Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen: Letter 5 Summary & Analysis

Fay’s next letter to Alice comes from Canberra in January. Fay admits that the additional stop in Australia makes her trip back to England much longer, but tells Alice that she needs the time before transitioning to being at home. Fay relates this process to the delays that she creates for herself before starting a new writing project, saying that an “uneasy mixture of terror, idleness and a paralysing reverence for the Muse” always keeps her from beginning right away.

Fay goes on to describe the differences between North Queensland and Canberra, remarking in particular that Canberra has a robust reading community whom she met at a book presentation the previous evening. She tells Alice that she used to hate public speaking, but that now she understands the value of using her voice. Fay encourages Alice to speak up as much as possible, even though so many women feel they have to be quiet “when they would do better to be noisy.”

Fay relates how valuable it is for audiences to connect with an author in order to discover new viewpoints and to gain the comforting knowledge that “we are not alone in the oddity of our beliefs.” She notes that this enthusiasm from readers also puts a burden on writers that Jane Austen and her contemporaries never experienced. While writers like Austen focused on writing rather than promotion and book sales, writers like Fay are duty-bound to make public appearances and answer directly to readers. Accordingly, Fay tells Alice that if her goal is to be a writer, she should give up, but that if her goal is to write, nothing will stand in her way.

Thinking of the differences between her writing life and Jane Austen’s, Fay wonders what made Austen believe that people beyond her family would want to read her novels. She notes that Austen would have read aloud to her family and friends, and that the presence of a literal audience would have helped her learn the dramatic techniques that characterize her novels. Fay instructs Alice to pay similar attention to audience in her own writing, and to remember that the City of Invention should both change and comfort its visitors.

Fay then details the modern tendency of academics and journalists to try to pick apart the mysteries of novels and their writers. She bemoans the misguided belief that understanding a writer can lead to understanding her work, relating stories of her own readers trying to get her to reveal the secrets of her work. Fay feels that such attempts to pull apart the meaning of literature lead to misguided conclusions. She points to an anecdote of Jane Austen writing in a room where she was often interrupted, which is often interpreted by other critics to have been an impediment to her writing. In contrast, Fay believes that such interruptions would have kept Austen connected to the life of her household and the emotions that powered her work. For Fay, writing is an activity rather than a profession, one that is closely connected to life rather than separate from it.

Fay turns to the subject of Alice’s novel, about which Alice has asked for advice. Fay advises her to offer her reader “moral guidance,” meaning a useful example that readers can use to better understand themselves. She says that readers “want and need to be told how to live,” noting that in the City of Invention, events are never due to chance but instead depend on the good and evil actions of the characters who live there. Fay admiringly describes the moral directives of the Russian novelist Nicolai Chernyshevsky and tells Alice that Jane Austen is, in her own quieter way, just as instructive to her readers.