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Biographical sources

The scant biographical information about Austen comes from her few surviving letters and sketches her family members wrote about her. Only about 160 of the approximately 3,000 letters Austen wrote have survived and been published. Cassandra Austen destroyed the bulk of the letters she received from her sister, burning or otherwise destroying them. She wanted to ensure that the "younger nieces did not read any of Jane's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". In the interest of protecting reputations from Jane's penchant for honesty and forthrightness, Cassandra omitted details of illnesses, unhappiness and anything she considered unsavoury. Important details about the Austen family were elided by intention, such as any mention of Austen's brother George, whose undiagnosed developmental challenges led the family to send him away from home; the two brothers sent away to the navy at an early age; or wealthy Aunt Leigh-Perrot, arrested and tried on charges of larceny.

The first Austen biography was Henry Thomas Austen 's 1818 "Biographical Notice". It appeared in a posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and included extracts from two letters, against the judgement of other family members. Details of Austen's life continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913, all of which included additional letters. Austen's family and relatives built a legend of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying her as a woman in a happy domestic situation, whose family was the mainstay of her life. Modern biographers include details excised from the letters and family biographies, but the biographer Jan Fergus writes that the challenge is to keep the view balanced, not to present her languishing in periods of deep unhappiness as "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family".