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The only life portraits of Jane Austen are two sketches by her sister Cassandra from ca. 1804 and ca. 1810. The later and more famous portrait, an unsigned pencil and watercolor sketch of a hard-set and severe-looking Jane Austen, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. J. E. Austen-Leigh commissioned James Andrews to adapt Cassandra's sketch for his Memoir. Andrews's anachronistic watercolor drawing changed Austen's attitude and features, essentially making a more presentable image of the writer for the Victorian reading public.
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This twelve-page fragment is of enormous significance because it is the only manuscript extant from the period between the completion of Northanger Abbey in 1799 and the beginning of Mansfield Park in 1811 and, unlike the manuscript of Lady Susan, it is a rough draft rather than a fair copy, bearing numerous revisions and cancellations. It was probably begun in 1804 (the paper is watermarked 1803), when Austen was living in Bath. This is a portion of the unfinished novel (the larger portion of the manuscript is held by the University of London).
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Austen invested the profits of her first three published novels in £600 worth of "Navy Fives," government stock that returned five percent interest annually, bringing her £30 each year. A memorandum of her personal expenditure in 1807 (MA 2911.2), in which she spent over £42, demonstrates that the profits from her novels were not sufficient to support her independently. This note records profits from the sale of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma between March 1816 and March 1817.
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"Plan of a novel" was probably written in 1816 as a comic riposte to Austen's correspondence with James Stanier Clarke, domestic chaplain and librarian to the prince regent. Clarke had self-importantly suggested that Austen write a novel about a clergyman, perhaps modeled on his own career. Austen's "Plan" is an assemblage of cliches and ludicrous plot points—several of which were suggested by the family members, friends, and acquaintances identified in the margins—that exuberantly parodies the implausible, formulaic excesses and artificiality of romantic fiction popular in her time.
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Writing over the course of three days, Austen acknowledges receiving another letter from Cassandra in the meantime: "You are very amiable & very clever to write such long Letters; every page of yours has more lines than this, & every line more words than the average of mine.
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"My Cloak is come home, & here follows the pattern of its' lace. . . . I like it very much," writes Austen to Cassandra while on a six-week visit to the fashionable city of Bath with her parents. This letter is the earliest in the collection to show excisions, presumably by Cassandra after Austen's death, before she bequeathed the letters to their niece Fanny. Biographers suspect that the censored sections of the letters were either overly critical of family members or described indelicate physical ailments too vividly.
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In Austen's time poetry was regarded as a more serious genre than prose fiction. Austen seems to have inherited her poetic talent from her mother, but she did not consider herself to be a serious poet and generally wrote occasional poems for events, such as marriages and births, that were playful, comic, or celebratory. For Austen, reading poetry was a serious pursuit, but her own compositions were a lighthearted pastime for personal and family amusement rather than publication. Eighteen poems by Austen—not all in her hand—survive.
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In this scene from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is visiting her newlywed friend Charlotte and distant cousin Mr. Collins, and can only communicate with her sister Jane by letter. In reading Jane's letters, Elizabeth realizes Jane is gloomy about Bingley's absence, a situation for which she blames Mr. Darcy. The letters "contained no actual complaint, nor was there any revival of past occurrences, or any communication of present suffering.
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In her letter dated 24 May, 1813 (MA 977.31), Austen reports seeing a painting of how she imagines Jane Bennet, who marries Mr. Bingley at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice. "Mrs Bingley is exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her." Scholars suspect that the painting she refers to is the Portrait of Mrs Q by the French portrait painter François Huet-Villiers.
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In Austen's letter to Cassandra, written from Bath on 2 June 1799 (MA 977.4), she commented on the style of contemporary hat decorations with evident amusement: "Flowers are very much worn, & Fruit is still more the thing.—Eliz: has a bunch of Strawberries, & I have seen Grapes, Cherries, Plumbs & Apricots—There are likewise Almonds & raisins, french plums & Tamarinds at the Grocers, but I have never seen any of them in hats." Gillray's caricatures satirized ladies who wore enormous ostrich feathers that needed to be glued in place with large quantities of goose grease a
