GETTING ESTABLISHED

As a child, Jane Austen seems to have been relatively unsentimental, humorous, and teasing, perhaps because the boys' school run by her father provided an environment of rowdiness and high jinks. She began writing down her ideas on scraps of paper almost as soon as she could write, and she wrote sketches for her own amusement, and soon for the amusement of her parents, siblings, and extended family members. The first pieces we have were probably composed between 1787 and 1793, when she was twelve to eighteen. Few of the juvenile writings are dated, so the dates scholars have assigned are derived from the little evidence that exists and the recollections of family members.

Austen fair copied her juvenile writings into three carefully tended notebooks consisting of twenty‐seven pieces of varying lengths and levels of polish. These quarto notebooks were likely gifts; we know that her father gave her the one she used for Volume the Second. She took these productions seriously, including tables of contents, page numbers, and dedications—all the details of a published book. She transcribed these pieces over fifteen or twenty years, and continued to make revisions as late as 1809. But because the original manuscripts from which she made the copies have not survived, we cannot follow the evolution of her craft. Clearly, however, these early pieces were important to her.

Brian Southam offers the following dating of the juvenile writings¹:

• 1787‐1790 (Volume the First)
  • “Frederic and Elfrida”
  • “Jack and Alice”
  • “Edgar and Emma”
  • “Henry and Eliza”
  • “Mr. Harley”
  • “Sir William Mountague”
  • “Mr. Clifford”
  • “The beautifull Cassandra”
  • “Amelia Webster”
  • “The Visit”
  • “The Mystery”
• 1790 (Volume the Second)
  • Love and Freindship
• 1791 (Volume the Second)
  • The History of England
  • “Collection of Letters”
• 1792
  • “Lesley Castle” (Second)
  • “The Three Sisters'” (First)
  • “Evelyn” (Third)
  • “Catharine” (Third)
• 1793
  • “Scraps” (Second)
  • “Detached Pieces” (First)
  • “Ode to Pity” (First)

In Volume the First, the handwriting is childish and the compositions appear to be the earliest of Austen's literary efforts, even though the one date they carry is 1793. The contents of Volume the Third are dated 1792. Volume the First resides in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Volume the Third is in the British Museum, and Volume the Second has a private owner. The publisher Chatto & Windus first published Love and Freindship [sic] in 1922 with an introduction by English writer G. K. Chesterton.

Family lore maintains that Austen composed these lighthearted and often hilarious early writings simply as family amusements to be read aloud. Many of the pieces are dedicated to family members, and no doubt the evening readings produced much mirth. Still, Austen must have taken this composition seriously, given the copies she made and the revisions she continued to make.

In addition to humor, her juvenile writings display a characteristic toughness. Austen shows little or no mercy to her satirical targets. She goes beyond simple literary parody to skewer some notable excesses in human behavior, and she already gives evidence of her keen eye and no‐nonsense approach to social interactions. She has little patience for arrogance, self‐absorption, vanity, or hypocrisy. She spots human weaknesses from a great distance, and she targets them in her character portraits. Even the pieces that seem purely silly ridicule superficiality and self‐importance. Still, mischievousness prevails in Austen's early work.²

Some of these qualities appear in Austen's later fiction. Several of her characters have exaggerated personality traits. There is Mrs. Allen's obsession with clothes in Northanger Abbey; Mr. Palmer's rudeness to his wife in Sense and Sensibility; and Mr. Woodhouse's concern with health in Emma, reinforcing his portrayal as a fussbudget. However, in her mature fiction, while such characters have a ruling passion or trait, their personalities function in a larger social context, and Austen presents them with real affection and a deep knowledge of the human heart, whereas in the juvenilia, one‐dimensional characters are simple puppets for Austen's burlesque effects. As the pieces become more sophisticated, they offer outlines of Austen's later themes and literary techniques. Her characters evolve into complex individuals who interact in more elaborate ways with the society in which they live, and who grow and change in the course of those interactions.

