Joann Ryan Morse published little during her lifetime but inspired four decades of English majors at Barnard College with the breadth and depth of her learning, her critical acumen, her extraordinary wit, and her integrity as a teacher.  An important indication of her stature among her peers was her appointment to a tenured professorship by Columbia University, one of a scant handful of individuals without a doctoral degree ever to achieve this distinction.  Working from notes in her files, friends recently published a collection of her essays and lectures for private circulation.  The essay below was extracted from her notes for a memorable lecture that she delivered in 1987 to the Metropolitan New York Region of JASNA.  She was the first speaker I invited to address JASNA-NY because she had been the teacher who made Jane Austen new for me when I was her student at Barnard, and because she was the model for the scholar/critic/reader/teacher/humanist that I always aspired to become.