Jane and the Canterbury Tale

4

Jane is referring to events previously related in the volume of her detective adventures entitled Jane and the Genius of the Place. —Editor’s note.

5

Jane refers obliquely here to a period in Southampton, when her late friend Lord Harold Trowbridge taught her to fire a dueling pistol. The episode is recounted in the volume of her detective memoirs entitled Jane and the Ghosts of Netley. —Editor’s note.

6

Jane refers here to Maria Beckford, originally of Basing Park in Hampshire, who helped rear her dead sister’s children at the request of Mr. John Middleton, her brother-in-law. The Middletons leased Chawton Great House from Edward Austen from 1808 to 1813, and Maria Beckford visited Jane when both chanced to be in London. —Editor’s note.

7

Gentlemen, in Austen’s day, came of age at twenty-one. —Editor’s note.

8

Although Jane’s letters to Cassandra during this two-month visit to Godmersham say nothing of Curzon Fiske’s murder, no doubt due to Cassandra’s disapproval of Jane’s unseemly interest in detection, she does refer to the Moore family’s circumstances by directly quoting Fanny’s words on the subject. See Letter 95, dated November 5, 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Deirdre Le Faye, editor. —Editor’s note.

9

Jane describes this trip to Canterbury in a subsequent letter to her sister Cassandra (Letter 94, dated Tuesday, October 26, 1813), but makes no mention of entering the gaol with Edward. She discloses a second visit to Canterbury gaol in Letter 95, dated November 3, 1813. —Editor’s note.

10

See Letter 94, dated Tuesday, October 26, 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters, Deirdre Le Faye, editor, Oxford University Press, 1995. —Editor’s note.

11

Jane refers to the death of Henry Austen’s wife, Eliza de Feuillide, on April 25, 1813. An account of the weeks following Eliza’s death may be found in Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (Bantam, 2010). —Editor’s note.

12

“Fuzzing the cards” and “Greeking methods” were cant euphemisms for cheating. —Editor’s note.

13

Colonel Thomas Wildman, though unacquainted with Jane Austen, would intersect the life of one of her contemporaries and fellow writers, when he purchased Newstead Abbey—ancestral home of George Gordon, Lord Byron—in 1818, for the considerable sum of ?94,500. Wildman was a friend of Byron’s dating from their schooldays at Harrow. —Editor’s note.