TECHNIQUES

Austen's extensive reading prepared the way for her writing career. Her father apparently placed no restrictions on the books she read as a child. As her biographer Claire Tomalin puts it, “if she was allowed to read Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison as a child, which gives detailed accounts of maternal drunkenness and paternal adultery, and lays out the correct attitude to adopt towards a father's mistress and illegitimate half‐brothers, Mr. Austen cannot have kept much from her.”³ Henry Austen remembers his sister as a precocious reader, but he also emphasizes her piety, and he focuses on her reading of Samuel Johnson's essays, William Cowper's poetry, and sermons.⁴ But Austen also enjoyed Henry Fielding's comedy Tom Thumb and his ribald novel Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy (an experimental comic novel based in part on the philosophy of John Locke), and the fiction of Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney d'Arblay, and Charlotte Smith.⁵ The family read plays together, and Austen would have been especially familiar with Shakespeare's plays, which are mentioned throughout her own novels: Edmund Bertram and Henry Crawford discuss Shakespeare in Mansfield Park; Catherine Morland mentions Shakespeare in Northanger Abbey; and the Dashwood sisters read Hamlet with Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. She was familiar with Johnson's philosophical novel Rasselas and his essays, and she read James Boswell's work. The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Milton's poetry were, of course, important elements of Austen's formation and education.

We know that Austen's favorite novel was Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, published in 1753 and 1754. The novel is a seven‐volume work about a paragon of gentlemanliness, the woman he falls in love with after rescuing her from a kidnapping and possible rape, an Italian lady to whom Sir Charles has pledged himself and from whom it takes him many volumes to get honorably extricated, and their families and friends. Austen's only attempt at playwriting was a dramatic version of this story, a manuscript preserved by the Austen family for years but not discovered until the late 1970s, when it was edited and published by Austen scholar Brian Southam.⁶

Given Austen's novelistic preoccupations, some of the features of the plot of Sir Charles Grandison are particularly intriguing.⁷ For example, Sir Charles's outspoken younger sister Charlotte rails against marriage as a form of imprisonment. When in the end Charlotte agrees to marry, she misbehaves at her own wedding, will not let her new husband sit beside her in the carriage afterwards, and teases him so relentlessly that he smashes her harpsichord. This novel is full of discussions about women's roles and social place. The marriage between Harriet Byron and Sir Charles exemplifies an ideal for which Austen's heroines also strive: a marriage partnership that represents not only romantic love but a highly developed and respectful friendship between a man and a woman.

Austen's reading gave her philosophical insights, subject matter, and social attitudes to mine for her own work and a firm grasp of novelistic techniques. Her early writings were fictions in the form of letters. Letters also figure prominently in her novels: Darcy writes letters and the characters discuss letter‐writing as an activity in Pride and Prejudice, and a letter‐writing scene provides the climax of Austen's final completed novel, Persuasion. Letters were a form of writing practiced by women, and worked easily as a narrative technique that introduced women's voices into fiction. As her craft evolved, Austen developed the early epistolary versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice into third‐person narratives with her trademark omniscient and ironic voice as the controlling narrative authority.

Austen wrote many of her early pieces and the first versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice in epistolary form—a frequent mode of presenting novels in the eighteenth century, and Richardson's particular technique. She uses the mishaps of letters gone astray not only to create plot complications, but to poke fun at the crises and confusions that result. In “Lesley Castle,” one letter begins: “I have but just received your letter, which being directed to Sussex while I was at Bristol was obliged to be forwarded to me here, & from some unaccountable Delay, has but this instant reached me—.”⁸ Austen often made fun of herself, and of authorship in general. Her hilariously concise history of England, called The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st, is prefaced with an epigraph that reads: “By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian.” A note follows this epigraph and promises: “N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.”⁹

Jane Austen used a narrative method that has often been misunderstood, in part because of her own self‐deprecating references. In December 1816, she wrote to her nephew James Edward Austen about his writings, which she refers to in a bantering tone as “strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety & Glow” in contrast to her own productions, “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”¹⁰ She seemed to see herself as a miniaturist, writing occasional, offhand portraits. In fact, she used a technique of concentration, placing her characters in close proximity and in complex social situations, and then watching them interact and work out their relationships through revealing mechanisms of social negotiation. The “little bit” of ivory tells a bigger tale.

