Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/28

 means were sufficient to enable them to associate with the best families in the neighbourhood.

Country visits were more of a business then than now; wet weather and bad roads and dark nights made more obstacles to social intercourse than we realise in these days; but a houseful of merry, cultivated young people, presided over by genial parents, is sure to be popular with its neighbours, and Jane Austen had no lack of society when she was growing up. She was one of a most attractive family party, for they were all warmly attached to each other, full of the small jokes and bright sayings that enliven family life, and blessed with plenty of brains and cultivation, besides the sweet sunny temper that makes everyday life so easy.

Steventon Rectory in Jane Austen's girlhood was as cheerful and happy a home as any girl need have desired, and she remembered it affectionately throughout her life, unconscious how much of its sunshine she herself had produced, for in her eyes its brightness was mainly owing to her sister, Cassandra. It was natural that two sisters coming together at the end of a line of brothers should draw much together, and from her earliest childhood Jane's devotion to her elder sister was almost passionate in its intensity. As a little child she pined so miserably when Cassandra began going to school without her, that she was sent also, though too young for school life; but, as Mrs. Austen observed at the time, "If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate;" and this childish devotion only increased with riper years.

From beginning to end Jane never wrote a story that was not related first to Cassandra, and discussed with her; she literally shared every thought and feeling with her sister, and the two pleasant volumes of letters