Jane Austen (1775–1817), Autograph letter to Cassandra Austen, Godmersham, June 20–22, 1808. Purchased by J. P. Morgan Jr., 1920; MA 977.16
“Expect a most agreeable Letter; for not being overburdened with subject—(having nothing at all to say)—I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end.” —Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, January 21–22, 1801
Nowhere else can we hear Jane Austen’s own voice as clearly as in her letters. They let us listen in on the lifelong conversation she enjoyed with her sister Cassandra, her closest confidante and chief correspondent. Vivid and gossipy, they bring Austen’s private world and personality into focus. Their contents overflow with news of family and friends, domestic detail, and “important nothings” like boredom and bad breath at a country ball. The portrait of the novelist that emerges is clever and observant, occasionally snobbish, and skilled in “the true art of letter-writing,” which Austen herself declared, “is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.”1
Scholars estimate that Austen wrote several thousand letters; only about 161 survive. After Jane’s death, Cassandra selectively censored her correspondence, cutting out portions she judged unfit for future readers. These snippets likely contained uncharitable remarks about relatives or references to bodily ailments. Cassandra is thought to have destroyed many more letters to safeguard her late sister’s privacy.
Those that remain are marked by thrift. Because paper was expensive, Austen kept most of her missives to a single sheet, folded in half to make four pages. Postage at the time was charged by the number of sheets and distance travelled and paid by the recipient. To save space, Austen wrote to the very edge of the page, sometimes even upside down between the lines or perpendicularly across them, a common practice known as cross writing that would have tested Cassandra’s eyes and patience. Postscripts appear squeezed at the top of the sheet or sideways on the last page, which, before the widespread use of envelopes, doubled as an address panel.
This digital collection reproduces fifty-one letters in Austen’s hand, the largest collection anywhere in the world. Also included are three letters addressed to Jane, one letter by Jane copied out by a family descendant, and two deeply personal letters written by Cassandra after Jane’s final illness. Highlights include a letter about fashion featuring a drawing of the lace pattern from Jane’s cloak; a playful letter to her eight-year-old niece, Cassy, with each word spelled backwards; and a grief-stricken letter penned by Cassandra to Fanny Knight, another beloved niece, two days after Jane died in her arms: “I havelost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,—She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I lost a part of myself.”
The core of the Morgan’s Austen collection, comprising forty-one letters, was purchased by J. P. Morgan Jr. in 1920 for just three thousand dollars. More letters were acquired five years later, followed in 1975 by the bequest of Alberta H. Burke of Baltimore, which added eight letters by Jane and two by Cassandra. Transcripts of Austen's complete correspondence along with provenance and publication history have been compiled and edited by Deirdre Le Faye in Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Introduction by Dale Stinchcomb, Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, 2025
Endnotes
- Jane Austen (1775–1817), Autograph letter to Cassandra Austen, Steventon, January 3–5, 1801. The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 977.9.
