Jane Austen was a conscientious letter writer, though not at all a literary one. She did nothing to encourage or maintain correspondence with people outside her immediate family circle, and wrote simply to convey domestic news and gossip, most often to her beloved sister Cassandra when one or other of them was away from home. When R W Chapman’s first edition of the letters was published in 1932, a number of critics found their unliterariness positively infuriating: H W Garrod described them as ‘a desert of trivialities punctuated by occasional clever malice’; Harold Nicolson thought them ‘trivial and dull’, the work of a mind like a very small, sharp pair of scissors.

Of course, if you like clever malice, the book is a gold mine: ‘Miss Langley is like any other short girl with a broad nose & wide mouth, fashionable dress, & exposed bosom’; ‘The house seemed to have all the comforts of little Children, dirt & litter’; ‘Miss Debary, Susan & Sally…made their appearance, & I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow? There is also plenty of humour, much directed at herself – ‘Charlotte & I did my hair, which I fancy looked very indifferent; nobody abused it however, & I retired delighted with my success’ – and excursions into pure absurdity, such as is found in her juvenilia. But what of the ‘desert of trivialities’ that H W Garrod complained of? The further one gets in this book full of dancing, and dresses, journeys and petty cash, the more one believes that triviality is in the eye of the beholder.

‘To sit in idleness over a good fire in a well-proportioned room’, as Austen says in one letter, ‘is a luxurious sensation. Sometimes we talked & sometimes we were quite silent; I said two or three amusing things, & Mr Holder made a few infamous puns… We had a very quiet evening, I believe Mary found it dull, but I thought it very pleasant.’ Most of Austen’s evenings were very quiet, but her sincere interest in the minutiae of daily life – especially anything to do with money – and her completely unsentimental chronicling of it are utterly absorbing. The following from a letter written in London in 1813 is typical of her matter and manner: ‘I was very lucky in my gloves, got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked at all like a glove shop, & gave only four Shillings for them; upon hearing which, every body at Chawton will be hoping & predicting that they cannot be good for anything, & their worth certainly remains to be proved, but I think they look very well’ The strength of letters such as these is that they lack art (although there are some exceptions, notably her controlled rejoinders to the Prince Regent’s insufferably pompous librarian, James Stanier Clarke). Austen’s six novels famously do not lack art; otherwise the worldliness, intelligence, humour and materialism are very much the same.

Even if you have no taste for the quotidian, it is unfair to judge Austen’s character from these surviving letters, representing as they do probably a very small proportion of what was left at Austen’s death in 1817. Jane’s sister Cassandra had complete control over the author’s personal papers, and destroyed anything she thought might excite (or satisfy) vulgar curiosity. One of the nieces, Caroline Austen, said that of the remaining letters – given out among the family as keepsakes – several had portions cut out. Many of the really long gaps in the letters cover eventful periods in Jane’s life, notably the summer of 1801 when she fell in love with a man who is said (by Cassandra) to have died soon after. Whatever did happen that year, Jane had plenty of time to have recovered herself by 1804, when the correspondence starts up again. Little wonder, in the circum-stances, that biographies of her have tended to be so bland. When Harold Nicolson detected in the letters the presence of a mind like a very small, sharp pair of scissors’, he was perhaps not far off the mark, but the mind in question was Cassandra’s, not Jane’s.

Anyone hoping that this third edition of the letters will have come up with some meaty new material (a lost letter to Walter Scott, perhaps, thanking him for the review of Emma and describing her brother Frank’s expedition to rescue Sir John Moore at Corunna?) will be disappointed. Only the most fanatical Austen scholar could get excited about the few fragments of new text collected here – one of which is simply a date and a signature. The difference between this and the first two editions (by Chapman) is almost purely editorial. Sealed as they are into family talk, these letters need a great many footnotes to be comprehensible, and here Deirdre le Faye has improved dramatically on Chapman’s editions, although it is a nuisance that the notes (116 pages of them) are all printed at the back of the book. Le Faye has also provided a massive biographical index, a topographical index, a bibliography, and exhaustive details of ownership and watermarks which take in all the latest scholarship, and she has painstakingly redated and renumbered much of the text. Gone is Chapman’s valuable index of ‘Jane Austen’s English’, and his quirky list of ships’ names, but there is a new concordance to smooth the transition from one edition to the other, adding as it does so an extraneous flavour of Holy Writ to this very welcome reappearance in print of the sisterly gossip of ‘Divine Jane’.