‘My tree’ may be viewed in various contexts, but for most people the easiest of access would probably be in the most recent general biographies of me, respectively by David Nokes [Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997)] (inside cover); and Claire Tomalin, [Jane Austen: A Life [revised edition(London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000)].

There is also one in Park Honan’s Jane Austen: Her Life (revised and updated ed.) Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1997.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen

Sorry about the short delay-–please be kind enough to put it down to the time of year!
Anxious young Jane Fairfax in Emma—constantly on the look-out for letters from her slightly unreliable lover and secret fiancé Frank Churchill—considers how ‘wonderful’ is the post service of the day, and the exacting and rather grumpy John Knightley, the rising lawyer, does not disagree.

It is possible that we tend to underestimate the power of (literal) horsepower here—for example, young Willoughby does a romantic Dash across most of the south of England in a day to see the reportedly dying young Marianne Dashwood. Posh Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice considers 50 miles of good road little impediment to visiting—a very ‘easy distance’, he thinks. In fact the postal system changed in the course of my lifetime, from one of mounted ‘post-boys’ to well-regulated mail coaches with armed guards to defeat highwaymen. Tired horses could be replaced by ‘fresh’ ones on the different ‘stages’ of a journey. In large towns one’s servants might be asked to deliver by hand, saving money and possibly time. Otherwise, the post, for most people, was expensive, but it was the most important way of keeping in touch (to maximise its benefits many people, including myself, abbreviated words (like ‘wd.’ for ‘would’, ‘morng.’ for ‘morning’, etc.), and also wrote across the paper after filling it lengthwise.

My novels recognise this social importance, and correspondence is often ‘centre-stage’ (all my heroines receive letters quoted verbatim—Catherine in Northanger Abbey gets a sad letter from her disappointed brother James and an insincere one from her false friend Isabella, who has jilted him. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility gets a devastating one from Willoughby, Elizabeth in P&P an intriguing one from Mrs Gardiner. Fanny Price in Portsmouth in Mansfield Park receives startling epistles from Lady Bertram and her well-loved Edmund, and Emma in her novel hears the downright Mr. Knightley expatiate on how Frank Churchill uses letters to keep reality at bay and play games which ensure he doesn’t have to visit Highbury until Jane Fairfax arrives there and gives him a motive associated with his puppy-passion as an infatuated young lover. Strangest of all, Anne Elliot in Persuasion gets one written in the same room from Captain Wentworth—delivered by hand at great personal emotional expense (!) you might say, an interesting climax to the theme of letters and (non-) postal delivery! An interesting footnote to all this is that letters in my day were paid for by the recipient (the person who received them). You could avoid having your friends incur this if you knew something of great importance, like a Member of Parliament, who could ‘frank’ them for you. Edmund in Mansfield Park reminds Fanny that her uncle, Sir Thomas, will do this for her.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Thanks, incidentally, for the compliment. It is much appreciated. Yes, the word ‘genre’ or the way people use it has much to answer for. Naturally I wouldn’t speculate as to what exactly your professor has in mind, but the ‘genre’ idea has become a little protean, don’t you think? ‘The novel’ is commonly supposed to be a genre tout court, but the name is simply a variant on ‘new’, seems in itself to perform a holding operation while we decide what these new things (writings) are exactly. My eighteenth century predecessors seem to be united only in variousness – the fiction(s) of Defoe, Sterne, Swift, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson have little in common, and mine, though a bit like Richardson’s in exploring the inner world of feeling and sensibility, especially in relation to femininity, differ from his in technique and emphasis a good deal. What we seem to want the word genre to do is to describe, not only taxonomically--to pigeon hole my fiction--but to describe what it does, who to, and what reading it feels like—obviously a tall order. Can one word do all this? I do have elements of romance and satire, don’t I?

One reason why I am still so widely read is that I seem to be good at ‘realism’-–suggesting a particular social, and domestic, context, fairly un-grandiose, but including fairy-tale elements and gratifications (for characters and readers) anyway. In this respect a little-read fragment of mine, The Watsons (1802-5), written in Bath, is instructive: it depicts sisters afflicted by poverty in a snobbish context and subjected to the cruel whims of the marriage-market, and to men, including careless young dandies and patronising lords. It seems suggestive for its sense of what my awareness included—a sense of life in the raw—and what I decided to exclude; creative roads not finally taken. By contrast, my major fictions aren’t quite so unromantic in tone: Sense and Sensibility's sister-pair of Elinor and Marianne are poor but genteel, though they are patronised and, in a way, ‘abused’. The ‘fairy-tale’ here is in the marital conclusion, though the celebrations are a bit muted—does Marianne really love her Colonel, for example. And nasty and silly people seem to abound in the novel.

