Jane Austen’s Possessions Reveal Her Literary Ethos

Small things can be almost sacred, as is Fanny Price’s “nest of comforts,” assembled out of bits and pieces in the old schoolroom at Mansfield Park—a faded footstool, a collection of family silhouettes, a sketch of her brother’s ship; objects none of which is considered good enough for display elsewhere. Or they can be slippery, unnoticed clues—in Emma, the spectacles whose loose rivet Frank Churchill is discovered mending with such fixed concentration in Miss Bates’s sitting room. The silver knife, relic of little dead Mary, over which Fanny’s sisters quarrel, is a disturbing accessory amid Portsmouth’s squalor.