This myth is one of those rare ones about Jane Austen that she herself seems not only to have originated, but also to have insisted upon, repeatedly. The locus classicus of this myth is Austen's letter to her 18- year-old nephew, James Edward, who was at the time trying to write an ambitious historical novel. Austen's artistic commitment to composing on “a little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory” is no myth at all. She is indeed, if not exactly a miniaturist, then at least a practitioner of the small-scale. Clearly, Austen deliberately decrescendos and delimits, and in doing so her achievement was, for her time, highly original. Early reviewers agree that Austen's novels are striking and wonderful precisely because they are in some sense scaled down.