In Pride and Prejudice there is pressure on the Bennets from the patriarchal ‘entail’ which means they may lose their residence on the death of Mr Bennet, but Elizabeth is finally borne off to the never-never land of Pemberley and ‘thoughts of peace under an English heaven’, and Jane marries the rich young man originally thought too good for her. Also, day-to-day life at Longbourn, the Bennet family residence, doesn’t seem all that uncomfortable: neighbouring families drop in, Mr Bennet retires to his library, the local militia provides a keen source of interest to the younger girls, people out of sight prepare food and do all menial chores. I wrote realistic fiction with romantic elements, then? Mansfield Park, for example, includes slavery, seduction, social patronage and real misery, including, near its latter end, a detailed account of the afflictions of low life in Portsmouth for a heroine now used to something a little better; but Fanny Price does finally conquer all, is surrounded by friends and properly appreciated when re-installed at Mansfield, and, in addition, married off, rather against what appeared to be the odds, to the man (Edmund Bertram) she has secretly loved for some considerable time, apparently without much hope of a return! My novels were romances which included realistic features, as well as irony and satire, not always considered compatible with romantic genres and aspirations alike!

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Don't worry too much about the restriction to the discussion of three novels, the use of incidental examples from the others by way of parallel and contrast will always earn approval. One could stress the idea of the mother as structural 'member', pointing to issues up one level (in computer-speak) from personal qualities. Mrs Bennet is embarrassing in her silly, ill-judging presence, but in a way Mrs. Woodhouse, Emma's dead mother in 'her' novel, is equally significant as an absence, motors the action in this way as Mrs Bennet does in hers. Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park seems to unite the ideas, as she is a kind of 'absent-presence', so languid and deprived of any responsibility, and hence sense of responsibility towards herself or others she seems more or less dead much of the time. Her statement that 'we have been alive with acting' perhaps suggests this, as well as her supreme blindness to 'what is going on', including the seducing of the affections of the Bertram sistsisters by Henry Crawford and the highly disapproving response the more intelligent characters know the remark will elicit from the careworn Sir Thomas, returned to find his house in an uproar.

Mothers inhabit structures which in some measure determine what or who they are. The 'reality of Lady Bertram' seems to derive from her position as wife of the domineering Sir Thomas, while Mrs. Bennet's characteristics are conditioned or exaggerated by her situation as the wife of a man who doesn't respect her, and by the entail, which threatens the Bennets' ownership of Longbourn, and leaves her in a constant state of almost hysterical anxiety. Anne Elliot's loss of her mother in Persuasion implicitly determines her lot, as she is left to make life-choices without her, and her mother-substitute Lady Russell was too snobbish, too set in her ways to be ideal, though kind and intelligent.

Another mother-substitute is Mrs Weston as the governess Miss Taylor at Hartfield, Emma's property. Though kindly-meaning, she too is inadequate in her lack of real authority over the strong-willed and headstrong Emma. In Sense and Sensibility the natural mother is separated from the motherly role. Mrs. Dashwood is a romantic and impractical character who has helped form younger daughter Marianne's. Consequently the elder daughter Elinor has her work cut out as something like a 'mother'--in the sense of the more mature person who guides and keeps the others out of scrapes and disasters-–to the extent that she can do this, to both of them. She is a mother to her mother, if we might put it that way.

One might say that 'mother' might finally be defined, less as a flesh and blood relationship than under the rubric of 'the power to supply moral guidance (and love)'. In Northanger Abbey Catherine's actual parents have this, but a large irony of and for the book is that this in itself looks highly inadequate in the light of Catherine's Bath-and-Northanger-Abbey experience. Mr. and Mrs. Morland just don't know what they are letting her in for, apparently. Finally, though, it seems that the firm moral sense and honesty with which they have 'armed' Catherine does steer her through difficulties and dangers, and the designing nature of 'others'. What the reader is left to wonder is, —is it merely a lucky accident, or series of them, which kept Catherine out of more serious trouble and suffering, given her initial naiveté? Despite her mother's good character, she is all at sea in relation to what has been going on right to the end.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.