In the last two years of her life, Jane Austen wrote five letters to her niece Fanny Knight that combined true affection, detached analysis, and rare good sense.* Austen scholar Janet Todd characterized Jane’s role as an “agony aunt” who dispensed sympathetic advice to a motherless teenager with lines that are now famous: “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony. ” In 1814, shortly after her first edition of Mansfield Park sold out, Jane wrote a letter of caution to her niece Fanny Knight about marriage and affairs of the heart: