A Collection of Letters, and: Lesley Castle, and: Evelyn (review)

REVIEWS 611 Jane Austen. A Collection ofLetters. Ed. Juliet McMaster et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1998. xix + 44pp. $7.00. ISBN 0-9681961-2-8. Jane Austen. Lesley Castle. Ed. Jan Fergus et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1998. xx + 48pp. $7.00. ISBN 0-9681961-3-6. Jane Austen. Evelyn. Ed. Peter Sabor et al. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1999. xx + 38pp. $7.00. ISBN 0-9681961-2-8. Jane Austen's youthful writings are fun to read in almost any format in which they appear. I first encountered them in their original editions, edited from manuscripts now at the Bodleian Library and the British Library. R.W. Chapman included them in his volume of Minor Works in The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen (1954). Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray edited them as Catherine and Other Writings for Oxford World's Classics (1993). And selected items from Jane Austen 's juivenilia have been published by the Juvenilia Press, "an enterprise that combines scholarship with pedagogy," according to the modest blurb that each fascicle carries. "It is designed to publish editions of early works of known writers, in a simple format, with student involvement. Each volume, besides the text by a young author (of any age up to twenty), includes light-hearted illustration, scholarly annotation, and an introduction that relates this work to the author's mature writing." The three new editions in this format from Juvenilia Press are A Collection of Letters, Lesley Castle, and Evelyn. A Collection of Letters contains five unconnected letters, each telling its own story, and each story containing almost enough material for a few chapters of a novel, if not a novel itself. The first letter, "From a mother to her freind," tells of her daughers, ages seventeen and sixteen, coming out by "drink[ing] tea with Mrs Cope & her Daughter" and the mother's fear that the "dissipation" of the event might be too much for her girls, who, as it turns out, were "disgusted with some Things ... enchanted with others ... [and] astonished at all ! On the whole however they returned in raptures with the World, its Inhabitants & Manners." In the second letter Sophia writes to Belle about Willoughby 's breaking his engagement to her to marry another. She is sure that she hurts so much because it has been a full six months since she was last jilted. And, as Lady Bridget so astutely inquires, "But my Love why lament his perfidy, when you bore so well that of many young Men before?" The third letter has Maria Williams writing to her friend about having Lady Greville, who always speaks her mind, accompany her to a ball and insult her in every way possible in the process . In the fourth letter a young woman writes to her friend about a conversation at a dinner party with a Miss Grenville—a conversation that, to all intents and purposes , never took place because Miss Grenville would not talk. The fifth letter finds a young lady "very much in love" sending to her intimate friend for her admiration a copy of an overwrought love letter from a fortune-hunter even as she relates, rapturously, the machinations of his aunt to promote the marriage with insincere professions of affection. As a set ofletters on how to do things in precisely 612 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 the wrong way, these can hardly be equalled. They send up sentimentality, gullibility , and servility by dramatizing them in action; they show the ill effects of "love at first sight," impertinence, and eagerness by having them go unrecognized. And they give us the young Jane Austen honing a style that likes to get the last word exactly right: "When one is unhappy nothing is so delightful to one's sensations as to hear of equal Misery." Lesley Castle presents a series ofletters that tells a set ofrelated stories. Margaret Lesley and Charlotte Luttrell write to each other about themselves and their sisters, Matilda and Eloisa, respectively, and about Lady Lesley, once upon a time Susan Fitzgerald, formerly a schoolmate of Charlotte's. Sir George Lesley has married her, leaving his beautiful and virtuous daughters to fend for themselves: "We are handsome my dear...