Mmmm, I will have to tread carefully here
.
I just got to this 2 days ago, I had a copy of the memoire in the Delphi collection of Austen's works but had never read it. However, on the basis of the extra material in it, I got a copy of the Oxford World Classics edition. I have scanned both and taken a couple of short sessions of reading to see what I thought and I have to say that I have dumped the project of reading either.
My reasons, which are of course personal ones and not claimed to be global, are:
1) While there is much worthwhile material in Kathryn Sutherland's introduction I found it, for my liking, very poorly written for anyone not inclined to struggle through it. Frequent long clumsy sentences, sentences with quotes included in them which, in my view, would have been better set off as extracts, very long (like VERY long) paragraphs that were unnecessarily dense and having plenty of scope in them for dismembering into a more presentable read, and often poor flow or rhythm in the what reads to me as being quite ponderous prose.
It came across to me as being from an intellectual who wrote from an introverted perspective writing to please herself, rather than with an outward view having consideration for her readers' needs. If anyone wrote for me material, of the type I have had to have produced, in the manner of this book's introduction they would be sent away to rewrite it (and I myself, have been asked to rewrite my own material having such faults, but the hard lessons in that were long back now
).
2). The memoire itself I don't have any issue with (that must be a relief after the above rant
), it is what it is and what could be expected. It is of the type that is written by local or family member amateurs about the history of some aspect of every little town (my own included) or of anyone who has some sort of place in history. Local bookshops abound with them and from my own personal view they hold little interest, I preferring a more substantial read without the trivialities and with the hearsay (of which there is quite a bit in this memoire) filtered out or tested, hopefully diligently, by a later biographer using that material for whom it is undoubtedly useful.
But it has not been a waste, my interest has been piqued enough to start reading instead Claire Tomalin's
Jane Austen, A Life which appears much better suited to my own preferences.
As an aside, there is an interesting chapter on Austen in Maugham's
Ten Novels and Their Authors which book has been mentioned in the Maugham thread (By FantasyFan if I remember correctly?).