A portrait of a plumply pretty young woman in a white dress will go on display for the first time next week. Nothing is certain about her. The public will be invited to judge whether she is a lost literary heroine, the only known portrait of Jane Austen's beloved companion and correspondent, her only sister Cassandra.
If it is Cassandra the picture is a treasure, and hugely valuable in the hectic collectors' market for Jane Austen memorabilia. If not, it is a reasonably competent amateur water colour, perhaps worth a few hundred pounds on a generous day.
Cassandra is a crucial figure in the Jane Austen pantheon: without her there would be almost no personal information about the country spinster who wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility and the other novels which made her world famous. The sisters exchanged gossipy letters every day they were apart. Jane died in Cassandra's arms in 1817, and until her own death in 1845 Cassandra carefully kept her personal possessions, letters, journals, and drafts of her work, and bequeathed them as precious keepsakes to her nephews and nieces.
She also makes biographers grind their teeth: a very private person, she carefully censored personal details which she felt were unbecoming, the very details biographers crave. It has been suggested the evidence for at least one unhappy love affair, illness, and depression have been scratched out of the picture.
The picture has come on loan to the Jane Austen House museum, in Chawton, Hampshire, with gaping holes in its provenance.
In 1884 Lord Brabourne, a great nephew who knew her well, and was preparing a book of her letters, wrote to his publishers: "I find I have a picture of Cassandra." The book appeared without her, and the picture was presumably sold with the rest of his estate after his death in 1893.
In the 1930s Robert Tritton bought the home of one of Jane Austen's brothers, and began collecting Austen memorabilia - including, it is believed, though there are no records of the purchase, this picture. The family kept it after an auction of the contents in the 1980s, and a descendant has now offered it on loan to the museum.
Even at the museum opinion is divided.
Peter Russell-Jones, one of the trustees, is convinced it is Cassandra, possibly drawn by her brother Henry. He thinks the prominently drawn necklace is coral, possibly a present from her sea-faring brothers.
He compared the portrait with the only portrait of Jane Austen in her lifetime, a more amateurish sketch by Cassandra, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
"There was a really striking resemblance, not just in the details of the dress, and the cap, which is virtually identical, but in the lines of the face and head. When I superimposed one on the other the match was remarkable."
The curator, Tom Carpenter, is more doubting. "We really don't know: we can say this may be the picture that was traditionally said to be Cassandra, but it is not honest to say any more than that. We will invite the public to decide, and hope somebody will be able to give us more information about it."
