Last weekend I went to see the house in Hampshire where Jane Austen spent the last years of her life and learnt something unexpected about the great author: she was a whizz at saying no.
Her house is now a museum and in it you can read about a letter she wrote to an annoying man named James Stanier Clarke, a librarian to the future king, who had been urging her to make her next novel a royal “historical romance”.
Austen began by larding it on. “You are very, very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me,” she told Clarke, adding she was “fully sensible” that a royal romance might sell more than her tales of contemporary domestic life in country villages.
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