It may be that Austen half admired her creation’s mixture of cunning and sexual bravura; Lady Susan was at least capable of exercising power—even though this force was chiefly directed at breaking up homes and managing her daughter’s misery. The corrupt heart of Lady Susan gestures backward toward the juvenilia; Lady Susan’s lack of moral judgment looks ahead to Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park or even to the flawed Emma.

Jane Austen may have been merely “trying her hand” at a popular form in the same way that contemporary novelists sometimes take a flyer at a romance novel. She may have been touched by Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was widely known at the time. Or perhaps she was teaching herself a new expressiveness; the materials of Lady Susan are flimsy, but the knit is tight. She had learned while writing Lady Susan about the novelist’s control. And she was soon to try something a good deal more ambitious.

5

IN 1795, just twenty years old, Jane Austen began a new epistolary novel about two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who, like the Austen sisters, are without money and each of them longing for marriage. The two characters differ sharply in temperament. Marianne, the impulsive, swooning, impractical younger sister, is allied by her nature to the forces of true love and happiness. Elinor, the older sister, is on the side of prudence—acquiescence is closer to the mark—and modestly in love with an equally prudent young man whose family is totally opposed to a match with such an impecunious family. At this, Elinor can only shrug her agreement; she perfectly understands the importance of money and station, as Marianne does not. Jane Austen, writing to Cassandra, who was visiting her fiancé’s family at the time, allied herself with Marianne: “I write only for fame,” she said, “and without any view to pecuniary emolument.”

It is impossible to read this declaration without hearing a harsh note of self-mockery; the mention of the word “fame” by someone as unknown and isolated as the young Jane Austen requires an arch, undercutting tone that Cassandra would be able to interpret without the least hesitation. She might also understand, as a contemporary reader of the letters does, that there is a sense in which Jane Austen meant what she said: She hungered for fame and may have felt, even at this stage of her development, deserving of it, knowing at the same time that such a yearning could not be expressed in anything other than an ironic voice. Her new effort, Elinor and Marianne, her longest novel yet, might just possibly serve as her introduction to the world. We know it as an early draft of Sense and Sensibility.

The manuscript was read to the family, although not one page of it has come down to us today. We recognize those familiar names and register the subject: two sisters of fundamentally different character searching for love and happiness, each in thrall to their very different loves. The novel is saved from the simplicity of allegory by the fact that Marianne’s sensibility and Elinor’s sense are not perfectly idealized or opposed; they are, each of them, a little silly and a little calculating. We have real sisters here, and not convenient contrarieties. Their devotion to each other pulls the novel’s sometimes tenuous structure tight.

But the embryo novel must have had a very different trajectory. An epistolary novel can only exist if its characters are separated from each other and obliged to correspond—this artificial construct is one of the problems with the novel-in-letters. In Sense and Sensibility, which abandoned the epistolary form for a third-person narrative, the two sisters are scarcely ever apart.

And something else intervened in the life of Jane Austen soon after she finished Marianne and Elinor and was perhaps considering a revised narrative approach: She fell in love, or at least what she took for a form of love.

There is a joke among novelists that in order to initiate strong action or to revive a wilting narrative it is only necessary to say: “And so a stranger came to town.” The arrival of a stranger, in fact, was the spark that ignited, and perhaps changed forever, the developing sensibility of Jane Austen.

It was January of the year 1796. Jane had just turned twenty. The stranger was Tom Lefroy, from Ireland, visiting relations at nearby Ashe parsonage before beginning his law studies in London. He was young, pleasant, good-looking, and had already taken a degree in Dublin. (All the heroes of Jane Austen’s mature novels are reading men, men of the book, and clever Tom Lefroy is no exception.) He and Jane Austen met only a few times, but they seemed to enjoy the same high spirits and sense of irony. Jane’s letters to Cassandra at this time show her to be thoroughly smitten, unable to restrain herself from repeated references to her “Irish friend.” Her spirits are effervescent as she reports on an evening spent with him at a local ball. “Imagine to yourself,” she confides boldly, “everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” As usual, she cushions her enthusiasm with one of her typical throwaway gestures, claiming that Tom Lefroy’s one fault was that “his morning coat is a great deal too light,” and clearly she intended to correct this fault in exactly the lighthearted way by which women were permitted to bring men to a state of excellence. Tom Lefroy calls on her after the evening of “profligate” behavior, and their open discussion of the novel Tom Jones gives a sense of the ease they felt together, for the response of shock to the bawdiness of Tom Jones had not diminished since its publication. That two young people could discuss such a work suggests a willingness to go beyond flirtation into an area of sensuous exploration. She was keenly conscious of his being teased for his attentions to her, as she wrote to Cassandra, and she expected the drama to play itself out at the next ball—“I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white Coat.”

It did not happen.