It will be remembered that Miss Austen is less explicit about Edmund Bertram:
“I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.”
On the other hand, Marianne Dashwood required two years to conquer her devotion to Willoughby in favour of Colonel Brandon; but then Miss Austen has claimed for her sex, through Anne Elliot, “the privilege of loving longest, when existence, or when hope, is gone.”
FOOTNOTES:
[6] She died 18th July 1817.
[7] It may surely be questioned whether this remark quite allows for the home of Fanny Price.
PARALLEL PASSAGES
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name an author of genius even approximately equal to Jane Austen’s who owed so little as she to any deliberate study of literary models or conscious attention to the laws of style. Concerning her personal character and private interests we know, indeed, surprisingly little; but it is certain, on the one hand, that she was not in touch with the men and women of letters among her contemporaries, and, on the other, that her family circle did not practise the gentle art of criticism. The further assumption that she had thought little, and read less, about the theory of her art, is justified by the absence of any such references in her letters, and by her simple ideas of construction, as developed in the advice to a young relative who was attempting to follow her example:
“You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”
Jane Austen, however, read novels with keen enjoyment: Northanger Abbey is in part an avowed burlesque of Mrs. Radcliffe, and we can discover, in the language of Shakespearean commentary, the “originals” for several of her plots and persons in the works of Fanny Burney.