For an example of the use of the word 'trio' by Jane Austen, see Mansfield Park, chapter xxix: 'They were now a miserable trio.'
'Persuasion'
1. Chapter i: The Hampshire and Winchester Editions, following the first edition, print the opening passage as follows:—
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; where he found occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt. As he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century, and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed: this was the page at which his favourite volume always opened.
This obviously makes no sense as it stands; and to no less a light than Macaulay belongs the credit of putting it right.
Some of his old friends (says Sir G. O. Trevelyan in his Life of Macaulay[373]) may remember how he prided himself on a correction of his own in the first page of Persuasion which he maintained to be worthy of Bentley, and which undoubtedly fulfils all the conditions required to establish the credit of an emendation; for, without the alteration of a word, or even of a letter, it turns into perfectly intelligible common-sense a passage which has puzzled, or which ought to have puzzled, two generations of Miss Austen's readers.
And in a footnote, Sir George says:—
A slight change in the punctuation effects all that is required. According to Macaulay the sentence was intended by its author to run thus: 'There any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which his favourite volume opened.'
Whether or not the emendation would have satisfied Bentley the critic, it eventually satisfied Bentley the publisher, who adopted it in his later editions.
2. Chapter i, a page or two further on, all editions read:—