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Part 20: All Her Powers of Performance

Sat, 05/14/2022 - 6:00am
"Embroidery for Fire Screen" (early 1800s, Cleveland Museum of Art)

Trifles Light as Air

A collection of one-shots based on Northanger Abbey: drabbles, flash fiction, missing scenes, and more. Title from Shakespeare's Othello, as quoted by Jane Austen in Chapter One. Now available as an eBook via Draft2Digital.

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It surprised Miss Andrews to receive a letter from Miss Thorpe, a person unheard from in months.

It surprised Miss Andrews to receive a letter from Miss Thorpe, a person unheard from in months. However, as her current mourning lessened the danger this correspondence might otherwise present for the increase of their association, she read it with some interest. Even more surprisingly, there was an undertone of resentment at odds with the cheerful events described.

She felt a great deal of amusement at finally coming to the point, the first felt since bidding her mother adieu, and was so perversely relieved by her fairweather friend's misfortunes that she determined to answer with some comfort from her own pen:

"If no reconciliation is possible—as, from my own experience of Mr. Morland's loyalties, I well believe to be the case—I advise you to take consolation in the virtues of feminine industry. To that purpose I shall gladly recommend you for the charitable sewing when next I am at church."

Title from Chapter 29 of Northanger Abbey: "To compose a letter which might at once do justice to her sentiments and her situation ... was an undertaking to frighten away all her powers of performance...."