Holly, ‘Emmagrammatology’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989), 39–51, 49–50.

19. The limitations of Mr Weston’s understanding are further demonstrated by Mark Loveridge’s discovery that the riddle appears to be an in-joke for readers of moral theory, since it derives from Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), which states that ‘that must be the Perfection of Virtue where M = A’ (M being the ‘Moment of Good’, A the Ability or Agent), ‘Francis Hutcheson and Mr Weston’s Conundrum in Emma’, Notes and Queries, ns 228 (1983), pp. 214–16.

20. 29 January, 1813, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, p. 202.

21. See also Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787); Catherine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790).

22. For Austen’s clerical background and representations of clergymen, see I. Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London, 1994).

23. Descriptions of the heroine’s eyes are a standard feature of novels of the period, while eye portraits had come into fashion in the 1790s. Shawls became fashionable after 1802, when the shortlived Peace of Amiens enabled English travellers to visit Paris and see the craze for Indian shawls brought back by Napoleon’s army from the Middle East.

24. See, e.g., W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753); W. Gilpin, Three Essays (1792); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (1769– 90). The question was also addressed by a host of literary aestheticians.

25. 16 December, 1816 (Letters, p. 323).

26. Readers who have equated Austen’s art with miniature painting and therefore realism are taken to task by L. Bertelsen in ‘Jane Austen’s miniatures: painting, drawing and the novels’, MLQ 45 (1984), 350–72.

27. Compare Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the emergence of the novel as a genre, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1981).

28. On Austen’s debts to dramatic writers see M. Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art; Bradbrook, Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 69–75; Paula Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London, 2002). The dramatic qualities of Austen’s texts have been demonstrated in the numerous film and television adaptations; for critical discussion of some of these, see Andrew Wright, ‘Dramatizations of the Novels’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 120–30, and for more recent versions, L. Troost and S. Greenfield (eds.), Jane Austen in Hollywood.

29. See MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds.

30. Margaret Ann Doody points out that the charade appears in A New Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Transpositions, &c, 2 vols. (London, 1791), II, 15 (‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 347–63, 362).

31. From Fable L, ‘The Hare and Many Friends’, in John Gay’s Fables (London, 1727), p. 172.

Further Reading

LETTERS

Le Faye, Deirdre (ed.), Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford, 1995)

Modert, Jo (ed.), Jane Austen’s Manuscript Letters in Facsimile (Carbondale, IL, 1990)

BIOGRAPHY

Austen, Caroline, My Aunt Jane: A Memoir (Alton, 1952)

Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870; rev. 1871) ed.