Freya Johnston

Thank you.

Hi.

Yeah, I mean, there isn't actually much of the correspondence left, but it still does include quite a variety of moods.

Quite often, Austen sounds angry.

She also sounds quite bitter at times about the lack of control over her own life, particularly in the letters that she sends after her father's retirement when the family moves to Bath, a place that she loathed and that Anne Elliot also dislikes very much in persuasion.

And one of the great things that she enjoys about Austen

Fame as an author is a degree of financial independence.

And at that stage, of course, also the family has moved back to Hampshire, the county she never wanted to leave in the first place.

So there is anger there, but there is also a happiness in the letters, certainly a degree of pride in her achievements as an author and just an enjoyment of writing.

Also her own intelligence.

She's quite sharp about other people.

The vast majority of the letters are to her sister.

And so, as you would expect, they detail a kind of closeness between them and they dwell on family matters for the most part.

She's talking about purchases of food or clothing a lot of the time.

These things aren't little things.

They are the stuff of daily life that her novels also celebrate.

And there is happiness in that.

Yeah.

And even when she is giving literary advice or talking about books, it is usually to people who are either amateur authors or not authors at all.

So one of her nieces, Anna, was an aspiring novelist and