@the Morgan Library

I went to the exhibit.

Actually, I joined the Morgan Library, so I could go repeatedly, the chance to see Jane Austen's actual letters being something that does not happen every day, even in New York. So I plan to go back.

Here, then, are my very first impressions: The exhibit is confined in too small a space. The Gillrays, however, are great. I had seen them reproduced in many books, and digitized in various British museums, but there is nothing like seeing an actual print, life-size, in front of you.

The letters of Jane Austen! Oh, what can I say? She has wonderful handwriting, tiny, perfectly even and perfectly spaced, with never a blot, matching to her what her younger relatives remembered of her being dexterous and clever in every handy undertaking: needlework, spillikins and cup-and-ball. Her handwriting is in fact so perfect you might be tempted to think this is something innate to people from the 18th century, were it not that Morgan had happened to also collect one of the letters to JA from James Stanier Clarke, the librarian to the Prince Regent, who wrote to JA after her visit to Carlton House, the Prince Regent's London home, in the fall of 1815. His handwriting is a sloppy, random disaster, something I might produce if you gave me a quill and ink. And he had been using a quill and ink all his life, unlike me. So perfectly spaced, perfectly composed handwriting, such as you see in the letters of Jane Austen or facsimiles of the Declaration of Independence are not ordinary, but examples of unusually orderly minds, and unusually dexterous hands.

@ the exhibit: numerous letters are on display, as well as other rare examples of words actually written by Jane Austen: manuscript pages of "Lady Susan," "The Watsons," the "Plan for a Novel, According to Suggestions From Various Quarters." And yet no transcriptions are provided, and I cannot help wondering why. It's not like we don't know what they say: they have all been transcribed. I have read them all. Despite the perfect evenness of JA's handwriting, they are not so easy to read that you can read them standing there over a glass case.

Country Gentry

Last week we assumed the life of country gentry: Staying in the gracious home of wealthier relatives, paying visits, attending concerts, taking long walks in the woods with the dog. And, of course, not working, because otherwise how do you have the time to do all that, and really enjoy it? Now, alas, it is back to reality. I found myself thinking about what a broad margin Jane Austen had to her life, for all her worries about money and her relative lack of autonomy, for all the social restrictions that hedged her in.

Now I am reading another Austen-inspired fiction. Actually it is not entirely fictional: In Cassandra & Jane the author is writing from the perspective of Jane's sister, Cassandra, more than 20 years after Jane's death and nearing her own end, looking back at life with Jane and sorting her letters into two piles: those to be burned and those that can survive.

That destruction, of course, is a major sore point with Austen enthusiasts everywhere, and it's a brilliant idea to attempt to fictionally restore them. As she retells the story of Jane Austen's life, in a clearly well researched way, made-up excerpts from letters, filling in the tantalizing biographical gaps, mingle with excerpts from real ones.

The two major challenges this author poses for herself: to immerse herself in the mind and worldview of Cassandra Austen, a person living nearly 200 years ago, and to write letters (or fragments of letters) that Jane Austen might plausibly have written. Both are hard, but the second is much harder.

I haven't written about Jane Austen's letters here, though I think about them all the time. They are the main source of information about her personal and emotional life, and if you read enough biographies you see the same fragments quoted over and over. The trouble is that Jane Austen, a master of irony in her novels, is an even more ironic and unreliable narrator in her letters, particularly the ones to Cassandra, which are probably the bulk of those that exist. You can vividly see the quicksilver play of her mind at work, riffing on the trivialities of daily life with deadpan humor. But is she actually joking, sometimes?