Ninety-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.
What tribute does a friend owe to a published author? My usual response: Friendship doesn’t require that you read my book—life is short, after all--but it does require that you buy it.
Jane Austen may have agreed—or so we might conclude from the letter that she finished writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 211 years ago today (#96 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence).
A day or two earlier, Austen had apparently received a copy of the second edition of Sense and Sensibility, and one of her sisters-in-law had reported that a mutual acquaintance planned to buy her own. “I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it,” Austen wrote to Cassandra. “I shall not mind imagining it a disagreable Duty to them, so as they do it.”
Given that Austen’s habit of publishing anonymously must have made it hard for her extended circle to fulfill this basic obligation of friendship, perhaps she was thinking about her sales to a wider public. But the point holds nonetheless: If you can’t get your friends to buy your books, however unwillingly, what hope is there for complete strangers?
Commentaires