Human beings required love and location, but society, with its sharp class separations, stood in the way of a woman’s fulfillment. The novel, in its subject, is both like and different from her own circumstances, and its ebullience convinces the reader of Austen’s own enjoyment of the mingled episodes of comedy and longing. Physicality and youth push the story toward its fairy-tale denouement. The young Bennet sisters are healthy, vital creatures, and the men—Bingley, Darcy, Wickham—burst with male strength and attractiveness.

Elizabeth looks for a time to have lost her chance at happiness. She has refused Mr. Collins and also Darcy, and has lost Wickham to her sister Lydia. Despite this, she remains surprisingly sanguine, convinced as she is of her essential worth. Her confrontation with Lady Catherine is one of the most vigorous and triumphant scenes in literature, for here she is allowed the full honesty we know her to possess. She is reckless; she is morally certain of her ground, and she understands despite her youth just what is at stake.

Mr. Austen, Jane’s father, was an inveterate reader of comic novels, and he clearly saw, even beyond a father’s natural fond inclination, that First Impressions was publishable. In November 1797 he picked up his pen and wrote to the publisher Thomas Cadell in London.

“I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprised in three vols about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina. As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first appearance under a respectable name, I apply to you. Shall be much obliged therefore if you will inform me whether you chuse to be concerned in it. What will be the expense of publishing at the author’s risk; & what will you venture to advance for the property of it, if on a perusal, it is approved of? Should your answer give me encouragement I will send you the work.”

Even knowing that Mr. Austen was not in the habit of writing such flogging letters, we marvel today at how restrained his words are when compared with today’s covering letter to a book publisher. He is concerned, it seems, mainly with the financing of the venture. He is utterly circumspect about the author, who she might be, what his relationship to her is. He says nothing at all about the subject of the novel, and not one word about the vibrancy of the writing. He does, on the other hand, and perhaps too openly, flatter the publisher with his “respectable name,” and he attempts to enhance the novel’s appeal by a sideways reference to Evelina. Here he very likely misjudged the effect; Fanny Burney’s novel had been published almost twenty years earlier and was written in a style that by the end of the eighteenth century was decidedly dated.

In any case, Mr. Austen’s letter of inquiry did not stir any interest at all at Thomas Cadell’s office. Someone wrote across the top of the page: “declined by return of post.”

We have no way of knowing how this rejection was received at Steventon. Mr. Austen, who seems not to have pursued the matter with other publishers, was undoubtedly disappointed that he was not to have some relief from a steadily dwindling income. He was no longer taking pupils, his farm income was unreliable, and it appeared more and more likely that his two daughters were not going to make brilliantly advantageous marriages or, in fact, any kind of marriage at all.

Did Jane Austen know that her father had approached a publisher, and if so, was she crushed by the publisher’s lack of interest? We know only that she turned her energies, and perhaps her disappointment, toward a revision of her earlier work, Elinor and Marianne, which she had renamed Sense and Sensibility. She was entering a period of growing confidence in her abilities, and this new assurance must have defended her against the casual dismissal, the cruelty of the phrase “declined by return of post.” Her reworking of earlier texts suggests a new ease with the form and direction of her work—which was immediate and as close to her as her needlework and her daily engagement with the pianoforte. The world of London publishers, on the other hand, was distant, and chances of publication remote. Meanwhile, she had her small audience: her family, a few friends. And she had, it would seem, a gathering of faith in her own work. She must have known, as the old century was drawing to a close, exactly how good a writer she really was.

7

ALL HER LIFE Jane Austen inhabited the world of the lesser gentility with its necessary thrift. Her letters, and her novels too, show a very real concern with the cost of articles. She knew the monetary value of a yard of good wool cloth or a basket of apples. There were always servants in the Austen household, but they were few in number, and the Austen women themselves augmented their efforts, supervising meals, ordering supplies, mending and remaking garments, and sewing the shirts that the men of the family wore.