Many of Austen's readers have an odd conviction, or feeling, that they know her personally, or at least know the kind of woman she was. Letters survive, her family wrote and talked about her to others after her death (sometimes long after it), and in general there is liberal documentation on her quiet, unaccented life. Yet she is surprisingly elusive as a person, and there is not even a proper painted portrait, only two rapid watercolour sketches - one, rather maddeningly, done from the back so that her features are veiled by her bonnet. Did Jane Austen, who was an intelligent and highly perceptive woman, perhaps suspect at heart that posterity would take a keen interest in her, and so resolved to outwit it and retain her privacy even after death? She was a model daughter, sister and aunt, a good neighbour and friend, sociable, fond of dancing and of good provincial society, unegotistical, self critical yet with a serene temperament; and her religious sense was not merely the conventional piety of a clergyman's daughter. But she was not lavish with her opinions or pronouncements, although we know that her three favourite authors were Johnson, Cowper and Crabbe, and compared with Keats or Moore or Scott she remains shadowy. What we would call her sex life was virtually non existent, though she appears to have been reasonably attractive physically. David Cecil believes her fatal illness (curable nowadays) prevented her from subjecting Persuasion to intense revision - a jolt for those who maintain that it is her most perfect work. Her death at 41 seems to have put many people besides her family into mourning (her tombstone can still be seen in Winchester Cathedral). Two of her brothers later rose to admirals and one of them, Frank, lived to be 91, dying in 1865.