Too Far for Comfort

Отрывок из книги

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

and for Selim

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On examination these sharp words turn out to have little evidence to support them. For one thing, Mrs. Milford left the Steventon district when Jane was only ten years old, so that she can only be speaking on hearsay. For another, the description [...] is at variance with everything else we know about Jane Austen. Whatever false impression she may have made at twelve years old, it is incredible that the grown-up Jane Austen, the Jane Austen who, within a few years, was to create such devastating embodiments of silliness and affectation as Lucy Steele and Isabella Thorpe, should herself have ever appeared as affected, let alone silly. Or husband-hunting; though, like most girls of her age, she probably considered any young man she met in the light of a possible husband. Altogether Mrs. Milford’s account must be considered mainly worthless. Personally, I should be sorry to regard it as wholly worthless. I like to think there was a time in Jane Austen’s life when she could be called a pretty butterfly. I know of no other women writer of the first rank who has been similarly described. (67)

Although Cecil dismisses the document at first, he cannot keep himself from commenting on it in a way that supports his own vision of the author as a well-adjusted woman who would shun folly in any shape or form. He gives credit to the statement, in the manner of an understanding father, by making the reader imagine a livelier, true-to-life young girl who had the artistic vision as well as the social experience to write the sparkling Pride and Prejudice.

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