I'd like to thank Professor Claudia Johnson of Princeton University for kindly granting permission to reproduce this article. It's a wonderful piece of writing! If one were to contend that the portrait is not Jane Austen, one is dealing with the following scenario: Jane Austen The Rice Portrait That Colonel Thomas Austen, who knew Jane Austen personally and was a member of her family gave the portrait as Jane Austen, but knowing that it was not, while innumerable people who personally knew Jane Austen were still alive, to a person who either knew Jane Austen personally or greatly admired the novelist, who accepted it as being of Jane Austen (even though it wa not) and who was married to Thomas Harding-Newman who knew Jane Austen personally and may have proposed to her and who presumably accepted it as Jane Austen (even though he knew it was not); all this at a time when innumerable people who knew Jane Austen personally were still alive. That she (Elizabeth Hall) gave ...