Jane Austen, or, Shades of grey?

"April had got into the way of reading Jane Austen less for pleasure than as a counteraction to those French books and Chinese and Egyptian prints and pictures which Barry liked her to study before he tried to follow out their instructions and illustrations in bed.  After his death she never knew how to get rid of his books -- too thick to burn and quite inappropriate for Oxfam  -- so they remained, parcelled up in their dreadful privacy on the top shelf of her wardrobe.  Hidden there they were as lost to her memory as were any occasional gleams of pleasure in past experience.  Happily now, she knew the value of her own bodily privacy.  She even enjoyed the privacy of her deafness, ignoring what she did not want to hear,  even when she happened to hear it.  In the same way she could contentedly block remembrance.

....with Tiger fumbling contentedly at her feet, she reopened Mansfield Park wondering, not for the first time, whether Fanny had not been rather more than an idiot to refuse Henry.  Perhaps so. Perhaps not.  Henry might easily have turned out to be an earlier Grange-Gorman.  She poked Tiger with her toe and read on peacefully."

Time After Time  Molly Keane

African correspondence

"There was nobody in the kitchen.  A glorious pheasant lay unplucked on the table.  Dark alcoves yawned back into the walls.  High, huge, and Gothic, a framed text hung above the loaded dresser,
 I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE.  The capital letters were blue and red and gold, under years of smoke and dust and grease.  I put my hand on the pheasant's breast, a stone under the fiery feathers.  I looked out of the windows to the stars.  Tomorrow there would be a letter for me.  Or perhaps not.  He was moving round Africa.  He had never had my letter about Papa.  I saw a native running to nowhere with my letter in the cleft of a forked stick, or it might be his letter to me.  The idea cheered me."

Good Behaviour  Molly Keane