Freya Johnston

Austen does seem to have reacted to that.

threat to her own security and to the security of other members of her family quite strongly.

It does seem to be the case that she is always alarmed by threats to financial security and understandably so because the family is never rich.

But she's delighted by and writes a lot about the success of her sailor brothers.

Henry is not only a reckless character, he's also the person who actually helps to get her into print.

So he acts as her agent.

He negotiates for her with publishers.

So he is an enabling figure as well as occasionally a bit of a pain.

Cassandra is the one that she always relies on the most.

And she calls her back in the final months of her life because she needs her to be there.

Well, I think it's very likely and there is that marginal note probably in Cassandra Austin's handwriting in a key passage of Persuasion about not being too prudent in your youth and actually just risking it and going for it.

So I think the fact that Cassandra Austin probably wrote the words, Dear, dear Jane, this deserves to be written in letters of pure gold next to that passage.

does suggest that there was some kind of parallel in Austen's mind between what happened to her sister.

And indeed also towards the end of the book, when Anne Elliot has that wonderful speech about women's superior capacity to maintain their emotions when existence or when hope is gone.

And she says it's nothing much to envy us for.

If you really are continuing to love when even the existence of the person you love couldn't really be said to endure anymore.

How could she not have had Cassandra in some sense in her mind in that passage too?

Well, she died in Winchester after an illness that had been dragging on for some time, but whose identity is still really uncertain.

People have argued for ages about what this illness actually was.

And for quite a while, the diagnosis was Addison's disease, partly because of a letter in which she talks about her skin changing colour.