Other women—family members, her own aunt and cousin—had seized their opportunities, risked their respectability, and claimed their future. What was she herself doing, other than scribbling away for the entertainment of the family and waiting for a husband to appear? And from where would that husband come? Candidates were sure to be in short supply, since neither of the Austen girls had a penny to bring to marriage, but still Jane dreamed of rescue. Once, idly, she covered a page of her father’s parish ledger with the names of fantasy husbands: “Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam,” “Edmund Arthur William Mortimer.” These were noble-sounding gentlemen with a ring of fortune about them. Then, out of a different longing, or perhaps terror, she wrote “Jack Smith,” to be married to “Jane Smith late Austen.”

Her life went on quietly. There were pleasant diversions, holidays with the family, visits from Eliza and her son, and preparations for the wedding of the Austen cousin, Jane Cooper. The officiating clergyman at this event was to be the handsome young Tom Fowle, whose family were old friends of the Austens and who had himself been a pupil in Mr. Austen’s rectory school. It was during this prewedding period that Tom and Cassandra became engaged.

Much of what we know about the relationship between the two Austen sisters derives from their correspondence, those periods during which they were separated. A letter, even to an intimate, brings another self forward, one that is more formalized and detached or else heightened and exaggerated. The letter writer’s persona is constructed and brought to artificial life, and there is in Jane Austen’s letters to her sister a witty, distracted performer at work, and one who longs to shorten the distance between herself and Cassandra by sharing the minutiae of daily life.

Their day-to-day relationship can only be guessed at, though Mrs. Austen is famous for saying that if Cassandra should cut off her head, so too would Jane. Quiet days spent together as they approached maturity are largely undescribed, and we tend to think of them as without event. Which is why the engagement of Cassandra comes with something of a thud in any account of Jane Austen’s life—we know so little about what led up to it, how it came to be.

And we can’t be sure what seventeen-year-old Jane thought about her only sister’s engagement. We do know that she composed for Cassandra a darkly romantic poem titled “Ode to Pity,” which fell rather short as a statement of sisterly rejoicing.

Ever musing, I delight to tread

The paths of honour and the myrtle grove Whilst the pale Moon her beams doth shed

On disappointed love.

Disappointed love? Whatever could she have meant? She also dispatched oddly worded messages of greeting to her newly born nieces, Anna and Fanny, the daughters of her brothers James and Edward; these missives were meant, perhaps, to be ironic, but the tone is heavy, almost bitter. Once again Jane Austen may have glimpsed the emptiness of the future. Her brothers were marrying and having children, and now her sister would be leaving home. She was relieved, probably, when the young couple, both of them penniless, postponed their marriage until Tom was on firmer financial ground. In the meanwhile he accepted a post as chaplain to a regiment headed in late 1795 for the West Indies, and the possibility of combat with the French.

Jane Austen’s writing output slowed down somewhat in her late teens when she seems to have been too occupied with the real business of romance and flirtation to spin mere fictions. But then, all at once, when she was about twenty, she completed a short novel, Lady Susan. Her father had given her a portable writing desk for her nineteenth birthday, a pretty thing of mahogany and leather, equipped with a glass inkstand and a drawer. The gift may have represented a kind of permission on her parent’s part, exactly what all young writers need if they are to continue in their pursuit. Or it may have been a suggestion—fatherly, kindly—that she distract herself by attention to her desk rather than to the wild flirting he had witnessed or heard about at recent balls. Lady Susan was the first piece she wrote at this new desk.

Her brothers, during this period, were engaged in combat at sea while she, at home at Steventon, pen in hand, brought to the page the only kind of combat a woman was allowed: the conquest of hearts and the overturning of domestic arrangements. The novel, never published during her lifetime, is her strangest and most unsettling literary offering and seems to have been unpopular with her family and friends. It is charmless. And very nearly pointless. Its form—a novel in letters—is not one that suited Jane Austen, whose own correspondence was familial and unfocused, with only occasional bursts of sparkle. She knew how to write a polite formal note, but in her letters to Cassandra she adopted early on a flighty, breathless persona, determinedly unserious and even appeasing, as though pleasing Cassandra, amusing Cassandra, was all that guided her pen. The plot of Lady Susan is very much off-the-shelf for its time: A wicked mother attempts to force her daughter into an unwanted marriage. Lady Susan is manipulative, cruel and selfish, abusive to her child, and traitorous to her friends, a predatory female of almost monstrous size. Her original marriage schemes are confounded, but she shows not the slightest degree of shame or self-awareness as a reader might have expected by the novel’s end, and Jane Austen does not mete out to her what would be an appropriate punishment.