From time to time – or whenever the spate of weird, annoying or delightful Jane Austen news slows to a trickle – I’ll be offering an excerpt from a letter Austen wrote on the day of my post, give or take two centuries. Herewith, the first of these:
Two hundred and ten years ago, on January 22, 1805 – letter #41, in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition -- Jane Austen had the sad duty of informing her brother Frank of the sudden death a day earlier of their beloved father, the Rev. George Austen, age seventy-three.
“We have lost an Excellent Father,” Austen wrote, before giving Frank an account of Rev. Austen's brief final illness. “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?. . . . The Serenity of the Corpse is most delightful!–It preserves the sweet, benevolent smile which always distinguished him.”
I’ve always had a soft spot for Jane Austen’s father, who gave his talented teenage scribbler a writing desk and who so enjoyed an early version of Pride and Prejudice that he offered it to a publisher too short-sighted to accept it. Alas, Rev. Austen did not live long enough to see the blossoming of his daughter’s career: his death came six years before the publication of Sense and Sensibility, the first of the novels to appear in print.