ABSTRACT
It is impossible for the lover of Jane Austen—and lover is the operative word here—to have anything but mixed feelings about Austen's older sister, Cassandra. On one hand, we owe to Cassandra the only surviving (if bad) portraits of Austen other than silhouettes: the famous, somewhat lopsided sketch of 1801, in which the novelist's mouth is awkwardly pursed and her eyes, gazing in different directions, look like small, astigmatic raisins; and an equally inept watercolor back view from 1804, in which nothing of Austen can be seen—Cassandra giving her all to the rendering of the complicated dress and bonnet—except the nape of a neck, the exposed back of one hand, and a tentative, slipper-clad foot. Crude they may be, yet without these sisterly gleanings we would know next to nothing of Austen's face or figure or how she held herself in space: dead at forty-two in 1817, she is part of that last, infinitely poignant generation of human beings who lived and died before photography.
