Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/32

 regretted not having read more and written less before she was sixteen, and urged one of her nieces not to follow her example in that respect; but there must have been many wet or solitary days in the quiet rectory life which would have been very dull for the child without such a resource, and posterity may rejoice that no one hindered Jane Austen's inclination for writing.

How soon she began to produce finished stories is not certain, but from a very early age her writings were a continual amusement and interest to the home circle, where they were criticised and admired with no idea as to what they might lead. Most young authors try their hands at dramatic writing some time or other, and Jane passed through this stage of composition when she was about twelve years old, though she never seems to have attempted it later in life. It was not a style which could have suited her, but at the time she tried it the young Austens had taken a craze for private theatricals, and Jane's plays are thus easily accounted for.

The corps dramatique consisted of the brothers and sisters and a cousin, who had become one of them under pathetically romantic circumstances. She was a niece of Mr. Austen's, had been educated in Paris, and married to a French nobleman, the Count de la Feuillade. He was guillotined in the Revolution, and she, with great difficulty, made her way to England, where she found a home in the already well-filled rectory at Steventon. She was clever and accomplished, rather un-English in her ways and tastes, and very ready to help in the theatricals, which, perhaps, would not have existed but for her. There was no theatre but the dining-room or a barn, and both actors and