Jane Austen and Writing

Jane Austen was such a great wit in her day and still in ours. I can’t help but read quotes from her letters to her sister Cassandra and laugh. I wonder if she was pleasant to be around seeming to say one thing and then twisting it to say another.  

One of my favorite quotes from her is when she was arriving in London.  “Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.” 1796

Christmas Eve of 1798 she wrote, “You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.”

Once when she was in London, she had reason to visit a fashionable girls’ seminary. She writes to her sister, "the weather...left me only a few minutes to sit with Charlotte Craven. She looks very well, and her hair is done up with an elegance to do credit to any education. Her manners are as unaffected and pleasing as ever... I was shewn upstairs into a drawing-room, where she came to me, and the appearance of the room, so totally unschool-like, amused me very much; it was full of modern elegancies, and if it had not been for some naked cupids over the mantelpiece, which must be a fine study for girls, one should never have smelt instruction."

I can't even begin to imitate and so I appreciate what she has written and press on to try and find another way to make my writing amusing. The quote below is wonderful. Anyone who writes about cake I have a natural affection for. 

“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me." 1808

(On buying a "sprig" for her sister's hat)] "I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What do you think on that subject?" 1799

My vote is for flowers.

At that time your mouth will be opened; you will speak with him and will no longer be silent. So you will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the Lord.  Ezekiel 24:27