Jane Austen’s letter, in which she shares private news and neighborhood gossip with her sister, will be on display at the writer’s former home. The 1798 letter is one of approximately 160 surviving letters from the iconic author and is also one of the earliest to survive.
Cheffins Auctioneers bought it from the estate of an anonymous Cambridge resident who bought it in 2000, reports Britain’s The Guardian.
The letter, written over four pages, will go on display at the Jane Austen Permanent Museum in Chawton, the town where she lived and wrote for around eight years of her life. It was placed in an exhibition that opens on March 22 and explores and presents her relationship with her sister.
The master of the early 19th century romantic novel wrote a letter from Steventon, the family home at the time, to her sister Cassandrawho was staying with their older brother towards the end of October 1798 To Edward Austen Knight at Godmersham Park in Kent. It was written the day after Austen returned from Kent, where she and her parents and Cassandra had spent two months visiting Edward and his family.
At the time of the letter, their mother was ill, so Austen took care of the household. In a letter from “he writes with mocking self-importance about his new responsibilities,” writes the Guadian. “I am indeed a very large person. I carry the keys of the wine-closet with me, and twice since I began to write this letter I have had to give orders to the kitchen. Our dinner yesterday was very good, and the chicken was perfectly tender; so I shall not nannies should be fired because of this…”
Austen also tells her sister that the cleaner is leaving to work elsewhere and that the new maid “cleaning lot”. “It doesn’t look like anything she ever touched could be clean, but who knows?” writes down.
The author also tells Cassandra about local matters, for example that they are “brought to Mrs. Hall’s bed of Sherbourne yesterday a dead child.”
The author also lists the errands she ticked off, including purchasing Japanese ink, and her plans to “he begins to work on his hat,” of which, as he writes, “upon her chief hopes depend”.
The museum in Chawton, where the letter will go on display, acquired it through the Arts Council’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme, with which they are negotiating a £140,000 tax settlement. The scheme allows those who have an inheritance tax bill or one of its earlier forms to pay this amount by transferring important cultural, scientific or historical objects and archives into state ownership.
Jane Austen, who today is considered one of the most excellent English novelists, was not publicly recognized as a writer during her lifetime, as she published anonymously in accordance with the practice of female authors at the time. She was born in 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of a pastor. In 1787, she began writing short novellas, verses and drafts of plays. Her first serious text is a short novel in the letters of Lady Susan, but otherwise she is best known today primarily for her novels Presumptuousness and partiality, Discretion and sensitivity and Emma. She died in 1817 in Winchester and is buried in the cathedral there.
Source: Rtvslo
