Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen

After blankly stating that Jane Austen had ‰ЫПbored herself‰Ыќ partway through Lesley Castle and thus never finished it, Weldon quickly adds:

I hate this kind of cold conclusion; these sweeping assessments of motive with which, in the present, we look back at the past. I despise it in biographers, and yet find I am doing it myself. ... The reasons she stopped writing Lesley Castle may have been because she ran out of paper, or shut her thumb on in the lych-gate of Steventon Church the previous Sunday: or because she was reading the manuscript aloud to her family one evening and they all started yawning and looking for the cards. There is simply no way of knowing ‰ЫУ and I take it back.

...

I look at the small, round table in the house at Chawton at which she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion and am told that when people came into the room she covered her work and put it aside. They deduce from this (a) that she was ashamed of her work and (b) that it was criminal that she should be disturbed in this way. Most writers choose to cover their work when someone else comes into the room. They know it does not appear to best advantage out of context. They fear that, taken line by line, it sounds plain foolish. They do not want to answer questions. ‰Ы_ So the work is covered. It isn‰ЫЄt shame, merely prudence. As for disturbances, some writers thrive on them. For many, if life provides uninterrupted leisure for writing, the urge to write shrivels up. Writing, after all, is part of life, an overflow from it. Take away life and you take away writing.