Free Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon Page B

Henry one hundred guineas for Lesley Castle is as likely to be the result of a frivolous conversation over the dinner table the night before, as to the motive I attribute to her. The reason she stopped writing Lesley Castle may have been because she ran out of paper, or shut her thumb in the lych-gate of Steventon Church the previous Sunday: or because she was reading the manuscript aloud to her family one evening and they all started yawning and looking for the cards. There is simply no way of knowing — and I take it back.
    But Lesley Castle starts marvellously! Little by little the awfulness of this Scottish castle, and the eccentric nature of its inhabitants, emerges: the two Lesley sisters, both very tall, gain a stepmother who is very short. Charlotte Cuttrell, to whom all write in their passion and despair, is an unfeeling audience and, it is evident in her replies, thinks only about food — its preparation and its eating — but by the ninth letter (the one before last) invention is wearing thin, as the postscript to the letter shows:
I am afraid this letter will be but a poor specimen of My Powers in the Witty Way: and your opinion of them will not be greatly increased when I assure you that I have been as entertaining as I possibly could.
    ‘Well, yes, Jane,’ Henry may have remarked, as the family sat beside the fire in the evening, and the servants drove the warming pans into the beds upstairs, and they had finished politely admiring Cassandra’s sketches, and talked a little about what was happening in France — that year of the declaration of the Republic and the setting up of the Revolutionary Tribunal — and whether cousin Eliza, who had married a French aristocrat, and a Roman Catholic one at that, would not soon be faced with the penalty of her wilfulness — and then perhaps wondered whether they should send off for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women — and then, when finally Jane had read out her last instalment of Lesley Castle (letter 9), ‘Well, yes, Jane, you are quite right. It is a poor specimen of your powers in the witty way, and I suggest you give up.’ Henry would have been nineteen at the time: he was a scholar and at Oxford: hard for any member of a family audience, hearing that postscript read aloud, not to make such a remark: and Henry seems the one most likely to make it. He was the joker of the family. He later, after Jane’s death, some twenty years later, when he had sobered down, wrote a preface to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, of really acute sycophancy: ‘Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives…’ writes Henry. But oh, Henry, once your sister joked and said she’d charge you a hundred guineas for an unfinished novel — could you have forgotten that? Or even at the time, did you raise your eyebrows, even while you joked, and do your best to discomfit your clever little sister?
    Whom not everybody, incidentally, liked. Philadelphia Walter, an Austen relative, wrote in this manner when Jane was twelve:
Yesterday I began an acquaintance with my two female cousins, Austens. My uncle, aunt, Cassandra and Jane arrived at Mr F. Austen’s the day before. We dined with them there. The youngest (Jane) is very like her brother Henry, not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve; but it is a hasty judgement which you will scold me for. My aunt has lost several fore-teeth which makes her look old — [no one knew about calcium then: tradition held it that you lost one tooth with every child, and you probably did. So Mrs Austen would be eight down.] — my uncle is quite white-haired, but looks vastly well: all in high spirits and disposed to be pleased with each other…Yesterday they all spent the day with us, and the more I see of Cassandra the more I admire — Jane is whimsical and affected.
    Poor Philadelphia: if she had known the scrutiny this letter was to be subjected to — if she had known how she was to be