Yes, things do seem alarmingly imminent. I do appreciate your anxiety, and in ideal circumstances I would have responded even more promptly. Also, and equally unfortunately for your project I was a pre-Victorian novelist, and sound recording didn’t develop until more than a half-century after my death. In my time musical cultivation was an important part of a lady’s education – remember Darcy’s younger sister Georgiana in my Pride and Prejudice, for example, who played and sang all day according to the housekeeper at Pemberley, and was the more highly considered as a result, and Mary Bennet, the middle-ranking Bennet sister, who also practised and played with less happy results; also the sensitive Marianne who is capable of rendering “powerful concertos” in Sense and Sensibility.

I myself had a music collection and set great store by the pianos I owned in Steventon and later in Chawton, Hampshire: for the later one I paid thirty guineas, rather a lot of money for an impoverished family of females (myself, my elder sister Cassandra, and my mother), which shows what store I set by my musical cultivation, rather like Anne Elliot in Persuasion perhaps, who plays while the others dance with the man she loves! I had my own music collections and also copied music for friends and relatives, including some the rich Knight family of Godmersham. Many of the pieces I played were by lesser composers of the day like Schobert, Pleyel, and Arne, though I knew at least some bits and pieces hacked from the works of Handel, (Messiah), Haydn and Mozart.

Also popular in my time were “Scotch and Irish airs”, melodies made into songs, and one of those in particular, “Robin Adair”, was made famous in Emma as a sign of the love which has blossomed between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax in the fashionable resort of Weymouth. Frank uses it as a ruse to deceive Emma in her speculations about Jane as a forlorn lover of Mr. Dixon, now the husband of her best friend, living in Ireland. Music is also socially significant in my social context and novels alike, partly of course because it is the basis of the private and public balls, in which traditional English country dancing, a highly evolved and demanding pursuit, brings the sexes together in a more formal time than yours. Information about this tradition is provided in The Making of Pride and Prejudice by Sue Birtwhistle and Susie Conklin, and it is brilliantly illustrated in the Netherfield ball which briefly unites Elizabeth and Mr Darcy in the BBC adaptation to which the book is an accompaniment. Note the brilliant session musicians of London who play the thing straight off with no rehearsal time allowed. The particular piece in which Lizzie somewhat reluctantly partners Darcy, incidentally, is called “Mr Beveridge’s Maggot”: a “maggot”, in case you were wondering, my dear, as who would not, is a fancy, or a fancy which threatens to become an obsession, perhaps. I do hope all this helps, and that things will go well for you!

With best wishes. Jane.

You may not know it, but you are auditioning as one of my "bad-ish" characters! "Your questions (plural) answered", certainly, but didn't expect people to get quite so plural. You need a certain confidence to go through my novel yourself, I think -- I often give information pretty plainly there. Indeed, you seem to think I should read my novels for you as well as merely writing them!

Well, enough harrrumphing, I suppose: here are a few pointers: the grand houses of Emma are Hartfield and Donwell, the latter Mr Knightley's, with a larger estate. Emma's at Hartfield was "merely a sort of notch" in it. Donwell was once an Abbey -- an ancient, rambling property appropriated in the sixteenth century from a religious order. Mr. Knightley is the local landowner, a sort of Squire, and a magistrate, who looks after the local folk in Highbury as well as himself, apparently. Both Mr Knightley and the Woodhouses are the leading families in the area with an income in the thousands, Mr. Elton the local clergyman with a few hundred and a parsonage who marries trade-rich Augusta, whose family fortune, made in Bristol, may be derived from the slave trade. The Coles are the local tradespeople (new money folk rising in status but below the old money gentry families in rank). Frank Churchill had been brought up by a rich family and even moved in courtly circles (George III made Weymouth fashionable, and there he met Jane Fairfax, with whom he is in love.) But he is the son of Mr Weston given away to the childless Churchills, and Mr Weston's status is less assured, though apart from money through trade he also has the military rank of Captain, rendering him more acceptable to the snobbish Emma, no doubt. Jane Fairfax is an accomplished and talented girl brought up by Colonel Campbell, a companion for their daughter, recently maried to a Mr Dixon. This small crisis, the end to a sort of first career, brings her to Highbury. She is a relative of the impoverished Bateses: old Mrs Bates was married to a clergyman (deceased), and pension arrangements don't seem to be too satisfactory; she and her daughter Miss Bates have scarcely enough to keep bodies and souls together. Jane Fairfax, now equally poor through loss of previous status, may have to go a-governessing (teaching -- a dreadful fate in my book[s]), unless Frank Churchill, an unreliable young man tied to the whims of his tyrannical "adopted" mother, Mrs Churchill keeps his promise to marry her, and is allowed to.

