_JANE AUSTEN'S WORKS._


    SENSE AND SENSIBILITY                    2 vols.
    PRIDE AND PREJUDICE                      2 vols.
    MANSFIELD PARK                           2 vols.
    EMMA                                     2 vols.
    NORTHANGER ABBEY                         1 vol.
    PERSUASION                               1 vol.
    LADY SUSAN--THE WATSONS WITH A MEMOIR    1 vol.
    LETTERS                                  1 vol.


THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN

_Selected from the Compilation of her Great Nephew_

_EDWARD, LORD BRADBOURNE_

BY SARAH CHAUNCEY WOOLSEY


[Transcriber's Note: While the title page gives credit to Lord
Bradbourne, the actual title of Edward was Lord Brabourne.]


PREFACE.


THE recent cult for Miss Austen, which has resulted in no less than ten
new editions of her novels within a decade and three memoirs by
different hands within as many years, have made the facts of her life
familiar to most readers. It was a short life, and an uneventful one as
viewed from the standpoint of our modern times, when steam and
electricity have linked together the ends of the earth, and the very air
seems teeming with news, agitations, discussions. We have barely time to
recover our breath between post and post; and the morning paper with its
statements of disaster and its hints of still greater evils to be, is
scarcely out-lived, when, lo! in comes the evening issue, contradicting
the news of the morning, to be sure, but full of omens and auguries of
its own to strew our pillows with the seed of wakefulness.

To us, publications come hot and hot from the press. Telegraphic wires
like the intricate and incalculable zigzags of the lightning ramify
above our heads; and who can tell at what moment their darts may
strike? In Miss Austen's day the tranquil, drowsy, decorous English day
of a century since, all was different. News travelled then from hand to
hand, carried in creaking post-wagons, or in cases of extreme urgency by
men on horseback. When a gentleman journeying in his own "chaise" took
three days in going from Exeter to London, a distance now covered in
three hours of railroad, there was little chance of frequent surprises.
Love, sorrow, and death were in the world then as now, and worked their
will upon the sons of men; but people did not expect happenings every
day or even every year. No doubt they lived the longer for this
exemption from excitement, and kept their nerves in a state of wholesome
repair; but it goes without saying that the events of which they knew so
little did not stir them deeply.

Miss Austen's life coincided with two of the momentous epochs of
history,--the American struggle for independence, and the French
Revolution; but there is scarcely an allusion to either in her letters.
She was interested in the fleet and its victories because two of her
brothers were in the navy and had promotion and prize-money to look
forward to. In this connection she mentions Trafalgar and the Egyptian
expedition, and generously remarks that she would read Southey's "Life
of Nelson" if there was anything in it about her brother Frank! She
honors Sir John Moore by remarking after his death that his mother
would perhaps have preferred to have him less distinguished and still
alive; further than that, the making of the gooseberry jam and a good
recipe for orange wine interests her more than all the marchings and
countermarchings, the manoeuvres and diplomacies, going on the world
over. In the midst of the universal vortex of fear and hope, triumph and
defeat, while the fate of Britain and British liberty hung trembling in
the balance, she sits writing her letters, trimming her caps, and
discussing small beer with her sister in a lively and unruffled fashion
wonderful to contemplate. "The society of rural England in those days,"
as Mr. Goldwin Smith happily puts it, "enjoyed a calm of its own in the
midst of the European tempest like the windless centre of a circular
storm."

The point of view of a woman with such an environment must naturally be
circumscribed and narrow; and in this Miss Austen's charm consists.
Seeing little, she painted what she saw with absolute fidelity and a
dexterity and perfection unequalled. "On her was bestowed, though in a
humble form, the gift which had been bestowed on Homer, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Scott, and a few others,--the gift of creative power."
Endowed with the keenest and most delicate insight and a vivid sense of
humor, she depicted with exactitude what she observed and what she
understood, giving to each fact and emotion its precise shade and
value. The things she did not see she did not attempt. Affectation was
impossible to her,--most of all, affectation of knowledge or feeling not
justly her own. "She held the mirror up to her time" with an exquisite
sincerity and fidelity; and the closeness of her study brought her
intimately near to those hidden springs which underlie all human nature.
This is the reason why, for all their skimp skirts, leg-of-mutton
sleeves, and bygone impossible bonnets, her characters do not seem to us
old-fashioned. Minds and hearts are made pretty much after the same
pattern from century to century; and given a modern dress and speech,
Emma or Elizabeth or dear Anne Eliot could enter a drawing-room to-day,
and excite no surprise except by so closely resembling the people whom
they would find there.

