On this day in 1801. . .

One hundred and first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

How improper were Jane Austen’s letters?

By today’s standards--not very. Among the 160 extant letters, you’ll look in vain for blasphemy, obscenity, explicit sexual references, or anything else that might earn a 21st-century TV-M rating. Perhaps Cassandra burned the good stuff? Probably not, but if so, she did a thorough job.

But apparently not thorough enough for the Austen family’s Victorian descendants—or so we might conclude from the letter that Jane started writing to Cassandra exactly 224 years ago today (#35 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence).

Writing from Bath, where she is visiting relatives, Austen brings Cassandra up to date on the details of her arrival and first evening in the city. “I have been awake ever since 5 & sooner,” she writes. “I fancy I had too much cloathes over my stomach.”

Except that if you’d read this letter when it was first published, in 1884, you would have understood Austen to have written, “I fancy I had too much cloathes over me.”

Yes, mentioning a lady’s stomach—even one covered so completely that the lady in question felt overheated--was apparently a bridge too far for the first editor of Austen’s letters: her great-nephew, Edward Lord Brabourne, who published the letters that Cassandra had bequeathed to his mother, Fanny Knight.

Janeites revile Fanny for her late-in-life pronouncement that Austen “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent,” and her son—whose prissy censorship of Austen’s letters is well-known--seems to have inherited similar standards of snootiness.*

Somewhere, Jane Austen is giggling.

* Curiously, according to Le Faye's footnotes, Austen's first scholarly editor, R.W. Chapman, did not restore the alteration to Letter #35 in his twentieth-century editions of Austen's correspondence.