The celebrated novelist exercises her critical opinion of another writer’s work in what Sotheby’s described as a “light-hearted jeu d’espirit which exudes not only Austen’s supreme intellect, but also her comic charm”.
The letter is to be offered for sale for the first time at the auction house tomorrow, carrying an estimate of £80,000-100,000. It marks nearly 200 years since Jane Austen’s death in 1817.
Dating from October 29-30, 1812, which was a critical time in Austen’s career after she had published Sense and Sensibility and when the manuscript of Pride and Prejudice was sent for publication, the letter provides a “rare insight into how Austen thought about fiction”.
The topic of her satirical missive is a “most tiresome and prosy” Gothic novel titled Lady Maclairn, the Victim of Villainy, written by her contemporary Rachel Hunter.
It also shows that even more than a decade after the publication of her own novel (Northanger Abbey), which satirised the Gothic novel, she was still reading others. Austen and her niece Anna Lefroy, the eldest daughter of Rev James Austen, Jane’s eldest brother, had enjoyed reading Hunter’s novel together. Her letter, addressed as if to Hunter herself, “brims with the shared pleasure the two women had taken in this over-plotted melodrama, relishing its clichés and absurdities, from the heroine’s relentless tears to the verbose repetitions of character and plot”.
A fragment of a letter from Jane Austen - one of three lots offered from descendants of her family which will be auctioned at Sotheby's on July 11.
Dr Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s specialist in books and manuscripts, said: “These letters have always belonged to the Austen family, and have never been offered for sale before. The vast majority of her surviving letters talk about her day-to-day life, so to have a letter like we do here, that talks specifically about writing and shows her engaging with the popular literature of the day, is hugely significant.”
The letter, alongside two other correspondences from Austen, is being sold by descendants of her family on July 11.
