The Letters of Jane Austen

Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by William Beechey, Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough. Austen writing to her sister Cassandra about balls, muslin, income, neighbors and the progress of her own manuscripts, in a voice that is recognizably the one behind the novels and rather sharper. The letters survive because Cassandra kept them and destroyed the rest; her great-nephew published what was left in 1884. This selection is drawn from that compilation. Sixty plates of portraits and scenes by painters including John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, dating from 1770 to 1842, picture the world the letters move through.