Jane Austen's own writing process itself could have been a scene in one of her novels. Her nephew James Edward Austen‐Leigh's memoir of his aunt describes the loss of privacy for writing that Austen suffered when the family left Steventon and moved to Chawton. At Chawton Cottage, she had to write in the public sitting room. Because she didn't want servants or visitors to know that she was writing, she wrote on small scraps that could be quickly hidden under a piece of blotting paper if someone entered the room. As Austen‐Leigh tells it, the door to the sitting room creaked when it opened or closed, and Austen did not wish it to be repaired because it signaled to her that she needed to spirit away her writing.

Jane Austen's irony and the brilliant thematic structure of her carefully wrought stories are legendary. Her brilliance begins at the level of the individual sentence. Almost any randomly selected sentence from one of her six major novels is a model of prose style. Her syntax is clever and elaborate, with flowing punctuation and lengthy, connected clauses; yet her sentences are never muddled or confusing. To parse them grammatically, or to analyze their vocabulary or their punctuation, might tax most readers; but each sentence satisfies because its complexity never gets in the way of its easy good sense. Austen's syntax is entangled, her points of view and manipulation of perspective are elaborately contrived, but the complexities of her prose flatter as well as speak to her readers' intelligence.

Austen was one of the first and most innovative practitioners of a narrative style known as style indirect libre, or free indirect style. While her fame derives largely from her straightforward, canny reportage of ordinary details and personal quirks, she also excels at painting a scene by combining one character's voice or point of view with the perspective of an omniscient narrating voice that speaks from outside the action. Sometimes these voices belong to multiple characters, as in the tour de force of indirect style that describes the strawberry sequence at the Donwell Abbey picnic in Emma.

The whole party was assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her appartus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and only strawberries, only now be thought or spoken of.—“The best fruit in England—every body's favourite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one's self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”¹¹

This passage comes largely from the perspective of vain Mrs. Elton, who has positioned herself as the hostess at Donwell; but it also contrives to deliver a group or community voice that moves from lively pleasure to lethargy in the course of this deliberately disjointed, galloping paragraph. It is not altogether clear who is speaking, and the indeterminacy of the phrases forms part of how they convey a communal sense of the initially delightful and then irritating activity of picking strawberries. The passage is both stylized and almost stream‐of‐consciousness in its flow.¹²

Austen's prose style welcomes and pleases her readers because she cultivates a rich relationship between the narrator and the reader. The narrator speaks directly to us, and with us consents to view the novel's characters from a certain perspective. Austen's narrative voice assumes that she is speaking to a sensible audience who understands and agrees with her right‐minded standards of behavior and morality. There is an amused, critical irony that embraces the reader in the inner circle of those who have insight and perspicacity, those who know and can judge.

Austen nearly independently invented a new and revolutionary form of the English novel. The novel played an increasingly important role in popular literature during the century that preceded Austen, and her work owes a debt to Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney in particular. But she combined the external observations of eighteenth‐century adventure fiction (the picaresque novels of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett) with the interior analyses of women's moral fiction of the period (the psychological novels of Ann Radcliffe and Burney) to achieve a quiet but startlingly influential innovation in the genre of the novel.

Women's domestic experience was circumscribed by gender roles and expectations, and women's lives centered primarily on family activities. Yet women also needed to use their domestic choices to fit themselves into the larger social and economic structures into which they were born. Austen took this confluence of private limitation and public necessity and wove it into some of the most psychologically insightful, socially astute, and complex literature we have in the English language. Given her inauspicious and utterly normal surroundings, one might ask how this was possible.

Austen's narrative voice is her most powerful and influential invention. Writing with distance and judgment, her narrators manage to be didactic and aloof, conversational and charming and, above all, ironic. They testify to the technical prowess and craftsmanship of Austen's mature prose. While her subject matter seems small—the subtle ways in which people interact and form judgments of one another, the nuances of space and language at a public gathering, the meanings of gestures and silences—she painted an overarching and highly moral portrait of social life.

As a stylist, Austen is best known for her use of irony, and this technique already emerges in sharp form in her juvenile writings. Austen's juvenile work frequently turns to wicked satire. One of her favorite targets was the vogue for sentimentality. When Emma learns that Edgar is away at college in “Edgar and Emma,” she retires to her room, where she “continued in tears the remainder of her Life.”¹³ In Love and Freindship [sic], the friends Sophia and Laura shriek and faint, swoon and run mad, a circumstance that leads to some judicious advice.

Beware of swoons … A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an excerise to the Body & if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to health in its consequences.—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—.¹⁴

To understand the finely honed production of Austen's irony, we should look closely at a couple of her mature sentences, because it is at the level of the sentence that Austen's narrative voice succeeds. Here is the famous opening sentence (and paragraph) of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”¹⁵ This sentence opens the novel with a proposition that the novel's plot proves: Charles Bingley has moved into the neighborhood of the Bennets, who have five unmarried daughters and an entailed estate, and Mrs. Bennet, with every other mother in the area, plans to ensnare him as a marriage partner for one of her girls, preferably the eldest. And in the end, after many vicissitudes and misunderstandings and illnesses and humiliations, the marriage is certain.

But plot foreshadowing is the least of this sentence's importance. It sets up the comical yet deadly serious dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet about the necessity of paying a visit to the new neighbors, and thus initiates the tone of the whole novel: the nature of the Bennet marriage and thus the question of marriage generally and so the social necessities and economic maneuverings that are requirements in this society. The sentence embodies an idea that is both practical and philosophical; it is an opinion both on economics and on social structure. This sentence, critic Julia Prewitt Brown observes, starts a chain reaction because it “reverberates throughout the entire first chapter, indeed the entire novel, and derives its brilliance from that reverberation.”¹⁶ The sentence is meaningful in a straightforward way and yet quite outrageous in its implications.

Brown mentions another classically and somewhat cruelly ironic sentence from Emma. This sentence also opens a chapter, and it also stands alone as a paragraph: “Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.”¹⁷ What occasions this ironic blast is one of the most awkward circumstances into which Emma Woodhouse contrives to trap herself. Emma encourages her friend Harriet Smith to consider Mr. Elton. Mr. Elton misinterprets her manipulations as a sign that Emma herself is well‐disposed towards him. Emma is mortified, Harriet is humiliated, and Mr. Elton recovers from his disappointment by affiancing himself to Miss Hawkins and returning to town to tout her merits.

Mrs. Elton, née Hawkins, becomes one of Austen's best satirical targets for self‐importance and social obliviousness. The sentence from Emma introduces the embarrassing fact that Miss Hawkins becomes an instant celebrity in Highbury, where everyone suddenly thinks well of her. The operative phrase “interesting situations” in the sentence makes it at once a humorous and a significant statement. The word “interesting” had more complex meanings in Austen's time than it does now, when it represents merely the opposite of dull or boring. Then, it meant something more like “intriguing” or “provocative.” But however we understand the word, it seems staggeringly cruel to call someone's dying “interesting.” (We might note that Mrs. Churchill is not spoken well of in Emma until after her offstage death.) Death, of course, is just what we least expect in a comedy of manners, where what we look for is a wedding. Austen subtly made marriage analogous to death in this neat sentence and illuminated another element of her fiction: It investigates the larger scope of human nature.

Saying as little as possible to convey the crux of a situation or a character constitutes another of Austen's ironic techniques. Her lovers' confessions of love and proposals of marriage perfectly illustrate her economy of language. Whole books lead up to these moments, of course, after a range of obstacles and discomfiting circumstances and embarrassments. At the climactic proposal scene in Emma, for example, even though the narrator provides two pages of indirect discourse on the agitations of Emma's mind when she realizes that she herself is the object of Mr. Knightley's affections, the moment of truth is delivered only in these lines: “She spoke then, on being so entreated.—What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.”¹⁸ The scene continues with the tactic of indirect speech, a clipped series of confessions and revelations between the lovers who are to be husband and wife.

Jane Austen also pioneered the use of style indirect libre to convey what her characters are thinking without quoting them directly. Austen often used this technique, especially during the climactic scenes when her lovers finally unburden themselves to one another and recapitulate the various musings, miscommunications, and circumstances that have led to plot entanglements and at last to an understanding of mutual love. The revelations between Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot in Persuasion that follow much misreading, self‐doubt, and emotional upheaval are preceded by indirect discourse during a concert scene that involves Wentworth's anxious jealousy of Anne's cousin Mr. Elliot, who ends the scene by interrupting them.¹⁹ This conversation has nothing really to do with the concert, but conveys the subtlety and edginess of the unspoken history and feelings between the interlocutors.

When the most important words are spoken in an Austen novel, the reader rarely gets to hear them. The second proposal scene between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice also uses indirect speech. When it comes to the central moment, the narrator tells us that Darcy “expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.”²⁰ And after the exchange between Knightley and Emma in Emma, the narrator offers a now famous Austenian observation.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom does it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material.²¹

This sentence tells us a great deal about Austen's novelistic technique. Even as her narrators choreograph their plots around a thicket of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, the characters mature and learn to give one another and themselves the benefit of the doubt.

SUBJECT TO REVISION

Jane Austen's brother Henry, in a “Biographical Notice of the Author,” his preface to his posthumous edition of his sister's first and last novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, presented the first public glimpse of his sister's working process as a writer. He stated that she became interested in literature and in her own language abilities at an early age in her father's library. Her novels were polished and sent out for publication from Chawton, but she began many of them, he noted, in earlier periods of her life. In Henry Austen's portrait, Jane Austen appears as a meticulous editor of her own work. “For though in composition she was equally rapid and correct,” he wrote, “yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her works from the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the charm of recent composition was resolved.”²²

As Henry Austen remarked in his “Biographical Notice,” Jane Austen read and reread, corrected and revised her work until she was satisfied that she had said what she wanted to say. Thus she began to write what would become her major works at a young age, and she spent many years rereading, revising, and correcting the manuscripts. The origins of the first three of Jane Austen's six great novels overlap with the writing of the juvenile works.

Austen may have begun her first completed novel, Lady Susan, as early as 1793 or 1794. We have a fair‐copy manuscript with few corrections from 1805, so scholars have had to speculate from other evidence.²³ She began to write First Impressions, later called Pride and Prejudice, in 1796, when she was just twenty‐one, and she completed the first version in 1797. Her family enjoyed it right away. Her father offered it to a publisher, but it was rejected sight unseen. By 1800, Jane Austen had completed a novel she titled Susan, and she had revised a third book called Elinor and Marianne, written before First Impressions. These works were the first versions of Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. All three were originally composed in epistolary form.

Austen prepared Susan for publication in 1802 or 1803, and sold it to a publisher in 1803 for £10, but it was not published, and in 1809 she arranged to buy back the copyright for the same amount. After her death it was published as Northanger Abbey. In 1803, Austen also worked on a novel fragment called The Watsons; the manuscript is written on paper watermarked 1803 and was probably composed in Bath. Austen's father died in 1805, and scholars assume that she abandoned this work in her bereavement. Her nephew James Edward Austen‐Leigh proposed another hypothesis for the abandonment of this promising manuscript: that the Watson family has the most obscure social status of any of Austen's principal families, and that she thought better of such a subject. Whatever the reason, The Watsons remains a promising story, if darker than much of her other work, and it is a loss to literature that Austen chose not to complete it.

When the Austen women moved to Chawton Cottage in July of 1809, Jane was thirty‐three. Chawton afforded little privacy for writing, but it was here that Austen composed her great mature novels. The first of Austen's completed major novels to be published was Sense and Sensibility in November 1811. It was followed in January 1813, by Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park appeared in May of 1814, and Emma in December 1815, the year that Austen began Persuasion. She began to lose her health in 1816, but by July of that year she had completed a first draft and a revised version of Persuasion, and in January of 1817 she began her last novel, the unfinished Sanditon. Northanger Abbey (the first of the six major novels in date of composition) and Persuasion were published together, with a biographical note by Henry Austen, in December of 1818, five months after Jane Austen died in Winchester on 18 July at the age of forty‐two.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Contrary to popular views that Austen was an amateur who did not take her work seriously, she thought a great deal about remuneration for her writings. Her first effort to publish was in November 1797. Her father, the Reverend George Austen, offered First Impressions, later to become Pride and Prejudice, to Cadell and Davies in November, offering to take on the costs and the risk himself. He compared the book in length and subject matter to Frances Burney's Evelina, but the publisher declined to read it.

The literary marketplace was no longer completely inhospitable to women by Austen's time, but it was difficult to enter. A century earlier, Aphra Behn became the first Englishwoman to support herself by her pen—at the cost of her reputation. Fame for a woman automatically meant infamy, which explains Jane Austen's typical decision to publish her work anonymously. Women could neither own property nor sign personal contracts.²⁴ She required a male relation to negotiate on her behalf, and her brother Henry performed this service for her.

There were several publishing options in England. Authors could sell subscriptions to their books, printing only the number for which they had prearranged sales. An author could negotiate a one‐time sale of the copyright, the method Austen chose for Susan (whose copyright she bought back six years after selling it) and Pride and Prejudice. The copyright, then as now, was a license to print a book, and was understood to represent property. The House of Lords had eliminated perpetual copyright in 1774, the year before Austen's birth, but publishers still paid blanket fees for a limited copyright ownership of fourteen or twenty‐eight years. A copyright sale assured an author of money regardless of the book's sales. However, if the book sold well, its author was not entitled to its profits. There were also various forms of profit sharing.

The method that Austen chose for Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma was to publish on commission. For the author, commission publication entailed underwriting the cost of paper, printing, and advertising, and the publisher distributed the copies and kept the accounts. In practice, the publisher usually fronted the costs of printing and took reimbursements from the profits. The publisher got a ten percent commission on each copy sold, and if things went well, the author made a profit. There was greater risk to commission publication, but also a greater chance of monetary rewards. Of Austen's novels published on commission, only the second edition of Mansfield Park lost money.²⁵

Austen kept careful records of her literary earnings. Writing to her brother Frank on 15 September 1813, she added a postscript.

You will be glad to hear that every Copy of S. & S. is sold & that it has brought me £140—besides the Copyright, if that should ever be of any value.—I have now therefore written myself into £250.—which only makes me long for more.²⁶

In a letter to Martha Lloyd dated 29 November 1812, Austen informed her close friend that Thomas Egerton had paid £110 for Pride and Prejudice. “I would rather have had £150,” she writes, “but we could not both be pleased, & I am not at all surprised that he should not chuse to hazard so much.”²⁷ Interestingly, because publications and copyrights represented property and income potential, they also became associated with the notion of authority.²⁸

It was not until after her death that any of Jane Austen's novels appeared with her name attached to them, so the reviews that were published during her lifetime never mentioned her by name.

Notes

1. Southam discusses his criteria for this dating in B. C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

2. Frances Beer provides a useful introduction to Austen's juvenile writings in the “Introduction” to The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, ed. Frances Beer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 9‐19.

3. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 67.

4. Henry Austen added a “Biographical Notice of the Author” to his posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and R. W. Chapman keeps this Notice in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 3‐9.

5. For accounts of Austen's reading, see the chapter “Reading and Response” in Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (1939; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 41‐83 and Margaret Anne Doody, “Jane Austen's Reading,” in J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam, eds. The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 347‐63.

6. Jane Austen's “Sir Charles Grandison,” transcribed and edited by Brian Southam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

7. Austen wrote her own version of this story. See Ibid.

8. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 119.

9. Ibid., 138.

10. Jane Austen's Letters, new ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 323.

11. The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 358‐59.

12. For a useful discussion of Austen's language use, see Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). For a study of the satiric uses of indirect style before Austen, see Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London, 1985).

13. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 33.

14. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 102.

15. Ibid., p. 3.

16. Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 26.

17. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 181. Cited and discussed by Julia Prewitt Brown, op. cit., p. 26.

18. Ibid., p. 431.

19. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 190.

20. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). p. 366.

21. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 431.

22. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 4.

23. See B. C. Southam, Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

24. Some property strictures applied differently to married and to single women. For a complete discussion, see Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660‐1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). A widow could inherit and manage property after her husband's death, and individual family arrangements could override property laws by explicitly stipulating alternative inheritance rules for an estate. This explains Lady Catherine de Bourgh's powerful position in Pride and Prejudice. She owns the Rosings living and thus has the authority to give it to Mr. Collins. She also makes the telling remark to Charlotte, on the subject of the Longbourne estate, “I see no occasion for entailing estates away from the female line.—It was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family” (The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 164). It should be mentioned in this context that Lady Catherine de Bourgh's title derives from her father rather than from her husband, who was of a lower rank.

25. Jan Fergus offers a useful discussion of publishing practices in “Conditions of Authorship for Women,” in Jane Austen: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 1‐27.

26. Jane Austen's Letters, new ed., ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 217.

27. Ibid., p. 197.

28. For discussions of publishing income and its relation to authorship and authority, see Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790‐1820,” Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Culture 17 (1987), pp. 198‐207.