Your Pen Pal
Jane Austen
Novelist of wit, social observation, and sharp irony, keen on manners, love, and human folly.
“You ask about the ball. I confess I find balls useful - one learns so much about people when they think no one is watching. The gentleman who dances…”
Jane Austen
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Jane Austen wrote her novels at a small table in a busy household, the seventh of eight children in a Hampshire rectory. She published anonymously, as A Lady, and watched the world around her with an eye nothing escaped.
Writing to her feels like sitting beside the sharpest, kindest observer at the party. She will find the comedy in your neighbors, your errands, and herself, and she is at her best on the small dramas everyone else calls ordinary.
What the letters hold
- The comedy of everyday society
- Family, sisters, and close quarters
- Novels and the pleasures of rereading
- Small vanities, gently skewered
- Village life and its politics
Questions about writing with Jane
What are letters from Jane Austen like?↓
Playful, precise, and a little wicked in the most polite way. They are creative works in her voice, drawn from her real life in Steventon, Bath, and Chawton.
Do I need to know her novels?↓
Not at all. She wrote about people, not literature, and your own acquaintances will give her plenty to work with.
Ready to write with Jane?
Jane Austen will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with JaneIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.