Letters of Jane Austen by Austen Jane

Author:Austen, Jane [Austen, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Classics
Published: 2011-04-07T03:35:56+00:00

Miss Austen, Edward Austen's, Esq. Godmersham Park, Faversham, Kent.

Letters from 1811

THE first three of these are from Sloane Street, where Jane was at this time visiting her brother Henry and his wife Eliza, to whom frequent reference is made. They are lively letters, and she seems to have enjoyed herself thoroughly, and to have had plenty of amusement of one sort and another. "The D'Entraigues and Comte Julien" were doubtless friends of "Eliza," whose first husband had been a Frenchman; the Cookes and Tilsons I have already mentioned, and nobody else in the fifty-fifth letter seems to require special attention. The fifty-sixth contains some interesting allusions to "S. and S." ("Sense and Sensibility"), from which I gather that some of her home critics had thought that she put the incomes of her heroes and heroines either too low or too high. It may be remarked that, as she told us in another letter that Elizabeth was her favourite character in "Pride and Prejudice," so, with regard to the novel now under discussion, she has most reliance on a favourable reception for its heroine Elinor. Then comes an amusing description of her sister-in-law's musical party, where the drawing-room becoming too hot (an example constantly followed with fidelity by modern drawing-rooms under similar circumstances), Jane stood in the passage surrounded by gentlemen (just as other Janes have frequently done), and no doubt contributed greatly to the pleasure of the evening. I cannot pretend to interpret the message sent to "Fanny" respecting the "first glee," which is written in a "gibberish" probably only understood by the sender and receiver of the same. We must therefore be satisfied with knowing that "the music was extremely good," that the professionals, who were paid for it, sang very well, and the amateurs, who were not paid for it, would not sing at all. The Play was a favourite amusement of Jane's; she seems to have gone to one or more every time she was in London. One is sorry to gather from this letter that Eliza caught cold from getting out of her carriage into the night air when the horses "actually gibbed," and one wonders what "that quarter" was from which Aunt Jane supposed that "the alloy of Fanny's happiness" would come; but, having no clue to the mystery, one can do no more than wonder. From the fifty-seventh letter we gather that Mr. W. K. (Wyndham Knatchbull) thought Jane "a pleasant-looking young woman," and we have another "gibberish" message to Fanny, and in a reference to a lady who is "most happily married" to a gentleman who "is very religious and has got black whiskers," one detects a touch of that peculiar humour which so often amuses us in the novels.

The fifty-eighth letter imparts the interesting intelligence of a cousin's marriage, which I find duly authenticated by "Burke's Landed Gentry," which chronicles the fact that General Orde's first wife was Margaret Maria Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Wm. Beckford, Esq., of Fonthill, Wilts, and that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.