162 pages, Sterling Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0760770160
The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen by – wait for it – Jane Austen was compiled by Dominique Enright, a writer with a passion for all things Austen. If you’re like me you oft have the urge to quote someone but can’t quite remember the quote in question (this happens to me all the time because I have a memory like a sieve and I particular get irked when it happens with Jane Austen). This book is almost worth the effort for the introduction alone, a nice, long but simple piece about Jane Austen’s life. The quotes in question are compiled from her novels, letters and diaries, so there is a wide variety that cover many situations, divided into chapters on subjects, including balls and gowns, love, family, housekeeping and marriage. Austen was a prolific letter writer, and many of the items collected here are taken from letters to her nieces and her devoted sister, Cassandra. Most of her correspondence – she wrote upwards of 3,000 letters – including all of the letters she received from Cassandra, was destroyed by her family members after her death, with only 160 surviving the inferno. As to her wit and wisdom, they are indeed evident throughout the many passages quoted throughout the book:
“Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end”.
“You [Cassandra] deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve”.
“I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive”.
As Enright wrote, “Her success as a writer lies in that, although her world was small, what she drew from it, and her insights into the people she encountered, allows her novels to function as microcosms of society at large”. Would that we had more words of wisdom from Jane, but this tome – and her six novels of course – must, sadly, have to do.
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