Lost letter airs Jane Austen’s dirty linen in public
Lines cut from author’s note to sister that paint picture of domesticity go on show at her museum
‘We were hoping to find evidence of a love child, or some form of sexual liaison. But part of her charm was her domesticity’
WHEN Jane Austen died in 1817, her family is said to have destroyed some of the letters she wrote to them to avoid any potential embarrassment.
Her sister Cassandra set about burning the author’s letters to preserve her privacy, and removed passages of other letters to prevent them being leaked.
So when the last six lines of one note from Jane to Cassandra in 1813 was recently unearthed, there were hopes it would lead to an intimate secret. Instead, the author simply described matters concerning her laundry.
But yesterday a leading academic described the mention of “linen inven- tory” and “storeplaces” in the note as part of what made Austen so universally popular.
The lines, which have gone on display at the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, Hants, concern her brother Henry’s domestic affairs, as she gives her advice to his French housekeeper, Madame Bigeon, on storing his goods. She also refers to another brother, George.
In the letter, dated September 15-16, 1813, Austen wrote: “By the time you get this, I hope George & his party will have finished their Journey. God bless you all. I have given Mde. B. my Inventory of the linen, & added 2 round towels to it by her desire. She has shewn me all her storeplaces, & will shew you & tell you all the same. Perhaps I may write again by Henry.”
Professor Kathryn Sutherland, of St Anne’s College at the University of Oxford, said: “We were hoping to find evidence of a love child, or some form of sexual liaison. But she was writing to her sister from London – part of her charm was her domesticity – Austen’s was an art of the trivial, her pioneering fictions transform modest domesticity into art. We might wish that a new scrap of writing by Austen would contain intimate revelations, but what could be more perfect than a linen inventory?”
Prof Sutherland explained that much of the writer’s work was passed on through the family and eventually sold to wealthy collectors who prized the author’s handwriting.
She said: “As Jane become more popular in the 19th century, her relative Lord Brabourne sold off a lot of her notes as fast as he could. It is likely this was one of them.
“As Caroline Spurgeon, the first woman professor in London University, wrote in 1927, ‘every scrap of information and every ray of light on Jane Austen are of national importance’.”
The six lines, part of a text known as letter 87, feature in a leather-bound autograph book among more than 200 notes and signatures from figures such as George Washington and Queen Victoria. Austen herself is said to have written more than 200 letters to her family. Hazel Jones, an Austen expert, said: “As Jane’s popularity grew so did the desire to possess some of her handwritten work – people gained a bit of kudos that way, especially American collectors. If you look at this letter, you can see the autograph is missing. So that was presumably cut and sent out to someone else.
“In many of Austen’s letters she appears domestic. This is not the first – you can find others where she discusses fabric and china. The letters destroyed by Cassandra I don’t think we are ever likely to find – and the bits that she cut out, they are lost.”
The museum will display the note, along with a book of autographs, before it is returned to a private US collector who bought the book at auction for £16,000 in September 2017.
Fragments of one of Jane Austen’s letters have been unveiled for the first time in two centuries. The missing lines concern not romance or intrigue, but laundry. Though fans might prefer gossip over practical talk of “linen inventories”, nothing could be more appropriate for a writer so alert to the humour and absurdity of everyday life. There are even echoes of Austen’s Gothic parody, Northanger Abbey, whose heroine excitedly discovers some parchment in a chest on a stormy night. The next day, however, the morning light dispels her enthusiasm, revealing that the mysterious document was actually a laundry list, left behind by a servant. If only, MPS might think, they could wake up one morning and discover that Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement had undergone the same transformation.