Ninety-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.
Jane Austen was a patriotic Briton, and during her lifetime, the United States was a fledgling nation, just a few decades removed from its status as a collection of British colonies. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock to run across the rather . . . jaundiced opinion of us Americans that Austen expressed in the letter she wrote to her friend Martha Lloyd exactly 210 years ago today (#106 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence).
Although only four of Jane’s letters to her survive, Lloyd was a lifelong friend of both Austen sisters, and by the time this letter was written, she had spent five years living with them and their mother in Chawton cottage. But in September 1814, Lloyd was visiting friends in Bath while Jane stayed with her brother Henry in London.
That month, the conflict that Americans call the War of 1812 was still in progress, and according to Austen’s letter, Henry and those with whom he was discussing politics were predicting (correctly, as it turned out) that Britain could not reconquer America—and that a failed effort to do so might prove ruinous.
Still, Austen expressed some optimism about the situation. “If we are to be ruined, it cannot be helped,” she wrote to Lloyd, “—but I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven, as a Religious Nation, a Nation inspite of much Evil improving in Religion, which I cannot beleive the Americans to possess.”
Ouch! No claim to the protection of heaven! From a clergyman’s daughter, that’s quite a diss. I’d like to believe that Austen would have modified her opinion had she known how many copies of her books Americans would one day buy.
Comments