"I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I hope you do not wear yours too often. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering."
Such references may remind us of Henry Tilney's astonishment that Catherine did not keep a journal of her doings. "How are your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life...? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion and curl of your hair to be described, in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me."
Jane Austen was not reduced, as was her own Mrs. Hurst, to playing with her bracelets and rings when there were no games or dances in progress. On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennet, she took up some needlework, and amused herself by listening to the general conversation, and entering into it when opportunity offered. Like everything { 217} done by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is admirable, and her embroidery would be treasured by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no such charming associations attached to it. There is a muslin scarf adorned by her needle which, to her true lovers, might seem a more precious relic than even her mahogany desk itself.
One little "interior" sketched by Jane, after a visit to a young wife who had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative of her own neat habits, and her ideas of the material needs of happiness, that, intimate as it is, it merits quotation: "Mary does not manage matters in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one."
We have seen on an earlier page that Jane Austen provided warm garments for the village poor. On one occasion we know where she bought her flannel. In an entry (made at Basingstoke) which might form the text for a dissertation on prejudice and economy, she notes that: "I gave { 218} 2_s._ 3_d._ a yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Why this contempt for what, in spite of all patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise, is still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless and necessary of materials? Marianne Dashwood included the wearing of a flannel waistcoat by Colonel Brandon among the several defects which made it impossible that she should ever be his wife, and when, for reasons not all unconnected with the "happy ending" of the novel, she agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that this gallant officer had "sought the constitutional safeguard" of the much-despised garment. To Jane Austen and Marianne Dashwood flannel, it seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as celluloid collars and cuffs are to most people of our own day.