Status Updates From Cranford

“I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening…The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were.  There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth.”

“ And so it was in everything.  Miss Jenkyns’s rules were made more stringent than ever, because the framer of them was gone where there could be no appeal.  In all things else Miss Matilda was meek and undecided to a fault.”

“ “Elegant economy!”  How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford!  There, economy was always “elegant,” and money-spending always “vulgar and ostentatious”; a sort of sour-grapeism which made us very peaceful and satisfied. ”

Ch. 5, Old Letters: I realized that the Misses Jenkyns belong to the same generation as Jane Austen's heroines. This gives me a fairly good idea of what their youth was like.