Austen delivers, in chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, a bold, spirited defense of the novel as a form, stepping off the page with a rare first person singular “I,” cutting away from the frame of the novel for a moment and mocking those who say pretentiously, “I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels.” In novels, the narrator argues, “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which, the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Extraordinarily, this manifesto was delivered by a woman in her early twenties, whose own works had yet to be published—and wouldn’t be for another dozen years.

The history of the Northanger Abbey manuscript is heart-breaking. It was completed in 1799 and read (and discussed and debated and weighed) by the Austen circle. Then it was put away for some years. In 1803, Jane Austen took it out from whatever drawer or closet it had been secreted in and revised it. What might the intervening years have added to the original idea of a young, impressionable girl confronting her future and facing the real world she was about to enter? It is commonly believed that Jane Austen’s 1803 revisions were lighter and less extensive than those she imposed on her other novels. Still carrying the title Susan, the novel was sold to the London publisher Crosby for ten pounds. Austen must have been elated; she was twenty-eight years old, and this was her third mature novel—with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice still unpublished. At last she would find an audience.

In fact, the publisher did not bring out the novel as promised. Several years passed, and Jane Austen was never to know why a publisher would pay for a manuscript, advertise it, and then postpone its publication. Possibly the idea of the Gothic had lost its popularity, making a burlesque of the form somewhat absurd. Crosby may have lost confidence in a book that, in fact, is somewhat unsteady in its structure and certainty unorthodox. It has to be said that its elements—a young girl’s struggle for love and happiness and a commentary on a fashionable literary strand, the Gothic—are not particularly well integrated. In 1809 the publisher offered her back her manuscript for the same ten pounds she had been paid, but she was unwilling or unable to take up the offer. Finally, in 1816, after the success of Emma, she did buy it back, revising it lightly and writing an “Advertisement” which describes the original publisher’s delay and begs the patience of the reader, who might find a number of out-of-date allusions. It was finally published along with Persuasion in 1818, a year after Jane Austen’s death, in a four-volume offering “By the Author of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ ‘Mansfield-Park,’ &c.”

An unsigned “Biographical Notice of the Author” prefaced the text, a brief sketch written, in fact, by Henry Austen, Jane’s devoted brother. Jane Austen was, at last, introduced to the world. Henry is lavish in his praise of her person, her skill with music, drawing, and dancing, her devout Christianity, her taste and tact. He mentions Jane’s debt to their father and how unsurprising it is that, considering her parentage, she “should, at a very early age, have become sensible to the charms of style, and enthusiastic in the cultivation of her own language. . . . Faultless herself, as nearly as human nature can be, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget.”

In this hymn of praise we can hear the voice of an adoring and grieving brother. But he was wrong when he claimed that everything flowed finished from his sister’s pen; she was a fervent reviser of her own work, willing—as with Sense and Sensibility—to alter her basic novelistic structures. She happily rejiggered her point of view and, in the case of Persuasion, her ending.

And in one of his judgments brother Henry was far too moderate. Jane Austen’s works, he prophesied, would eventually be “placed on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.” How far from the mark he was. Not only would she outdistance those all-but-forgotten names, but she would also find herself comfortably on the same shelf and in the good and steady company of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

10

THE NEXT NINE YEARS of Jane Austen’s life were unsettled and, to those who interest themselves in her creative arc, almost entirely silent. This long silence, in the middle of a relatively short life, is bewildering. It is a silence that drives a wedge between her first three major novels and her final three: Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. The silence asks questions about the flow of Jane Austen’s creative energies and about her reconciliation to the life she had been handed. She lived in a day when to be married was the only form of independence—and even then it was very much a restricted liberty. A married woman could achieve a home of her own, and with it a limited sphere of sovereignty.