The son of Jane Austen's 'favourite niece' Fanny Knight, Lord Brabourne had inherited a large number of letters from Jane Austen including some to her sister Cassandra and others to members of the Knight family. The Letters of Jane Austen (2 volumes, 1884) not only publishes these letters for the first time, but sets them in a family context drawn from the reminiscences of those who knew Jane Austen personally. The letters begin in 1796, when Jane Austen was twenty, and end with her death in 1817; they are informal, even intimate, in tone, and they range across domestic, family, social and literary topics. The letters are framed by a biographical essay and some other previously unpublished family documents. As a whole the material gave unprecedented access to the mind of a writer beginning, in the late nineteenth century, to be recognised as one of Britain's greatest novelists.