"I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed from that quality in the author. Good-nature produces a disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express themselves with smartness against the errors of men, without bitterness towards their persons."—STEELE, Tatler, No. 242.
NOTE
The author is much indebted to the Hon. C. M. Knatchbull-Hugessen, and also to Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., for permission to make extracts from the Letters of Jane Austen.
CONTENTS
I
Jane Austen's abiding freshness—Why she has not more readers—Characteristics of her work—Absence of passion—Balzac, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë—Jane in her home circle—Her tranquil nature—Her unselfishness—Compared with Dorothy Osborne—Prudent heroines—Thoughtless admiration
II
Literary influences—Jane Austen's defence of novelists—The old essayists—Her favourite authors—Some novels of her time—Criticism of her niece's novel—Sense of her own limitations—Her method—Humour—Familiar names—Some characteristics of style—Suggested emendations—A new "problem" of authorship—A "forbidding" writer—"Commonplace" and "superficial"—Thomas Love Peacock—Sapient suggestions