"It presents her as a professional woman writer; there are pens on the table, a sheaf of paper. She seems to be a woman very confident in her own skin, very happy to be presented as a professional woman writer and a novelist, which does fly in the face of the cutesy, heritage spinster view."—Jane Austen scholar Dr. Paula Byrne, who may have discovered a lost portrait of Austen. The image, done in graphite on vellum, undermines the traditional narratives of Austen that cast her as a one-dimensional irascible spinster, and instead "shows a writer at the height of her powers and a woman comfortable in her own skin."
[H/T to Iain, whom I love even more now than I did in the moment before he passed this along with a note about how much I'd like it.]
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