Mr. Bennet

did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket she was nothing more than a mere good-tempered civil and obliging young woman as such we could scarcely dislike her she was only an object of contempt is not that something like the first faint lines in the figure of fanny price when a loud knocking is heard on the door of the rustic cot by the the heroine's father inquires the nature of the noise and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door yes exclaimed i i cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance that is another point replied he we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock though that someone does rap at the door I am partly convinced.

In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father, and do we not hear for a moment in the rustic cottage by the Oosk the unmistakable voice of Mr. Bennet? but there is a larger critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles mr austen leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative but greatness is not made up of serious things in the sense of solemn things the reason here however is as serious as even he or any one else could desire for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen, and for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised, great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet.

But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet.

She was born, not made.