This chapter examines the myth that Jane Austen's letters are mean and trivial. In his anti‐Austen tract, “Jane Austen: A Depreciation”, H.W. Garrod spoke for many when he described the letters as “a desert of trivialities punctuated by occasional oases of clever malice.” Basically, the letters were everything they could have been expected not to be, especially since Henry Austen had attested to the continuity between the novels and the letters. The letters between Austen and Cassandra provided ways of connecting two branches of a large family, which eventually inherited the letters after Austen's death and took control over how they would be published, with the growing public interest in Austen's writing. The letters, as “fragments of observation,” are like the novel but also unlike. Kathryn Sutherland writes that “Jane Austen's letters are … the contested place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary … ".
JANE AUSTEN'S LETTERS ARE MEAN AND TRIVIAL
30 Great Myths About Jane Austen ; 147-154
2020-07-23
8 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Jane Austen's Life and Letters
Wiley | 2009
|GWLB - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek | 2007
|TIBKAT | 1974
Jane Austen's Sense & sensibility : 2007
GWLB - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek | 2008
|GWLB - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek | 1979