The text of these letters spills with extravagant compliments, interrupted by little scolds and reproofs. “I expected to have heard from you this morning, but no letter is come,” one of the scolds goes, from Jane to Cassandra. What was the tone of such recriminations? Was it the vagaries of the post that caused the consternation or Cassandra’s inability to match her sister’s letter-writing zeal?

When Jane Austen wrote to inform her sister of the birth of their brother James’s new son, Cassandra returned her good wishes directly to James and his second wife, Mary. Jane Austen, who had provided the news in the first place, was not thanked, and she was not pleased at being overlooked. She wrote to Cassandra in a jocular but petulant voice: “I shall not take the trouble of announcing to you any more of Mary’s Children, if, instead of thanking me for the intelligence, you always sit down and write to James.” And then she added: “I am sure nobody can desire your letters as I do, and I don’t think anyone deserves them so well.” This same letter contains a poisonously chilly remark about a neighbor, which is perhaps inserted in a humorous effort to lift the cloud of blame that preceded it: “Mrs. Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

We don’t know what Cassandra made of such comments, and perhaps she made nothing—the reference may tap into an old joke of theirs and nothing more. Nor do we know how she received Jane Austen’s remarks about her sister-in-law Mary following childbirth. Mary was indelicate, Jane reported crossly. She was untidy in her arrangements. She “does not manage things in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself.”

Such remarks are telling, contributing to a sense of uneasiness between the sisters and to the suggestion, often raised, that Jane Austen avoided marriage because of the imposition and indignity of childbirth—and the very real danger of death. Certainly she was surrounded by terrifying examples; even her brother Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, died eventually in the lottery of childbirth.

And yet, Jane Austen had not given up the hope that she might meet a husband, and she continued to attend local balls and parties. But when she reported to Cassandra in 1799 that “There was the same kind of supper as last Year & the same want of chairs,” the drag of repetition and of failure is fully felt. And when we read in the same letter that “There was one Gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good looking young Man, who I was told wanted very much to be introduced to me;—but he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it,” we comprehend the undertow of discouragement and a reluctant acquiescence that doesn’t quite manage to disguise itself.

In 1798 she spent time in Bath with her uncle Leigh-Perrot and his wife, and it was probably after this adventure that she settled down to a new work of fiction, an early version of Northanger Abbey, with the provisional title of Susan, the most explicitly literary of her novels. It is a narrative about a young girl’s growing up, about living with authenticity, but it is also a novel-maker’s comment on the art of the novel, as seen through the lens of the popular Gothic romances of her time.

Jane Austen’s letters are filled with gossip, with visits, with shopping. Only occasionally does she talk about the act of writing itself, as in her well-known remark about how she worked on her small pieces of ivory or how she required only a few families to create the canvas for a novel. She wrote no essays about the novel form, and probably she read none. The novel was, during her lifetime, still in its infancy; its constructs, its subject matter, its self-consciousness were still being worked out. She read widely—good novels and rubbish—and evolved, slowly, her own notions of how the fictional world might reflect and interrogate the real world. In Northanger Abbey she mocks the silly Gothic novel and also the readers of such novels. She manages this with very little overt didacticism, allowing Catherine Morland to instruct us by her example while this young woman, the youngest of Austen’s heroines, grows toward a new self-understanding in which the imagination is tempered by reason. From having no place of her own—she is one of ten children and not particularly beautiful or intelligent—she finds where she belongs through the exercise of her own powers, particularly the power of love. Loving Henry makes Henry notice Catherine and eventually love her.

Catherine Morland is lively and impressionable, and she has read enough Gothic romances to distort her vision of the world. Northanger Abbey mixes genres; it is a burlesque of the Gothic, just slightly reminiscent of Jane Austen’s girlhood writing, and it is also the story of a young woman’s education. The witty and attractive Henry Tilney, with whom Catherine falls in love, is one of Austen’s most engaging creations. Like Darcy, he has the humanity to fall in love with a woman (girl?) who is inferior to him socially. He possesses the qualities of irony and integrity, and though he is a clergyman, he is utterly innocent of piety. Northanger Abbey is perhaps the only Jane Austen novel in which the heroine is in danger of being eclipsed by the hero. His sophistication counters Catherine’s lack of worldliness, questions her absence of self-consciousness, and he loves her, tentatively at first, then endearingly, for what she has not yet become—and may never fully become.

Northanger Abbey is satire; epigrams lie everywhere on its surface: “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.” The tone here is arch and literary, as it is in the many personal asides and authorly intrusions, but we can see and hear the irony of the author’s voice, an author who means exactly the opposite of what she is saying.

And yet, surprisingly, we can sometimes hear what sounds very much like a cry from the heart of the author herself. Describing Catherine, she says, “She had reached the age of seventeen, without having seen one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility; without having inspired one real passion, and without having excited even any admiration, but what was very moderate and very transient.” Catherine finds her man in the person of Henry Tilney, the first man she dances with at Bath, but not before experiencing the poignant sense of aloneness that Jane Austen must have known. This revelation of loneliness is all the more surprising since it appears in the novel that, of all Austen’s work, most feels written as an entertainment.

The novel totters between this painful introspection and exclamations of assurance.