Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/15

 hardly have told whether she had lived in this century or in the last.

Rarely has a great writer's life been so completely hidden from the public throughout its entire course, and, indeed, for many years afterwards, as Jane Austen's, for no memoir of her was attempted until quite sixty years after she had passed away. Yet few authors could better have borne the fierce light of publicity upon their lives than the simple-minded, sweet-tempered woman, who never dreamt that anyone outside her own family would care to know anything about her, and who courted personal notoriety so little. She would never have realised the charm that her sweet, peaceful, womanly life would one day have for those who, having long worshipped her genius in her writings, would be delighted to learn how completely free she was from all the whims and caprices that sometimes disfigure genius, and how entirely she carried out the saying of her great sister writer, "D'abord je suis femme, puis je suis artiste."

During her whole lifetime "few of her readers," says her nephew, "knew even her name, and none knew more of her than her name"; and though this is perhaps too broad an assertion, it is undoubtedly true that she never made the least attempt to become known to any of her readers; indeed, she rather encouraged concealment than otherwise. There was no affectation of modesty in this, for throughout her life she expressed genuine and eager pleasure when her works were favourably received, but she had the shrinking of a refined nature from personal publicity, and her family, understanding the feeling, helped to screen her from it as much as they could. When Sense and Sensibility came out in 1811 her sister Cassandra wrote to