On this day in 1816. . .

One hundred and second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

The letter Jane Austen wrote to her 23-year-old niece Anna Lefroy exactly 209 years ago today isn’t especially remarkable--just a brief, amusing account of domestic happenings. An acquaintance has been visiting. A couple of neighbors are ailing. Anna left her gloves behind during her last stay. A young cousin was delighted to receive a present: “I do not know when I have seen her so much struck by anybody’s kindness as on this occasion. Her sensibility seems to be opening to the perception of great actions.”

But the note that Deirdre Le Faye appends to this letter--#141(C) in her standard edition of Austen’s correspondence—provides some insight into the difficulties Le Faye faced as she compiled the 1997 edition of Austen’s letters, the first in forty-five years.

The original manuscript of this letter, we learn from Le Faye’s note, was inherited by Anna’s daughter Fanny Caroline Lefroy upon her mother’s death in 1872. That original is apparently lost, but we know of its contents from two copies, the first of them included in an unpublished Family History Manuscript that Fanny Caroline wrote in the late 1870s or early 1880s.

Around the same time, Fanny Caroline’s second cousin, Edward Lord Brabourne, began assembling the first collection of Jane Austen’s letters, which was published in 1884. Brabourne drew heavily on letters he’d inherited from his mother, Jane Austen’s niece Fanny Knight, but he also included this letter to Anna. Fanny Caroline “may have sent the original MS to Lord Brabourne and possibly it was never returned to her,” Le Faye speculates in her note. (Don’t you hate it when you lend people irreplaceable cultural treasures and they just stick them on a bookshelf and never get them back to you?)

Meanwhile, Fanny Caroline Lefroy seems to have made another copy of the letter, which eventually passed to her niece Mary Isabella Lefroy. Mary Isabella made her copy available to R.W. Chapman, the editor whose early twentieth-century editions of Austen’s novels ushered her into the literary canon. Chapman checked Mary Isabella’s copy of the letter against Brabourne’s version and then published the result in his 1932 and 1952 editions of Austen’s letters.

But by the time Le Faye came along decades later, the whereabouts of Mary Isabella’s copy were unknown. And to make matters more confusing, capitalization and punctuation differ between the text of the letter included in Fanny Caroline’s Family History Manuscript and the version that Brabourne published, which Chapman verified by checking against Mary Isabella’s copy.

In compiling the fourth edition of Austen’s letters, published in 1997, Le Faye used the Brabourne/Chapman text, which “seems more likely to be accurate than the Family History version,” she argues. (Presumably she came to this conclusion because she figured that Brabourne had the original—that loaner from Fanny Caroline--to hand while he worked.)

For me, this saga highlights two important points. First, despite all the recent Miss Austen-driven scrutiny of Cassandra’s decision to burn some of her sister’s correspondence, what’s really remarkable is that we have as many of Jane’s letters as we do, what with all the lending and copying and inheriting and mislaying that went on in that big extended family.

And second, we Janeites owe a debt of gratitude to Le Faye, who parsed these complications and made it possible for us to read a modern edition of Jane Austen’s letters.