There is no good, undisputed portrait of Jane Austen and controversy has developed over what there is. Claudia Johnson's ‘Fair Maid of Kent?’ article began by asking, ‘What did Jane Austen look like?’ and concluded that we cannot be at all sure, since ‘the only unequivocally authentic image we really have [is] that watercolour depicting Austen from behind, wearing a large bonnet.’

Problems about the portraits arise partly from lack of knowledge about many aspects of Austen's life. As her niece, Caroline Austen, wrote to James Edward Austen-Leigh, when he was preparing his 1870 A Memoir of Jane Austen: ‘I feel it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generation.’ If Jane Austen's siblings concealed a good deal, the next generation followed suit. Kathryn Sutherland says, ‘We now know that her nieces and nephew did not tell us the whole truth about Jane Austen and her family as they knew it.’ Once all those of the two generations who had known Austen had died, some information relevant to the portraits was gone for good. It is against this background that questions of authenticity and image have to be considered and, where certainty is impossible, degrees of probability assessed.

ORIGINAL PORTRAITS

Cassandra Austen's sketches

The 1804 sketch

This is a watercolour drawing, signed C.E.A. (Cassandra Elizabeth Austen) and dated 1804 (see frontispiece). Identification of the sitter as Jane Austen is confirmed in a letter written by her niece, Anna Lefroy, to James Edward Austen-Leigh in 1862, in which ‘a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her on one of their expeditions – sitting down out of doors on a hot day, with her bonnet strings untied’ is mentioned. It is also probably referred to in a letter of Henry Austen to Richard Bentley in 1832, discussed below. After Cassandra's death, this drawing went, with some letters and other items including the unsigned sketch, to Cassy Esten Austen, eldest daughter of Charles Austen, the youngest of Jane and Cassandra’s brothers (Family Record, p. 280). It is still owned in the Austen family.