Forty-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters
It’s hardly news to dedicated Janeites that the Jane Austen we encounter in her letters – personal correspondence never intended for strangers’ eyes -- wasn’t always nice, at least in the sweet, simpering, derided-by-Henry-Tilney sense of the word. (See under: dead baby joke.)
So it shouldn’t be a shock to encounter Austen cold-bloodedly discussing the recent sad fate of a Southampton acquaintance.
“Mr Waller is dead, I see,” the thirty-two-year-old Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, in a letter begun exactly 211 years ago today (#53 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence). “I cannot greive about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much.”
Ouch! Not for Austen those conventional pieties in which every departed relative is a beloved husband and revered father. Not for her the dictum to speak no ill of the dead. She didn't like the man, and she won't pretend otherwise just because he's recently deceased.
And what a novelist! Just eighteen words, and yet we know there’s a story in there somewhere: Was Mr. Waller abusive? Was Mrs. Waller unfaithful? Were they a Bennet-style mismatch, or a coldly pragmatic financial alliance, or a May-December love story gone sour? We’ll never know, but in a not-very-nice throwaway line, Jane Austen makes us wish we could.