Wicked Wit of Jane Austen contest winner
Congratulations to LauraGrace, who knew that the phrase “a neighbourhood of voluntary spies” is from Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey.
“If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to — Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. — Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
LauraGrace’s name was drawn to win a copy of The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen, compiled by Dominique Enright. Congratulations to LauraGrace and many thanks to all who entered the contest.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Trust Henry Tilney to say something so clever.