"Your Aunt C. (Cassandra) does not like desultory novels, and is rather afraid yours will be too much so, that there will be too frequently a change from one set of people to another, and that circumstances will be introduced of apparent consequence which will lead to nothing. It will not be so great an objection to me if it does. I allow much more latitude than she does, and think nature and spirit cover many sins of a wandering story, and people in general do not care so much about it for your comfort.... I have scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon (don't tell Mr. C. Lyford) would not be introduced to men of their rank, and when Mr. P. is first brought in, he would not be introduced as the Honourable. That distinction is never mentioned at such times, at least I believe not."
Of a later novel of Anna's, which Jane "read to your Aunt Cassandra in our own room at night, while we undressed," she tells the girl that "Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a 'vortex of dissipation.' I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened...."
Mrs. Austen had said, and Jane agreed with her, that Anna had allowed a married couple in the novel to be too long in returning a visit from the Vicar's wife, and Jane had ventured to expunge, as "too familiar and inelegant," the "Bless my heart" in which Sir Thomas, one of the characters, indulged. Jane's own Emma might say "Good God!" when she pleased, but Anna's Sir Thomas might not even bless his heart!
A last criticism on Anna's book is worth quoting for its direct bearing on the critic's own method. "You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left."
Jane's estimate of her own manner of work is modest enough. "The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour," she says. With this phrase of her own as a text she has been called a "miniaturist," but if authors and artists are to be compared, there is quite as much of the selection and the richness of a Gainsborough in her work as of the minuteness of a Metzu or a Meissonier.
In her reply to the amazing proposal of the librarian at Carlton House that she should compose an historical romance founded on the records of the Saxe-Coburg family, she writes, not without a touch of her gentle satire—
"I am fully sensible that (such a romance) might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at any other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
Her limitations of subject are clear to her own mind. Even of the "domestic life in villages" she would only deal with the side where the daily bread was provided out of income, not out of retail profits or weekly wages. It is a suggestive fact, to which I have already alluded, that she never even tried to draw a peasant's family. Her heroines may, on the rarest occasions, call at a cottage to inquire after a sick child or leave a charitable gift, but of the conditions under which the labouring classes lived, during the hard times of the French wars, we learn nothing at all from her writings. The nearest approaches to such subjects are the account of the Prices' home at Portsmouth (a sordid interior which has been held, I think not unjustly, to be as vivid in its suggestion of impecuniosity and discomfort as anything written by Zola), and the similar, but far less effective, picture of the Watsons' family life.
Her literary style seems to be spontaneous, and so, in comparison with that of "stylists," it certainly is. She had stored her mind with good literature while still in her teens, and no doubt most of her limpid sentences flowed freely from her pen. But the consistent absence of superfluous epithets and other redundancies is evidence that she had consciously formed an ideal of composition, and that she thought out the means of producing her effects is clear from several passages in her letters. To her niece who addressed her as "Dear Miss Darcy," and wanted her to answer in that character, Jane replied—"Even had I more time I should not feel at all sure of the sort of letter that Miss D. would write." She had studied her art till she could analyze its qualities, as we may see from a letter written from Chawton in 1813. Mrs. Austen had been reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to Jane and Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austens), and Jane tells Cassandra that—
"Though she perfectly understands the characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought. Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough. The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling, it wants shade—to be stretched out here and there ... an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style."