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mary-kate blackwood's avatar

yes, i was sort of going for the fact that when you come home after a long time you are recognized both as still the same ("homely") and also unalterably changed, a good family will still expect some things from you but also keep limits on themselves...jane austen, maybe, knew this which is why she might have loved sailors, the constant presence of homecomings.

shorty thinks that, because austen is so distant from him, he's entitled to do what he likes with her letters as a pure academic exercise. from the opposite perspective, the gran is very close to jane austen and might be expected to think "well, she's my childhood, i have a right to read these." but she knows that jane austen is always and forever her own person, even if she belongs to the family in important ways. and i know a lot of people who have those principles...auden was strongly against rummaging through the dead's old stuff, i know there are people who refuse to read kafka besides Betrachtung and The Metamorphosis because they see max brod's refusal to burn the work as such a betrayal.

also i think part of the joke of the story is that it is written in a way shorty would be unable to find fault in—compressed, elliptical, with the minimum amount of detail. the double joke (I think?) is that annie is implicitly writing this just for enid, so in fact this whole story is something not meant for public consumption! the act of reading, maybe, makes us all into miniature shortys.

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