Rare Jane Austen letter to sister to be sold at auction
Caps with “large full bows of very narrow ribbon … one over the right temple, perhaps, and another at the left ear” were the height of fashion in 1813 – at least according to Jane Austen, who informs her sister Cassandra of the latest trend in a rare letter that will be auctioned at Bonhams in New York next month.
Letters from Austen seldom come up for auction, because Cassandra and other members of the novelist’s family destroyed the majority of them in the 1840s. Of the estimated 3,000 missives written by Austen, only around 161 survive, of which around 95 are to Cassandra.
The letter, dated 16 September 1813 and written shortly after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, runs to four pages. Dealing with everything from a trip to the dentist with her nieces to her mother’s health (Austen is hopeful she is “no longer in need of leeches”), it is “a gem”, according to Kathryn Sutherland, an Austen scholar and trustee of Jane Austen’s House Museum.
Bonhams, which will auction the letter on 23 October, said it is “full of lively detail, wit and charm”, vividly echoing the world [Austen] deftly portrayed in her novels” and “written at the height of [her] literary powers”.
“The poor Girls & their Teeth!” writes Austen at one point. “Lizzy’s were filed & lamented over again & poor Marianne had two taken out after all ... we heard each of the two sharp hasty screams.” The dentist, she adds, “must be a Lover of Teeth & Money & Mischief” – she “would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth & double it”.
She also mentions a visit to a “Mrs T”. This is Fanny Tilson, the wife of Henry Austen’s business partner, James Tilson, who had given birth to at least 11 children by that point. Austen finds her “as affectionate & pleasing as ever”, but notes to her sister that “from her appearance I suspect her to be in the family way. Poor Woman!”
With just a few words, the novelist conjures up for her sister an image of her situation: “We are now all four of us young Ladies sitting round the Circular Table in the inner room writing our Letters, while the two Brothers are having a comfortable coze in the room adjoining.” This use of “coze” predates the word’s first recorded appearance in print – in Austen’s own novel Mansfield Park, in 1814.
Austen also takes a deep dive into the world of headgear. “My cap is come home, and I like it very much,” she informs Cassandra. “Fanny has one also; hers is white sarsenet and lace, of a different shape from mine, more fit for morning carriage wear, which is what it is intended for, and is in shape exceedingly like our own satin and lace of last winter; shaped around the face exactly like it, with pipes and more fulness, and a round crown inserted behind. My cap has a peak in front. Large full bows of very narrow ribbon (old twopenny) are the thing. One over the right temple, perhaps, and another at the left ear.”
Bonhams believes the letter, which has been in a private collection since 1909, will fetch between £65,000 to £97,000 at auction. Sutherland said that “because of specific domestic details within it, it would have by far the greatest resonance inside the collection held by Jane Austen’s House Museum in the cottage where Austen lived and wrote”.
Earlier this year, the museum launched a crowdfunding campaign to help it raise the £35,000 it needed to buy a snippet of a letter written by Austen in 1814. More than 250 donors raised £10,000 in a public campaign in six weeks and it is on display at the museum.
Sutherland said it was particularly sad that publicly funded organisations like Jane Austen’s House Museum were unable to compete with international commercial buyers, “because so few Austen letters are retained for public benefit in British institutions”.
“If the present owners had consulted privately with us of course we would have been happy to try to reach a mutually fair accommodation, but auction house prices do not sit well with what public institutions can in most cases afford to offer,” she said.