"Miss Austen's novels are dateless things," Mr. Augustine Birrell tells
us. "Nobody in his senses would speak of them as 'old novels.' 'John
Inglesant' is an old novel, so is 'Ginx's Baby.' But Emma is quite new,
and, like a wise woman, affords few clues to her age."

We allude with a special touch of affection to Anne Eliot. "Persuasion,"
which was written during the last two years of Miss Austen's life, when
the refining touch of Eternity was already upon her, has always seemed
to us the most perfect of her novels; and Anne, with her exquisite
breeding and unselfish straightforwardness, just touched with the tender
reserve of memory and regret, one of her best portraitures. But this is
a matter of individual taste. Doubtless Elizabeth Bennet is "better fun"
as the modern girl would say. Miss Austen herself preferred her. She had
a droll and pretty way of talking about her characters which showed how
real they were to her own mind, and made them equally real to other
people. In 1813 she had the good luck to light upon a portrait of Jane
Bennet at an exhibition.

      "I was very well pleased (pray tell Fanny) with a
      small portrait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her.
      I went in hopes of seeing one of her sister, but there
      was no Mrs. Darcy. Perhaps I may find her in the great
      exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. Mrs.
      Bingley's is exactly like herself,--size, shaped face,
      features and sweetness; there never was a greater
      likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green
      ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always
      supposed, that green was a favorite color with her. I
      dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow."

And later:--

      "We have been both to the exhibition and Sir J.
      Reynolds'; and I am disappointed, for there was
      nothing like Mrs. D. at either. I can only imagine
      that Mr. D. prizes any picture of her too much to like
      it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine
      he would have that sort of feeling,--that mixture of
      love, pride, and delicacy."

The letters included in this series comprise about three quarters of the
collection in two volumes published in 1884 by her great-nephew Lord
Brabourne. The lightness, almost friskiness, of their tone cannot fail
to strike the reader. Modern letters written by women are filled more or
less with hints and queries; questionings as to the why and the
wherefore occur; allusions to the various "fads" of the day, literary or
artistic,--Ibsen, Tolstoi, Browning, Esoteric Buddhism, Wagner's Music,
the Mind Cure, Social Science, Causes and Reforms. But Cowper and Crabbe
were the poetical sensations in Miss Austen's time, Scott and Byron its
phenomenal novelties; it took months to get most books printed, and
years to persuade anybody to read them. Furthermore the letters, in all
probability, are carefully chosen to reveal only the more superficial
side of their writer. There are wide gaps of omission, covering
important events such as Mr. Austen's death, the long illness through
which Jane nursed her brother Henry, and the anxieties and worries which
his failure in business caused to the whole family. What is vouchsafed
us is a glimpse of the girlish and untroubled moments of Miss Austen's
life; and the glimpse is a sweet and friendly one. We are glad to have
it, in spite of our suspicion that another and even more interesting
part of her personality is withheld from us.

A good daughter, a delightful sister, the most perfect of aunts, what
better record could there be of a single woman? Her literary work never
stood in the way of her home duties, any more than her "quiet, limpid,
unimpassioned style" stood between her thought and her readers.

Her fame may justly be said to be almost entirely posthumous. She was
read and praised to a moderate degree during her lifetime, but all her
novels together brought her no more than seven hundred pounds; and her
reputation, as it were, was in its close-sheathed bud when, at the early
age of forty-one, she died. It would have excited in her an amused
incredulity, no doubt, had any one predicted that two generations after
her death the real recognition of her powers was to come. Time, which
like desert sands has effaced the footprints of so many promising
authors, has, with her, served as the desert wind, to blow aside those
dusts of the commonplace which for a while concealed her true
proportions. She is loved more than she ever hoped to be, and far more
widely known. Mrs. Ritchie tells somewhere an anecdote of a party of
seven assembled at a dinner-table, where the question arose of the
locality of one of Miss Austen's places,--Maple Grove, the residence of
Mr. Suckling, if we are not mistaken,--and six of the persons present at
once recognized the allusion, and had a formed opinion on the subject.
The seventh was a Frenchman who did not read English!

Scott, Macaulay, Sir James Mackintosh, Miss Martineau, Mrs. Ritchie,
Miss Mitford, and a host of others have vied in their generous tributes
of admiration. But most striking of all, to our thinking, is that paid
to Miss Austen by Lord Tennyson when, in some visit to Lyme not many
years since, those with him pointed out this and the other feature of
the place only to be interrupted with--"Never mind all that. Show me the
exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!" Could non-historical
verisimilitude go farther or mean more?

                                                      S. C. W.
