Note 53 — EMMA.[45]

In reading Jane Austen’s novels one is carried back to the time when good playing on the piano, or “the instrument” as it is frequently called, was held, in the higher classes, as it is now in much lower grades, a crowning mark of a liberal education in a girl. Yet Jane Austen herself fell short of this attainment, and she almost invariably makes her heroines—as in the experiences of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland, and Fanny Price—either to have failed in the duty of practising, so as not to have acquired more than a moderate proficiency in music, or else to have been deficient in musical taste or deprived of musical education.