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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ?
A recent posting to AUSTEN-L:
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 17:06:33 -0500
From: Ellen Moody
Subject: More From the LRBEveryone will remember the general trend of Terry Castle's now famous article, Sister-Sister; alas -- according to Bonnie Herron, in this week's letters to the LRB -- nobody seems to have remembered a paper given by Edward Copeland at the annual Jane Austen Society of North America Conference at Lake Louise in 1993. It was then, says Ms. Herron, that Mr. Copeland "clearly establish[ed] from the records of Ring Brothers of Basingstoke, a home furnishings store, that when Jane was 19 and Cassandra 22, in 1794, `Austen's father... bought two special made-to-order matching beds' for the sisters." It seems that after all Jane and Cassandra slept in separate beds.
We did not even need the bill of sale to prove Austen and Cassandra had separate beds; Austen tells us this in a number of passages when she describes their sleeping arrangements: once she says: "all the beds, indeed, that we shall want are to be removed -- viz., besides theirs, our own two" (letter of January 3 1801); she does once talk of sleeping in the same bed with Martha Lloyd because there was not enough beds to go round ("Nurse & the Child slept on the floor"); and it's clear what she enjoyed was the close conversation: "The bed did exceedingly well for us, both to lie awake in & talk till two o'clock, and to sleep in the rest of the night" (letter of January 8 1799).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ?
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