Welcome to the first of our series of short Group Reads of Jane Austen's letters.

The plan is that over the course of the next few years we will hold occasional GRs of the letters, with a view to eventually reading all of the letters contained in the Le Faye edition.

It will be a long, but hopefully not a bumpy ride :-)

I find the letters absolutely fascinating: they give us such an intimate insight into JA 's life : some are missing,some tampered with,but those that remain are fascinating little puzzles which reveal an awful lot about JA,IMHO.

I really look froward to reading them in your company.

Myretta will be scanning in and posting some facsimiles of the letters during the course of the GR: the originals are ,IMO,very hard to read and decipher but it is fascinating to see them as JA wrote them ( or at least as they have descended to us!)

Oops,nearly forgot! I think the archive of these GRs will be useful in general, but these GRs give us the opportunity to create a really exhaustive index to the letters, which would be a boon for anyone searching for that elusive JA comment on a particular topic.

So- perhaps we can all get together next week,at the end of the GR, and compile a list of topics covered in this section with page refernces,which we can maintain as the GRs continue?