ing her, and perhaps even Cassandra did her share. But for the
most part her culture must have been self-culture, such as she herself
imagined in the case of Elizabeth Bennet. Later on, the French of
Reading Abbey school was corrected and fortified by the lessons of her
cousin Eliza. On the whole, she grew up with a good stock of such
accomplishments as might be expected of a girl bred in one of the more
intellectual of the clerical houses of that day. She read French easily,
and knew a little of Italian; and she was well read in the English
literature of the eighteenth century. As a child, she had strong
political opinions, especially on the affairs of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. She was a vehement defender of Charles I and his
grandmother, Mary, and did not disdain to make annotations in this sense
(which still exist) on the margin of her Goldsmith's _History_. As she
grew up, the party politics of the day seem to have occupied very little
of her attention, but she probably shared the feeling of moderate
Toryism which prevailed in her family. Politics in their larger
aspect--revolution and war--were of course very real at that date to
every patriotic citizen, and came home with especial force to the
Austens, whose cousin's husband perished by the guillotine,[23] and
whose brothers were constantly fighting on the sea. In her last
published sentence at the end of _Persuasion_ the author tells us how
her Anne Elliot 'gloried' in being the wife of a sailor; and no doubt
she had a similar feeling with regard to her two naval brothers. But
there was then no daily authentic intelligence of events as they
occurred. Newspapers were a luxury of the rich in those days, and it
need excite no surprise to find that the events are very seldom
mentioned in Jane's surviving letters.[24]

We can be in no doubt as to her fervent, and rather exclusive, love for
her own country. Writing to an old friend, within a few months of her
own death, she says: 'I hope your letters from abroad are satisfactory.
They would not be satisfactory to _me_, I confess, unless they breathed
a strong spirit of regret for not being in England.'

Of her favourite authors and favourite pursuits, we will speak later.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Charles Austen failed to do so in January 1799. See p. 124.

[14] The description of Steventon is taken, almost entirely, from the
_Memoir_, pp. 18-22.

[15] This was written nearly half a century ago, before t