"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?