The cathedral of Winchester where Jane Austen is buried and Milsom Street in Bath where she shopped do in fact still remain. If anything, the glory, love, and honor that Kipling called down upon her head soon after the First World War are greater now. It has been an occasion for general rejoicing that Pride and Prejudice is this year celebrating its two hundredth anniversary. Few books of that age attract not only scholars, but also attentive common readers whose love overflows into movies, fan fiction, beach towels, and knitting patterns. With every passing year, Austen inspires great pleasure, even almost religious devotion.

It seems an act of Providence that, two hundred years ago last January, when the novel was published, Jane Austen was briefly separated from her sister and confidante Cassandra—providential, because her letters from that time preserve her initial reaction to her second published novel. She looked on her work and found it, well, pretty good: “Upon the whole . . . I am quite vain enough & well satisfied enough.” Faint praise, we might think, but to Cassandra she also called the book “my own darling Child.” Her child had a