Status Updates From Persuasion

It was beginning to rain again, and altogether there was a delay, and a bustle, and a talking, which might lead to... 😳

4/4: ". . . To hope to make so much out of so little showed no common confidence in her own powers, and more than common daring. Of the thousands who take up a pen to write a story meant to amuse, how many are there who can, or who dare, be true, like Jane Austen?"

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

". . . To hope to make so much out of so little showed no common confidence in her own powers, and more than common daring. Of the thousands who take up a pen to write a story meant to amuse, how many are there who can, or who dare, be true, like Jane Austen?"

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

3/4: ". . . In her own range, and admitting her cold views of life to be true, she is faultless, or almost faultless . . . The value of light and shade, as a means of success, she discarded. Strong contrasts, bold flights, she shunned. To be true, to show life in its everyday aspect, was her ambition . . ."

2/4: ". . . [T]his want of certain important faculties . . . causes the only defect, of Miss Austin's works: that everything is told in the same tone. An elopement, a death, seduction, are related as placidly as a dinner or ball . . . As she is, however, we must take her, and what her extraordinary powers wanted in extent, they made up in depth . . ."

1/4: "But it was natural that powers so great should fail somewhere . . . [T]he delicate mind that could evolve, so shrewdly, foolishness from its deepest recesses, was powerless when strong feelings had to be summoned. They heard her, but they did not obey the call . . ."

2/2: ". . . It seems so natural . . . so easy, that we are apt to forget the performance in the sense of its reality. The literary taste of the majority is always tinged with coarseness; it loves exaggeration, & slights the modesty of truth."

—appendix extract from Julia Kavanagh, "The Language of Feeling," from "English Women of Letters" (1862)

1/2: "Wonderful, indeed, is the power that out of materials so slender, out of characters so imperfectly marked, could fashion a story. This is her great, her prevailing merit, & yet it cannot be denied, it is one that injures her with many readers . . ."