Letters to Jane: Austen, the letter and twentieth-century women’s writing

Abstract

In 2005, Nina Bawden published a series of letters to her dead husband, Austen Kark, who was killed in the Potters Bar train crash. The letters explain the legal wrangles that followed the inquest into the accident and chronicle her attempts to cope with her anger and grief. The title of the work, Dear Austen, suggests that he is its only possible reader, as well as the only (impossible) recipient of her epistles - ‘I wish you could answer this’, ends the third letter.1 Yet the publishers, Virago, must have realized that the title also suggested a wider audience. So synonymous is Austen with Jane Austen that it was difficult to tell, encountering the book on the shelf in Waterstone’s, whether it was under B for Bawden or A for Austen. Some unconscious urge on the part of the bookseller or the browser would like to make it something other than it is, to transform it into another kind of posthumous correspondence.