It is frequently said of Austen’s letters that they ‘illuminate’ the world of her fiction. This is certainly the case, though to say so is hardly to say very much. Sometimes, it is true, Austen comments directly on work in progress – in particular, on the earlier novels,
Sense and Sensibility,
Pride and Prejudice and
Mansfield Park. (In a famous letter written just after the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813, she tells Cassandra that she is ‘vain enough’ over her book, but thinks it ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade.’) But what advocates of Austen’s correspondence usually mean is that the letters deal in a general way with the same topics explored in the fiction: marriages and family life, parties and balls, domestic entertainments and the now-antiquated courtship rituals of the early 19th-century provincial English gentry.
Yet with Cassandra in mind, one wants to put a finer point on it. Both Austen and Cassandra received marriage proposals at different points in their lives; Cassandra was in fact engaged to be married in 1797, only to have her fiancé die of a fever in the West Indies. Austen received at least two proposals in her youth, both of which she turned down. Biographers have made much of a mysterious ‘gentleman’ at Lyme Regis in 1804-5 who, according to Austen’s niece Caroline (who heard about it from Cassandra), had ‘seemed greatly attracted by my Aunt Jane ... I can only say that the impression left on Aunt Cassandra was that he had fallen in love with her sister, and was quite in earnest. Soon afterwards they heard of his death.’ Whatever one makes of the story (and Austen’s own part in it goes unrecorded) neither she nor Cassandra showed much real inclination for matrimony later in life. One can’t help but feel that both found greater comfort and pleasure – more of that ‘heartfelt felicity’ that Emma Woodhouse finds with Mr Knightley, or Elizabeth Bennet with the handsome Darcy – in remaining with one another.
The letters from Austen that Cassandra allowed to survive testify to such a primordial bond. Virginia Woolf observed of Austen’s fiction that ‘it is where the power of the man has to be conveyed that her novels are always at their weakest.’ Perhaps this is because men are inevitably inferior to sisters...
- Terry Castle, 'Sister-Sister', London Review of Books, 3 August 1995
