Yet if neither Elinor Dashwood nor Marianne is to be described as a likeness of Jane, the elder sister in her philosophical submission to what she believed to be the loss of her lover, and the younger in her literary tastes and her impatience with people who talk without thinking may fairly be regarded as in part reflecting the author's personality. None of her heroines _is_ Jane, but there is much of her also in Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, and a good deal in Anne Elliot, though she admitted that Anne was too nearly perfect to be altogether after her heart. The simple little souls of Fanny Price and Catherine Morland, so dependent on the direct assistance of others in the formation of their feelings, are in very small degree expressions of the author's temperament. We may, I think, regard Emma Woodhouse as the nearest approach to a { 197} portrait of the artist who painted her, but "nearest" is a relative superlative. Many people do not care for Emma. A strong expression of recent disapproval was quoted a few pages back. Jane Austen anticipated objections. "I am going," she said, when she was beginning the book, "to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."
Whether or not we may see in Emma a good deal of Jane herself, we may fairly be certain that none of her characters is an intentional copy of any one in the circle of her friends and acquaintances. She herself declared her opinion, which tallies with all that we know of her, that the introduction of living people as actors in a work of imagination is a breach of good manners, and that, propriety apart, she was too proud of her characters to admit that they were "only Mrs. A. or Colonel B." How far she made use of individuals in the composition of such strongly-marked figures as Mrs. Elton, Mr. Collins and Sir Walter Elliot, we cannot, of course, know. The point, for what it is worth, could have been better elucidated if Miss Austen's circle had been less far removed from the world wherein the { 198} Wraxalls, the Gronows and the Grevilles listen and watch. We know that, whatever the degree of similitude, Disraeli's Rigby offers a recognizable likeness to Croker, Dickens's Boythorn to Landor, Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston to Braxfield. Accepting Jane Austen's denial of the deliberate introduction of real persons in her novels, we cannot tell how many of her Hampshire acquaintances served intellectually for her pictures of country society as the maidens of Crotona served physically for the picture of Helen by Zeuxis. We may be certain that, all unconsciously, they gave her of their best, each according to his means.