Jane Austen Wrote a Letter to Her Niece in Code, but Harry Potter Fans Should Be Able to Crack It

In 1817, 41-year-old Jane Austen wrote a letter to her eight-year-old niece, Cassandra Esten Austen. The letter is written in code and wishes her niece a happy New Year, reading: “I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.”

Harry Potter fans should be familiar with the code being used as it is the same code used by J.K. Rowling for the inscription that is on the Mirror of Erised. The writing is backwards and can be most easily read by holding the code up to a mirror. Austen’s code is a little easier to decipher as she keeps the words whole and doesn’t break them up like Rowling does. For instance, the inscription on the Mirror of Erised reads: “Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.”

As Mental Floss reports, Austen wrote the letter to her niece only a few months before she would die due to Addison’s disease. The letter is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York as part of the museum’s “Treasures From the Vault” exhibition. The piece was donated to the institution in 1975 by a Jane Austen collector named Alberta Burke.

No other surviving letters written by Austen have been written in this cryptic fashion but, according to Morgan’s literary and historic manuscripts curator Christine Nelson, it wouldn’t be surprising if Austen had written more. “Given her love of riddles and linguistic games (which comes through, of course, in her novels), I have to believe that other family members were the recipients of similarly playful epistolary gifts,” said Nelson.

“Those simple details give a sense of the texture of Austen’s everyday life—and that she thinks to communicate them to her young niece makes clear that ‘Aunt Jane’ knew just the kinds of tidbits a child of that age would relish,” she added.
The letter will be on display at the Morgan Library until March 2018.