Who's counting?

It’s fair to say that Jane Austen was a prolific letter-writer. Deirdre Le Faye, who edited the standard edition of Austen’s correspondence, once reckoned that in her 41 years of life, Austen wrote some 3,000 letters, “at a conservative estimate.” Of this number, only 160* survive—less than 6 percent of that (possibly understated) total.

You might be forgiven for assuming that the slimness of these pickings is all Cassandra Austen’s fault.

“Cassandra purged the letters in the 1840s, destroying a majority and censoring those that remained,” asserted a 2019 post on the blog of the Oxford University Press. “Jane Austen wrote so many letters, but. . . her sister Cassandra destroyed most of them before she died,” the Instagram account JaneAustenWasHere announced in January. “Cassandra burnt the vast majority of her sister’s letters,” the British magazine Country & Town House agreed this summer.

But no matter how often this particular claim is repeated, a teensy bit of common sense will make clear that it probably isn’t true. Cassandra certainly burnt many of the letters that Jane Austen wrote to her, but it’s unlikely that her bonfire included the majority of the letters that Jane Austen wrote to all her correspondents.

The tally of extant letters makes this clear. Of the surviving 160, 95 were written to Cassandra, but the remaining 65 went to 18 other correspondents: friends, relatives, and business associates. Most of these people received only one or two of the surviving letters; a few (Austen’s nieces Anna Lefroy and Fanny Knight, her brother Frank, and her publisher John Murray) got a more substantial number.

If we assume that the surviving letters constitute a precise microcosm of Austen’s entire correspondence, that means that more than 40 percent of her letters weren’t written to Cassandra. If Austen’s other correspondents had held onto their letters from her, we’d have nearly half of all the letters she ever wrote, even if Cassandra is assumed to have destroyed 95 percent of hers. Cassandra could still be said to have destroyed “the majority” of Jane’s letters—95 percent of her 59 percent would amount to about 56 percent of the total—but hardly “the vast majority.”

But do the surviving letters constitute a precise microcosm of Austen’s entire correspondence? How likely is it that she wrote six out of every ten of her letters to someone she lived with much of the time? Not likely, it seems to me—especially when we consider that she spent many years not living with her brothers and their families, not to mention assorted other aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and acquaintances.

My guess—and it can only be a guess, given the paucity of the evidence for the now-lost letters—is that Cassandra’s cache, while substantial and valuable, constituted less than half of Austen’s lifetime correspondence. We can still blame her for the bonfire—I certainly do!--but there’s enough blame to go around.

* Some sources claim that 161 Austen letters survive, but this total includes Le Faye’s Letter #122(A)(D), to Austen’s publisher John Murray, which Henry Austen dictated to his sister while recovering from a serious illness. In other words, while the letter (or, at any rate, the draft of it that survives) is in Jane’s handwriting, the text was composed by Henry.