Happy Birthday, dear Jane!

Yes, it's Jane Austen's birthday, though I've blogged so much about her recently that I wasn't quite sure what I should post in honor of the day. I decided on this wonderful quote, which made me realize how much I need to re-read Mansfield Park.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Jane Austen was born in 1775, the seventh child and second daughter of George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen.

In honor of the day, I've begun reading Josephine Ross' Jane Austen: A Companion.

'Tis the season to read Austen! Happy Birthday, dear Jane!