Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
In a letter about Persuasion to her niece Fanny Knight, Jane Austen wrote, half-jokingly, that Fanny "may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me." (Source)
Captain Wentworth's fortune of £25,000 in 1817 is the rough equivalent of over $2 million today. (Source)
Persuasion is the only one of Austen's novels for which any of her manuscripts survive: there’s an earlier draft of the last two chapters, giving an alternate ending, in the British Library. (Source)
Two of Jane Austen's brothers were in the navy. (Source)
Jane Austen lived for a time in Bath with her family, but, like Anne, she disliked it. (Source)