The Voice of the Particular. Authorship and Reflections of Reality in Jane Austen’s Correspondence
The Voice of the Particular. Authorship and Reflections of Reality in Jane Austen’s Correspondence

Summary/Abstract: My essay is dealing with different roles mirrored in Jane Austen’s collected letters, focusing on the stylistic and topical differences and similarities between the narrative style of her prose and that of the letters. Austen’s letters are addressed mainly to family members and friends (with a few important exceptions), their topic varying from exchange of information about family members and events concerning the Austens to personal reflections of the letter-writer, and some (very few but well elaborated) considerations about her own creations and the nature of fiction-writing itself. A close reading of Jane Austen’s correspondence also reveals the everyday reality of England at the time of the Napoleonic wars, serves as a background to Austen’s well-known and ever popular novels, but most of all offers a precise description of the status of a woman writer in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the obstacles and possibilities to be found in her way. The way in which the writer of these letters matches different roles with different narrative voices through a span of 21 years makes her personal correspondence comparable to a virtual novel.

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