Remembering Jane

We watched an interesting webinar from the Jane Austen Society, about Jane and some of the people who have written about her. It has been said that she is the third most written about woman in the world, after Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary. I don’t know how you would measure that, but she certainly does have a huge following.
 
In 2014 we went on a Jane pilgrimage to Winchester. She lived in the yellow house in College Street, near the Cathedral, from April 1817 until her death on 18 July. She would have been carried in her sedan chair around the pretty buildings in the Cathedral close.

Jane was was buried in the Cathedral. Her first memorial, created by her brother Henry, praised her personal qualities and prominently named her father, but it did not mention her success as a writer. This omission was rectified in the brass memorial on the wall near her grave. Much later she received a third plaque, in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The brass memorial has a quotation from the Book of Proverbs, "She openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue is the law of kindness". "Wisdom" yes, but I'm not sure that "kindness" quite does justice to Jane's biting wit or the razor sharpness of her observation.