Jane Austen and the Letter

Jane Austen’s letters have survived as evidence of her life and of her development as a writer. The preservation and recirculation of her letters into biography was initially controlled by her family and tended to divorce letter-writing from authorship. This chapter assesses the impact of letter-writing and letter-publishing agendas on the surviving letter corpus. The chapter considers the role of the Austen-Leigh and Knatchbull branches of the family in Austen life writing and surveys contemporary reviews of their publications including Brabourne’s Letters (1884) and the Austen-Leighs’ Life and Letters (1913). It retraces the role of Cassandra in the composition and retention of the letters. It explores letters in Austen’s juvenilia and letters as biographical evidence by tracing their relationship with letter manuals and epistolary fiction, concluding with a brief discussion of letters in the archive.