Looking up Jane Austen in Amy Froide’s book Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (OUP, 2005), I encountered a somewhat bizarre reference. The author quotes from a letter by Jane Austen addressed to a niece. The niece was Fanny Knight, her brother Edward’s eldest daughter, and the quotation reads: “I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed. She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself” (p. 56).

But it was Jane who died as the first of the two sisters, and it was Cassandra who lamented her death to their niece Fanny! Cassandra lived to be an old woman: she died only in 1845, at the age of 72. (The letter is dated 20 July 1817, and was written two days after Jane’s death.) Froide identifies Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of Jane Austen’s letters as the source, but claims that she took the quotation from Terry Castle’s article “Sister-Sister” published in the London Review of Books of 3 August 1995. So would it have been Castle who was wrong about which of the sisters died first?

No, as it happens: Castle writes about Cassandra sitting beside her dying sister’s bedside, and she even quotes the passage from Le Faye’s edition correctly (“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, — She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself”).

Froide’s book was recommended to me for an article I’m writing on Jane Austen’s Will. The book, however, focuses on urban unmarried women (which Jane Austen wasn’t) and on the period 1550-1750. Frankly therefore, I wonder why it was recommended in th first place. And if the author didn’t bother to check this unusual reference as well as misquoting her source, I think I’ll let it go.

(Furthermore, singlewoman is not an entry in the OED, so how common was the word after all?)