AUSTEN, Jane.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Autograph fragment, a single line of text copied by her, almost certainly from a sermon by her brother James. A remarkable discovery, found in an album compiled by Emma Austen-Leigh (1801-1876), apparently one of the "Sermon Scraps" copied out by Jane Austen from an 1814 sermon by her brother James (1765-1819) on the Book of Common Prayer and Bible reading, and later cut into pieces by his son James Edward Austen-Leigh, author of A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870). This cutting was not mounted in the album but was pushed down into the gutter of the binding.Soon after his book was published, James Edward received requests for his aunt's autograph. Serendipitously, as he explained to his daughter Mary Augusta, "Mamma has found what I had known of but forgotten, an MS sermon partly written out by Aunt Jane for my father. This I have been able to break up into about twenty sentences. I have pasted each to a larger strip of paper, and have added a certificate that it is in her handwriting, not her composition."James Edward sent one to his first correspondent, the Mechanics' Institution in Guernsey, but it is no longer to be found there. Other fragments have surfaced over the years, including examples now in the Fitzwilliam Museum and King's College, Cambridge, and others offered at Sotheby's London in 1985 and 1986 and at Bonhams London in 2026. In her 2013 study, Deirdre Le Faye identified 14 separate fragments, 12 of which were then still extant. The present fragment was unknown to

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