Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/48

 romance would be given to the best-known sister with those embellishments and alterations that are sure to occur as a story filters from one generation to another.

Cassandra had been engaged to a young clergyman who could not marry till he obtained preferment, but who had good prospects from a wealthy relative, who was kind to him and had several livings in his gift. While waiting for one of these to fall vacant, the patron, who knew nothing of the engagement, urged the young man to go out with him on a visit to the West Indies; he went there, and died of yellow fever. Cassandra's grief, which was deep and lasting, was, of course, shared by Jane, who, though quite young at the time, already felt every sorrow of her sister's as her own. That these two stories have been confused together, I feel sure; and those readers who regret losing an additional touch of romance for the charming story of Persuasion must remember that both Emma and Mansfield Park were written, and Northanger Abbey completely revised for the press, after 1805, so that there is really no reason why one of these should not show traces of Jane's sorrow as well as another.

With the authority of the family for pronouncing the story told by Sir Francis a mistake, we may dismiss it, together with the wild statement once made by Mary Russell Mitford (on the authority of her mother) about Jane Austen in her girlhood. Mrs. Mitford, before her marriage, lived at Ashe, the rectory next to Steventon, and Miss Mitford, in one of her pleasant rambling letters, quotes her mother as remembering Jane Austen well before her marriage, and adds: "Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest,