Almost always in these cases Austen champions the underappreciated child—Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price—and holds the misguided parents up to ridicule.

The gradual softening of the parodic edge can be traced in even her earliest work. Her assaults as she moved through her teens were more and more indirectly delivered. The management of dialogue, undeveloped in her early work, became her weapon, replacing the crude manipulations of a disconnected narrator. Undoubtedly the family dramatics in the barn helped establish her ear, which in the later books is perfected. When Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey, for instance, says that Miss Tilney “always wears white,” we are handed an economical piece of loaded information by the very person for whom this declaration has meaning: Mrs. Allen, a silly but shrewd woman, knows that someone who “always wears white” has no need to worry about the cost of laundering; someone who wears white exclusively has also adopted an eccentricity that speaks of a certain daintiness, and also resolution and stubbornness of mind.

Two qualities distinguish Jane Austen’s early work from the juvenilia of other writers. The works were public, at least in a limited sense, and they were part of a continuum. The unformed writer who produced Lesley Castle in her teens is the same Jane Austen who was writing Pride and Prejudice at the extraordinary age of twenty-one, a mere five years later.

None of the early writing we have on record hints at the secrecy and confessional desperation associated with young girls. Instead, all of the work appears to have been shared openly with family and friends. The erasure of the private self from Jane Austen’s early work suggests a confusion concerning that self or else a want of permission from those around her. Her maturing sensibility must be read today through the scrim of an increasingly subtle voice as she attempted to close the gap between longing and belonging, between wanting to please herself and placate her audience. Her satirical thrust remains in the foreground, but becomes more and more her own intricate invention. Moving from Lesley Castle to the later Catharine, we see her growing attention to plausibility, to psychological realism, and to expository halftones that mitigate the earlier childish excess.

In a notebook Mr. Austen presented to the young Jane, he provided a title for its eventual contents: “Effusions of Fancy by a very Young Lady Consisting of Tales in a Style entirely new.” In this highly compressed, carefully constructed dedication, Mr. Austen gestures toward all that characterized his daughter’s early writing; he reminds her, and perhaps himself, of her extreme youth, her tendency toward effusion and fancifulness, and at the same time he recognizes her uniqueness of style, her novelty of approach. This literary daughter of his had more than ordinary promise.

The fatherly inscription is tender and knowing and without real mockery. It can only have encouraged Jane Austen to write more.

4

THE BUSY, BUSTLING LIFE of the Austens was changing. The house, in fact, was emptying out, with the Austen brothers going off in their separate directions. Francis was in the East Indies, pursuing what was to become a successful naval career, and Charles, the youngest Austen, was following in his footsteps. The charming Henry, Jane’s favorite brother, was studying at Oxford, and James was now curate in the vicarage at nearby Overton. And Edward (lucky Edward, adopted by the wealthy Knight family) was beginning his life as a landed gentleman and considering a most advantageous marriage. Jane, at home with her parents and her sister Cassandra, must have found herself in a debilitating vacuum. Was this to be her life then? Her brothers had entered the public world, while she and Cassandra were confined to domestic preoccupations and small social forays in the immediate neighborhood.

Some years earlier James had written a telling prologue to one of the family theatricals. Times have changed, proclaimed cousin Eliza, who read the piece at the performance. Women had been oppressed in the past:

But thank our happier Stars, those times are o’er
And woman holds a second place no more.
Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,
These Men all wise, these “Lords of the Creation,”
To our superior sway themselves submit,
Slaves to our charms and vassals to our wit;
We can with ease their ev’ry sense beguile,
And melt their Resolution with a smile . . .

Jane had just turned eleven when she sat listening to this curious and playful statement of emancipation, which can also be viewed as a sop tossed to women in exchange for what had been taken from them. Women’s power was locked up in their charm and wit, in their targeted, practiced smiles.