In her letters, Austen makes play of this authorial egotism. But whereas her fiction melds together the perspectives of narrator and characters, letters are naturally reliant upon the first person pronoun. Her most sympathetic characters are rarely the garrulous ones. Writing or speaking only of oneself is something Austen treats warily. In her final months, Austen is self-aware enough to imagine herself as seen from the outside: A sickly letter writer filling her pages with her circumscribed observances.
The valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse from Emma (1815) is a brilliant study of such a phenomenon. There is a kind of self-centredness to suffering and grief that Austen’s novels acknowledge as somewhat inescapable at the same time as they criticise it.
In one of the last letters she wrote before her death, Austen wryly notes: ‘With all the Egotism of an Invalid I write only of myself’.
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Austen’s famously free and indirect style here both elicits our sympathy for the grieving mother and is a corrective to incongruous memorialisation. Yet consideration is still paid to ‘all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings’. When Mrs Musgrove in Persuasion (1817) laments the passing of her son Richard, her audible grief-what the author-narrator sharply describes as her ‘large large fat sighings’-is seen to be flabbily in excess of the reality of a ‘pathetic…family history…the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son’. Her writing often deals unflinchingly with death.
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