Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/25

 two inches wide," as she called her novels, and that the home-life of the parsonage, its duties, its amusements, its visits and its visitors, its joys and its griefs, were the tapestry into which she wove the lives of her heroes and heroines. Her invariable principle in writing was to use the material which lay near to hand, and which, therefore, she knew thoroughly how to manipulate. Both the places and the people must be much altered now from what they were when Jane Austen grew up among them; but the life-like figures painted so long ago by her master-hand gain additional clearness and vraisemblance for us when we realise how both they and their surroundings were drawn from what their author actually saw, and how completely it was her genius that transformed such commonplace material into immortal substance.

Nothing could have seemed less likely to inspire a young author with good subjects than the prosaic surroundings and quiet routine of the uneventful Steventon life, with its neighbourhood neither better nor worse than other country neighbourhoods of that day, and its distance from any large town or centre of life; yet Jane Austen found this sufficient for her.

Many great writers have made a splendid use of splendid material; but she truly "created," for she made immortal pictures out of nothing. We have all encountered Miss Bates, Sir Walter Elliot, and General Tilney in real life, but few of us found them amusing until Jane Austen taught us to do so. It must not be supposed, however, that she ever drew absolute portraits in her works; she considered that an unpardonable liberty, and once, when accused of doing so, she indignantly repudiated "such an invasion of the social proprieties;" adding, with a laugh, "I am too proud of