"if You Don't Marry My Sister You will Mortally Offend Me": Sibling Matchmakers (AGM: 2009: Philadelphia) (Critical Essay‪)‬

AMELIA WEBSTER, an interesting & well written Tale, as she called it, is among Jane Austen's shorter juvenilia in Volume the First. It's epistolary, and it consists of a mere seven brief letters, and the whole occupies less than three pages in the Chapman edition. Yet in the course of this interesting tale no fewer than three marriages are accomplished. In a work of such dimensions, there isn't much room for subtlety or the finer finesses of sensibility. When George Hervey writes to his friend Beverley, he is brief and to the point: [My Sisters] are both fine Girls--particularly Maud, who I think would suit you as a Wife well enough. What say you to this? She will have two thousand Pounds & as much more as you can get. If you don't marry her you will mortally offend