On Writing Daily
As a young girl, Jane Austen wrote copious
amounts of letters, plays, and stories
whether she was motivated to write or not.
However,
at
times,
she
struggled
immensely with her writing. When she was
21, she expressed to her only sister and
lifelong confidant, Cassandra, "How ill I
have written. I begin to hate myself."
Even when Miss Austen was unable to
complete a novel during her years in Bath,
England, (where she had little literary
inspiration), she wrote letters regularly. "I
am not at all in a humour for writing; I must
write on till I am,” she told Cassandra.
And she confessed, in 1814, in a letter to
her favorite niece, Anna, (daughter of her
older brother, James) that she had “nothing
very particular to say, yet I write.”
Austen’s most productive writing years
were spent in Chawton Cottage, near Alton,
England, where she developed her distinct
writing habits. She worked on a writing
slope gifted by her father that was placed
on a small walnut table located adjacent to
a Muli-Light At Chawton Cottage, her
regular writing schedule allowed her to
produce 3 of her 6 novels during the last 8
years of her life; and to revise several of her
earlier works as well.
On Writing About Topics and Locations One
Knows Well
During her own lifetime, Austen was
accused by critics of ignoring the larger
world and historical events of the day in
favor of everyday occurrences in village life.
Her rationalizations for these limitations
were, of course, deliberate authors lost
if they wrote about topics that were out
of their depth and scope. “Three or four
families in a country village is the very
thing to work on,” Jane wrote to her
niece, Anna. In another letter, Miss
Austen urged Anna, a budding writer
herself, to keep her characters in
England as Anna knew nothing of the
manners in Ireland. “You will be in
danger of giving false representations.”
Continuing, she wrote, “Stick to Bath and
the Foresters.
There, you will be quite at home.”
As easily as she gave writing advice,
Austen was one to follow her own
counsel. When James Stanier Clarke, the
Prince Regent's librarian, suggested new
avenues for Jane to explore, she wrote
"No - I must keep to my own style and go
on in my own Way; And though I may
never succeed again in that, I am
convinced that I should totally fail in any
other."
In 1816, she elaborated further in
another letter to Mr. Clarke, "I could no
more write a Romance than an Epic
Poem could not sit seriously down to
write a serious Romance under any other
motive than to save my Life, and if it
were indispensable for me to keep it up
and never relax into laughing at myself
or other people, I am sure I should be
hung before I had finished the first
Chapter."
On Style and Punctuation
Austen was not overly concerned about
punctuation. After the release of Pride
and Prejudice, she wrote to Cassandra,