On this day in 1816. . .

One hundredth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

As we Janeites never tire of pointing out, Jane Austen was not a Victorian writer, since she died twenty years before Queen Victoria ascended the British throne. And in at least one respect, Austen’s sensibilities were distinctly un-Victorian: She was unsentimental about children.

That lack of sentimentality is on display in the letter Austen wrote to her 10-year-old niece Caroline exactly 209 years ago today (#140 in Deirdre Le Faye's standard edition of Austen's correspondence). Austen is reporting a piece of extended-family news, the recent death of the probably-80-something Elizabeth Leigh, a first cousin of Austen’s mother.

“We all feel that we have lost a most valued old freind,” Austen writes to Caroline, “but the death of a person at her advanced age, so fit to die, & by her own feelings, so ready to die, is not to be regretted.”

Even in a letter to an adult, this bracing pragmatism might seem almost too cold-blooded. (“Not to be regretted”? Really? Not at all?) In a letter to a child, it’s . . . well, let’s just say that I can’t imagine these words issuing from the pen of Charles Dickens, creator of saintly Tiny Tim and Little Nell.

Still, Austen’s bluntness doesn’t seem to have traumatized Caroline, who kept the letter for at least the next 36 years, before dividing it into sections that she passed on to younger relatives. Maybe Austen understood her audience--or maybe my instinct to cushion this blow is an artifact of my own post-Victorian sentimentality about children.

Still, for contemporary readers, Austen’s clear-eyed attitude toward death has a sadly ironic quality: We know that when she wrote this letter, Austen herself had only fifteen months left to live.