Virginia Woolf compared her to Shakespeare: “She flatters and cajoles you with the promise of intimacy and then, at the last moment, there is the same blankness. She is not just representing characters in her novels she is representing the discursive bubble those characters inhabit, and she almost never steps outside that bubble.
Besides the usual difficulties involved in trying to extract a moral from works of literature, there is the problem of Austen’s irony. The letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.” After Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed or censored most of Jane’s letters to her, and after their brother Francis’s death his daughter destroyed all of Jane’s letters to him. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. “What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea.
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