On this rainy Friday and was thinking about how I would like to stay curled up with my tea and a book. This got me thinking about how Jane might have spent a rainy afternoon. I found this article from the BBC that lists some of the books that Jane would have been reading. I decided on Cecilia by Frances Burney.
Cecilia, subtitled Memoirs of an Heiress, is the second novel by English author Frances Burney, set in 1779 and published in 1782. The novel, about the trials and tribulations of a young upper class woman who must negotiate London society for the first time and who falls in love with a social superior, belongs to the genre of the novel of manners. A panoramic novel of eighteenth-century London, Cecilia was highly successful with at least 51 editions.
The first line:
“Peace to the spirits of my honoured parents, respected be their remains, and immortalized their virtues! may time, while it moulders their frail relicks to dust, commit to tradition the record of their goodness; and Oh, may their orphan-descendant be influenced through life by the remembrance of their purity, and be solaced in death, that by her it was unsullied!”
Project Gutenberg has the novel for you in a few formats for your reading pleasure. –
Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3
Jane Austen Society of North America - New Jersey Region 