On this day in 1808. . .

Ninety-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

Janeites do not always take Jane Austen at her word when it comes to the people she loved.

For instance, there’s Cassandra, Austen’s beloved older sister and lifelong best friend. They were so close that after Jane’s death, Cassandra wrote, “It is as if I had lost a part of myself.” But decades later, Cassandra burned most of Jane’s letters, and Janeites can’t forgive her for the biographical bonfire.

There’s the oldest Austen brother, James, whom Austen described as “so good & so clever a Man” –but whom she also criticized as a dull and inconsiderate house guest. Accordingly, Janeites dislike him. Good and clever? Ha!

And then there’s Fanny Knight, the oldest of the many Austen nieces and nephews and the first child of Edward Knight, the third-eldest Austen brother. Fanny was more than seventeen years younger than her Aunt Jane, but despite the age gap, the two women grew close—as Austen attests in the letter she began writing to Cassandra exactly 216 years ago today (#57 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence).

“I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny; I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another Sister, & could not have supposed that a neice would ever have been so much to me,” Jane writes to Cassandra, who was staying at Edward’s house in Kent to help out as the family welcomed its eleventh (!) baby. “She is quite after one’s own heart; give her my best Love, & tell her that I always think of her with pleasure.” *

Case closed, right? Jane Austen loved Fanny, and so we must, as well.

Not so fast. More than sixty years later, in a private letter to one of her sisters, Fanny recalled that her famous aunt “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.”

The Austen family, Fanny explained, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes. . . . Aunt Jane was too clever not to put aside all possible signs of ‘common-ness’ (if such an expression is allowable) & teach herself to be more refined. . . . Both the Aunts were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion &c) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage which brought them into Kent. . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever & agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.” **

This condescending and snobbish passage has ruined Fanny’s reputation for generations of Janeites. It's useless to point out that by 1869, Fanny was an elderly Victorian lady whose ideas of refinement had no doubt been shaped by her long marriage to an aristocrat—and that, at the age of seventy-six, she might have been starting to suffer from the dementia that eventually overtook her.

Nope: there’s no coming back from suggesting that Our Jane was—perish the thought!--vulgar. Another sister, indeed! With sisters like that. . .

* The letter gains added poignancy because we know, as the Austen sisters did not, that just days later, fifteen-year-old Fanny would lose her mother to childbirth complications.

**Text taken from Claire Tomalin’s Austen biography, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1997), pp. 134-5.