Page:Austen Lady Susan Watson Letters.djvu/135



is the name given by those who published it, to a fragment written by Jane Austen when living at Bath. It is in the writer's mature style and is no girlish composition. It is unelaborated and incomplete, but promises well, and it is a regret that the writer did not finish it. Why she laid it aside is not known; probably it was interrupted by the pressure of social engagements and she thus lost interest in it when the thread was broken.

Her nephew expresses the opinion that she became aware of the mistake of having placed her heroine too low in the social scale, in such a position of poverty and obscurity which, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it, and therefore, like a singer who has begun on a wrong key, she discontinued the strain. Jane Austen was genteel in the meaning of the word in her own day, not in the obvious meaning of the word at present. But the Watsons are gentlefolk: they go to Rh