Collins as a husband, explains: “I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home.” Jane Austen also longed for a home; all her novels concern themselves with this longing. But the reality, when represented in the bumptious form of Harris Bigg-Wither himself, was untenable.

During the night following the proposal she resolved to break her agreement. Almost certainly she consulted Cassandra. The marriage would bind the two families even closer together and would give Jane a home of her own, but nothing could alter the person of Harris Bigg-Wither and the very probable revulsion she felt for him. Emma in The Watsons announces that she can think of nothing worse “than [to] marry a man I did not like.” And years later, advising her niece Fanny, who was in the delicate position of having encouraged a young man in his hopes, Austen wrote, “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

She knew, too, and so did Cassandra, that marriage would permanently reshape their extraordinarily close sisterly relationship. In accepting the marriage proposal, she must have felt she had made a dutiful decision, one that would ease the worry and financial strain of the Austen family. But the role of martyr was too heavy to bear. The morning after the proposal she confronted her fiancé and informed him of her change of mind.

The situation was immensely uncomfortable on all sides. Jane and Cassandra left the house immediately and fled to Steventon, where they demanded that their brother James take them home to Bath the next day. They were in a state of great distress, insisting that they must leave the neighborhood at once. The scene is dramatic and unforgettable: the tableau of the trembling women who, during what must have been a sleepless night, came to a decision that might possibly rupture relations between two old families. Jane Austen was exposed as a woman who for once lacked good sense, first leaping into a serious agreement without adequate reflection, then embarrassing herself and the members of two households. Cassandra, fleeing with Jane and sharing her humiliation, can be seen as the persuasive force behind the change of plan. Her own concerns, her wish to protect or limit her sister’s future, are caught up in the net of intrigue.

The story of the marriage proposal, its hasty acceptance and its reversal twelve hours later, entered the leaves of the Austen legend. Each family member had a theory, an explanation, about why Jane, normally so determined in her resolutions, so sensible, should have entered into a hasty agreement and then, with great clumsiness, extricated herself. What a pity, some of them must have said. Her life would have been more comfortable, more rewarding, and there might even have been children. An averted catastrophe, others must have said; for Jane Austen was not Charlotte Lucas. She was not a woman who could marry without love and without even a measure of respect.

His heart intact, or so it would seem, Harris Bigg-Wither proceeded to marry Anne Howe Frith two years later and produce a family of ten children. Jane Austen, having survived this excruciating experience in 1802, returned to Bath and to a future in which her chances of marriage declined with each birthday. She must have meditated on her stupidity and grieved from time to time about a life she had rejected. In her letters she grows increasingly silent on the subject of balls and parties, and of the possibility that she might yet meet her ideal husband.

There was an injurious silence, too, from the London publisher Crosby about the publication of Northanger Abbey, or Susan, as it was then called, which had first been accepted—and its publication advertised—in 1803. The silence on the part of the publisher went on and on, year after year without explanation. Why didn’t she contact them and demand an explanation? She must have been, like any beginning novelist, unsure of the power arrangements between author and publisher. Certainly she wasn’t accustomed to dealing with publishers; publishers existed in another realm of life—in London, with their own habits and expectations, and their own majestic decisions.

She had already, with First Impressions, been cruelly cut down; now, at least, with the help of her brother Henry and his connections, she had obtained a promise of publication, and one she was disinclined to stir by annoying letters of inquiry. And undoubtedly she expected to hear at any moment that the novel was in print, that she was, at last, a published author, perhaps even a highly praised new voice. Meanwhile, it was difficult to invest her energies in a serious new work when not one of her finished novels had been launched in the world.

Novelists do not write into a void. They require an answering response, an audience of readers outside their family circle, and they also need the approval that professional publication brings.