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Austen’s cousin and the wife of her brother Henry, but Jane usually refers to Eliza simply as her
sister.
It was a convention of the time to address relatives acquired through marriage in the same manner as blood relations.—
Editor’s note.
3 Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) was the foremost tragic actress of Austen’s day. With her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons dominated the London stage at this time, where it is probable Jane had seen her perform.—
Editor’s note.
4 Robert Adam’s renovation of Old Drury Lane Theatre in 1775 featured pale green and pink paint with bronze detailing—which the Dowager Duchess apparently emulated. Old Drury was pulled down and replaced by a newer building in 1794. This building burned to the ground in 1809.—
Editor’s note.
5 This was the original Bath theater on Orchard Street, where Jane was a frequent patron. Its company divided performances between Bath and Bristol, playing houses in each city on alternate nights—Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in Bath; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Bristol.—
Editor’s note.
6 Elizabeth Farren was a member of the Drury Lane company during the 1780s and the recognized mistress of the Earl of Derby, who made her his second countess at his first wife’s death in 1797.—
Editor’s note.
7 James Gillray (1757-1815) was the foremost political caricaturist of Austen’s day. His satiric prints began to make their appearance in the 1780s. The aquatint engravings generally made sport of fashionable scandals or political missteps, much as do present-day political cartoons.
8 These were the government’s public funds, one of the few reliable investments in Austen’s day, which generally yielded annuities of four percent per annum.—
Editor’s note.
9 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the noted Georgian playwright of
The School for Scandal
and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, was also a member of Parliament. Sheridan first came to Jane’s notice in 1787, when he made a four-day speech against her family’s friend Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, during Hastings’s seven-year parliamentary trial for impeachment.—
Editor’s note.
10 The Pump Room was one of the social centers of Bath. It adjoined the King’s Baths, near the Abbey and Colonnade in the heart of the city, and was frequented by the fashionable every afternoon. There they would congregate to drink a glass of medicinal spring water presented by liveried pump attendants; to promenade among their acquaintance; and to peruse the calf-bound volume in which recent arrivals to the city inscribed their names and local addresses. Austen describes the Pump Room to perfection in
Northanger Abbey
, in which Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe make the place their second home.—
Editor’s note.
11 Jane refers here to the events related in the first volume of her edited journals,
Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor
(New York: Bantam Books, 1996).—
Editor’s note.
12 John Philip and Charles Kemble both attended a Roman Catholic college in Douay, Flanders. Their father was Catholic, their mother Protestant, and according to custom the sons were reared in their father’s faith while Sarah Siddons was raised in her mother’s.—
Editor’s note.
13 To be “disguised” in Austen’s day was to be quite thoroughly drunk.—
Editor’s note.

Chapter 2
Wilberforce Elliot Pays a Call
     
    12 December 1804, cont.
~
    T HE UPROAR OF THE ASSEMBLED GUESTS WAS SWIFT AND sudden. The Dowager Duchess of Wilborough screamed, the Knight was wrestled into a chair, and not a few of the guests made swiftly for the door—being disinclined, one supposes, to a meeting with the constables that evening, and all the tedium it should require.
    For my part, I had not the slightest hesitation in remaining. The murder of the White Harlequin had rendered Lord Harold’s business irrelevant; but he should assuredly be summoned now from London, and my observation of all in the