Victorian refashioning, the face is softer, its expression more pliant, and the eyes only pensively averted.

"[18] The Memoir is a "rag-bag, not the shaped life of the historio- or psycho-biographies of the late twentieth century, but an undesigned and unprioritized assortment" of detail, such as descriptions of clothing, a "eulogy of spinning", and a digression on the Welsh ancestry of some Austen relations.

[20] Jane Austen herself is described as "a comfortable figure, shunning fame and professional status, centred in home, writing only in the intervals permitted from the important domestic duties of a devoted daughter, sister, and aunt".

[21] However, the manuscripts published alongside the biography suggest another portrait, one of a struggling author who endlessly revised and of a "restless and sardonic spirit".

[17] It generated interest in the works of an author which, for half a century, had been read almost entirely by the literary elite, and Austen's popularity increased dramatically.

[1] The image of "dear aunt Jane" presented in the biography was not seriously challenged until 1940, when psychologist D. W. Harding argued that there was a "regulated hatred" in Austen's works.