In the end Mrs Churchill dies, Frank marries his sweetheart, Emma marries the much older Mr Knightley, which is neat as her sister Isabella has already married his brother John. Her little friend Harriet Smith marrries Farmer Robert Martin after initial discouragement from the snooty, self-deceiving Emma. As you know, I liked marriage-plots, and this, my fifth novel, gives to the added value of three for the price of one. Now don't say you haven't got enough out of me, my dear! Time for you to do a bit of exploring yourself, I think! With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Embroidering the truth was indeed one of my themes and preoccupations, especially in Emma. Emma finally conceded that there was "some little likeness between" herself and the devious Frank Churchill, and on this basis there might indeed be "some little likeness" between myself and Anna. Wasn't the whole programme rather rich in, made out of, simulations of one kind or another, though -- in which case Anna might be capturing the spirit of the thing in claiming to be "virtually" a modern version of myself? -- An actress purporting to be me doing a fair impression of Amanda Root as Anne Elliot in the 1995 Persuasion, for example, musical soundtrack from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility over a simulation of me in what purported to be a real-life situation, Kate Winslet as Marianne being rejected by Greg Wise as Willoughby in the film of Sense and Sensibility offered as a version of my feelings on my "rejection" by Tom Lefroy, "versions" of me offered by various young actresses in close-up purporting to correspond to random descriptive pot-shots by some of my contemporary relatives. And so on.

However, well-spotted is all I can add for now. With good wishes for the new year, my 228th, incidentally, I think!

Jane Austen.

As you may know, I was fond of music and had a practised hand and eye for it. I played and sang, “chiefly before breakfast” in one account, at Chawton, in Hampshire, my last home (in which my last three completed novels were produced). I owned music collections which consisted largely of near-contemporary songs and ballads which included interesting narratives of their own. They are often impassioned in theme and expression -- therapeutic material for those of us chafing against the restraints of the time.

There is also interesting material on the music of my time in the book of the famous 1995 adaptation, The Making of Pride and Prejudice, edited by Sue Birtwhistle and Susie Conklin (Penguin), more particularly on the traditions of English country dancing detailed in books of the period listed there, especially perhaps the Apted Book of Country Dances (see pp. 61-72).

An article in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America (no.23, 2001), by Molly Sandock, “’I Burn with Contempt for My Foes’” is rich in detail about the sort of music I knew about and practised; while Patrick Piggott, in a book called The Innocent Diversion (Douglas Cleverdon: The Clover Hill Editions, 1979) takes a slightly different tack in describing in detail the music which entered my novels and the role(s) it played there. (It is at least interesting that, for example, the superior musical artistry of the significantly named Jane Fairfax in Emma seems to challenge the pecking order established by sheer rank.) Piggott, however, seems almost to accuse me of philistinism (i.e. of actually preferring the inferior music which [mostly] came my way -- tsk! tsk!), but yet another book by Robert K. Wallace seems to contest this on slightly different grounds, pursuing an analogy with Mozart in suggesting that my habits of literary composition at least had something in common with those of my very great contemporary in music.