THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'I am sorry I have affronted you on the subject of Mr Moore, but I do not mean ever to like him; and as to pitying a young woman merely because she cannot live in two places at the same time, and at once enjoy the comforts of being married and single, I shall not attempt it, even for Harriot. - You see I have a spirit, as well as yourself’
Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, February 1807

In her correspondence as in her novels, Jane Austen's voice is unmistakable. Witty and observant, intimate and gossipy, her letters take us back in time to the well-ordered, upper-middle-class world of Georgian England, providing a unique insight into both her own personality and the society in which she lived. The collection opens with a letter written on January 9, 1796, to her elder sister, Cassandra. Jane was twenty and unashamedly teased her sister with an account of her flirtatious behaviour at a ball: 'Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.' Whether amused by the latest fashion ('coloured petticoats with braces over the white Spencers and enormous Bonnets') or wickedly caricaturing a lady glimpsed at a ball ('Broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband and fat neck'), recommending a housemaid or describing the gruesome business of having a tooth pulled, Jane Austen's letters are concerned with the fabric of everyday life. In them she gives and receives news - about friends and relations, births, marriages, deaths, careers and money - always displaying, as Sir Walter Scott once commented, 'that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting'. Deirdre Le Faye provides full annotation to each letter, together with biographical, topographical and general indexes in her superb complete edition.