Ninety-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.
Exactly 226 years ago today, the 23-year-old Jane Austen finished up a letter to her sister, Cassandra (#17 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). And buried amid the usual banter, gossip, and news—about a new cap, a baby nephew, an enjoyable ball—came a stray remark that, to us, seems monumental.
“I do not wonder at your wanting to read first impressions again, so seldom as you have gone through it, & that so long ago,” Austen teased Cassandra.
First Impressions, of course, was the manuscript that would be published exactly fourteen years later as Pride and Prejudice. Sandwiched between a report of two recent marriages and a remark about an old petticoat, this throwaway reference is, according to Le Faye’s footnotes, “the first surviving mention in JA’s letters of her adult literary work.”
The movies, the fanfic, the costume balls, the wet shirt, the “I Heart Darcy” tote bags and fridge magnets: All of that lay ahead, unimagined—unimaginable--by the letter’s author and recipient. As far as we know, the earth didn’t shake when Austen offhandedly mentioned her future masterpiece. But perhaps it should have.
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