Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/63

 always delighted in their companionship. One of them discovered in later years that he must constantly have interrupted her in the midst of her writing by his visits to Chawton Cottage, but she had never allowed him to find it out at the time, either by open mention or by repressed annoyance. Another wrote after her deaths, "As a very little girl I was always creeping up to Aunt Jane, and following her whenever I could, in the house and out of it. I might not have remembered this but for the recollection of my mother's telling me privately that I must not be troublesome to my aunt. Her first charm to children was great sweetness of manner. She seemed to love you, and you loved her in return. This, as well as I can now recollect, was what I felt in my early days before I was old enough to be amused by her cleverness. But soon came the delight of her playful talk; she could make everything amusing to a child. Then, as I got older, when cousins came to share the entertainment, she would tell us the most delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and her fairies had all characters of their own. The tale was invented, I am sure, at the moment, and was continued for two or three days if occasion served." Thus, beloved by both her own generation and the next, Jane's life at Chawton was a thoroughly peaceful and cheerful one; but much as she treasured the home life, it could not satisfy her so entirely as to make her forget that literary life, which was as a second nature to her.

In the summer of 1811, two years after her move to Chawton Cottage, Sense and Sensibility was published by Egerton, and Jane Austen, at the age of thirty-six, was fairly launched on that career of authorship which was to prove so short, yet so much more brilliant