[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations...

This passage comes from Jane Austen’s early epistolary novel *Lady Susan* (written in the 1790s; published posthumously in 1871). It appears in a letter describing the young Frederica Vernon, who, distressed by her mother Lady Susan’s schemes and her own uncertain prospects, retreats into sentimental reading and reflection. Austen frames Frederica’s “musings and quotations” about autumn as a conventional pose drawn from fashionable poetry and sensibility culture—an idiom that would have been familiar to late-18th-century readers. The tone is gently ironic: the narrator reports the language of refined feeling while hinting at how secondhand and performative such literary melancholy can be.

The sentence both indulges and satirizes the period’s taste for “sensibility.” Autumn is presented as a ready-made trigger for refined emotion—“inexhaustible influence” on the tender-minded—and as a topic that every respectable poet has supposedly treated. By piling up the rhetoric of taste, tenderness, and poetic precedent, Austen signals how easily feeling can become a literary cliché. The final clause—Frederica occupying herself in “musings and quotations”—suggests that her emotional life is mediated through borrowed lines rather than direct experience. The effect is double: it captures a genuine adolescent impulse toward melancholy while exposing the social and textual scripts that shape it.