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IN 1814 JANE AUSTEN WROTE A SERIES OF LETTERS to her niece Anna critiquing a novel that Anna was writing. While Anna’s uncompleted novel has not survived, her aunt’s letters are treasured for the light they shed on Austen’s working methods, including her most famous advice:
You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life;—3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on—& I hope you will write a great deal more, & make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.
A defining characteristic of Jane Austen’s fiction is its realism: she depicts characters, events, and places firmly rooted in early nineteenth-century England. The three or four families she collects in each novel share a locale—a country village—situated...