From November 2009 to March 2010, there was a special exhibit of Jane Austen writings at the Morgan Library & Museum called
A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy.The Morgan itself owns the largest collection of Jane Austen letters in the world. Unfortunately, her sister burned most of them, so the relatively few that remain are treasures, indeed. The letters show that Austen, like Jane Fairfax in
Emma used cross-writing to save paper. If you view the
digitized version on the site, you can zoom in to decipher one of her letters for yourself.
The detailed description on the letter says:
Writing over the course of three days, Austen acknowledges receiving another letter from Cassandra in the meantime: "You are very amiable & very clever to write such long Letters; every page of yours has more lines than this, & every line more words than the average of mine. I am quite ashamed—but you have certainly more little events than we have." The letter is full of little events: "Mr Waller is dead, I see;—I cannot grieve about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much," and "I want to hear of your gathering Strawberries, we have had them three times here." She reports that she is not enjoying Walter Scott's newest creation Marmion, an epic poem about a sixteenth-century battle between the English and the Scots, although she suspects she should be.
I do consider these letters a wonderful image for Austen's novels and her characters. The first read reveals something, but it takes another read from another angle to get a deeper understanding about the heart of the matter. In Persuasion, for example, Anne Elliot finds her cousin to be all that is sensible, amiable, and charming but has her friend's revelation about his ruthless selfishness assure her that he was dissembling all along. The reverse is true of Mr. Darcy, who makes a terrible first impression but later proves himself -- in a letter, no less -- to be the very best of men.
It is really a wonderful experience to see the author's own handwriting, and it's fully legible without any cross-writing challenges. Back in the day when I had to look up an Oscar Wilde typescript for an assignment, I had to go to the library and handle it with gloves. Now one can just summon a manuscript at home on demand.
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