She is sure to have remembered how, years earlier, she and lively Tom Lefroy had sat in the parlor at Steventon and chattered openly about the novel Tom Jones. Two young people, they had read and responded to the same titillating passages. It may be that that tidemark of engaged conversation was never again matched—and that she forever after made do with smaller fare.

Nevertheless, her conversation about the cost and use of domestic items seems genuine, and appears to sit side by side with more abstract observations on moral behavior. And almost always when she spoke of the price of apples or of some small turn in fashion, she managed to coax a strain of irony into her remarks, a reminder to herself and others that she understood perfectly the discrepancy between ideas and objects. “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me,” she once wrote Cassandra, meaning that she was able to mock the very person she was, a clever woman who was, nonetheless, able to invest herself in tasks that others might find tedious.

There were always a few servants in the several households Jane Austen occupied, but never so many that the family escaped a share of domestic duties. She was probably ambivalent about such tasks, taking at least a minor pleasure in what she was obliged to do. Routine was essential to her creativity; the grounding in domestic reality was useful to her fiction and allowed her a wider range of understanding. She did complain on at least one occasion, though, much later at Chawton, that “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb.” Her labor would have amounted to simple household sewing and to the planning of family meals and the ordering of supplies, not the actual acts of cooking, serving, or cleaning.

Economic restraint meant that she was locked into a quotidian life with its responsibilities for household management and that she was attached to a mixed community that bored her, amused her, and allowed her to be a full social being. More important, interaction with a large slice of society permitted her to observe and to gather material for her novels.

She often makes sharp remarks about her friends and speaks just slightly more obliquely about family members; almost everyone but Cassandra and her father suffered beneath her critical gaze. Her distinctions clearly entertain her or else she produces them to entertain others; she seems to have felt it an expression of her taste to criticize her neighbors for their fat necks and bad breath. She enjoys Miss Armstrong, the friend she met at Lyme Regis, but for the fact that she “seems to like people rather too easily.”

It is in her comments about other people that she sometimes loses her footing between malice and wit, confusing irony with injury. The more lethal of these barbs appear in her letters to Cassandra and were perhaps designed to please an aspect of her sister’s misanthropy that was otherwise hidden. Her novels espouse a far more generous appraisal of others. In Emma we read solemn and sensible advice that she herself often ignored: “It is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”

Within the family, she felt genuine affection for Cassandra and for her brother Henry. What was it about Henry that endeared him to her? “Oh! what a Henry,” she once said of him. Feckless is the term sometimes applied by others to his character: weak, unfocused. Of all the Austen brothers, it is Henry who appears to have lived the most hedonistically. James selected the church and stuck to it. Edward was plucked out to be a country gentleman and that was what he remained all his long life. Francis and Charles chose naval careers, where they thrived and were rewarded. Henry was educated for the church, sidestepped into the military, then became a banker, and, finally, following his bankruptcy, was ordained. His was a ring-around-the-rosy life, and it seems he took all his transformations with grace and with a lightness of heart. He married the woman he loved, his cousin Eliza de Feuillide, and after her death embarked on a second marriage. Constancy may not have been his strongest attribute, but he was constant, at least, in his love for his sister Jane. Only four years separated the two. His interests, like hers, were literary, and in an informal sense he acted as his sister’s agent, beginning in 1803 with the submission to a publisher of Northanger Abbey. His pride in Jane’s accomplishments was enormous. Made giddy by her success, he couldn’t help but reveal her name to a public that had no idea who had authored her novels. In his moments of personal distress, he required Jane’s presence, and perhaps it is this more than anything else that bound the two of them together. Interestingly, he is the only one of her brothers remembered in her will—with a bequest of £50.

Cassandra, sister and friend, is the most enigmatic presence in Jane Austen’s life. Just two years apart, the only daughters in a family of brothers, they shared a bedroom all their lives; most of their time was spent together and, when separated, they corresponded with great frequency.