ABSTRACT
The eleventh division of the letters includes those written during that which I believe to have been Jane Austen’s last visit to Godmersham] With regard to most of these later letters, I have derived much assistance from my mother’s old pocket-books, in which she regularly kept her diary from the time she was eleven years old until she was unable to write. During the earlier years there are only casual entries relating to Aunt Jane. As, for instance: ‘June 18, 1807.—Papa brought me a packet from Southampton containing a letter from Aunt Cassandra, and a note and long strip of beautiful work as a present from Aunt Jane.’ Then in September of the same year the visit of ‘grandmamma and Aunts Cassandra and Jane Austen’ to Chawton House is duly chronicled, and in 1808 ‘Aunt Jane’s’ stay at Godmersham for a week, accompanied by her brother James and his wife. There is also an interesting entry of the date of September 28, 1811: ‘Letter from At. Cass, to beg we would not mention that Aunt Jane wrote Sense and Sensibility.’ But, although many passages both in our letters and the pocket-books evince the affection which from a very early period existed between the aunt and the niece, the time when that affection seems to have ripened into more intimate friendship was in 1812, during a visit which my mother, in company with her father and cousin, ‘Fanny Cage’ (afterwards Lady Bridges), paid to Chawton Great House in that year. They arrived there on April 14, and stayed until May 7, when they returned to Kent, paying Oxford a visit on their way. My mother had at this time just completed her nineteenth year, and she and her aunt seem to have been much together during this visit. Unfortunately I have no letters bearing the date of this particular year; probably because the sisters were more than usually together at Chawton Cottage; but during the next three years I am able, by a comparison of the letters and the pocket-books, to trace Jane’s movements with greater ease, and in somewhat more of detail.
