This lack of correspondence does not point to a period of dead time, but rather to a settled period in which Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra were seldom separated. Routines were established in these early years at Chawton, and it was routine that Jane Austen loved. The immediate neighbors in the region may not have known how the spinster Jane Austen occupied her days, but the other women of the household did, and they accommodated the schedule it demanded.

After a session at the piano, and after organizing the family breakfast, Jane Austen settled down to her writing in the smaller of the two sitting rooms. Dinner, the main meal of the day, was served between three and four-thirty in the afternoon. After that would come the social part of the day: conversation, card games, and still later, tea. The evening was often spent reading aloud from novels, and probably it was during this time that Jane read her ongoing work to her audience of intimates. She was famous for her readings, if we can believe her brother Henry, which were always delivered with a sense of drama. “She read aloud with very great taste and effect,” said Henry in the biographical notice that accompanied the publication of Northanger Abbey shortly after her death.

She was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because she had a trusted audience with a wide range of taste—her mother, her old friend Martha Lloyd, Cassandra, other visiting siblings who were passing through, and old friends—all of whom had known her since girlhood and had witnessed her developing skills as a novelist. This coterie was knowledgeable about what caught her author’s eye, those moments of moral inaction, the premises that would make or undo a woman’s life. They knew her successes (the spirited, satisfying rondure of Pride and Prejudice) and her failures (the ugly and narratively misshapen Lady Susan). They were not a spontaneous, anonymous audience, but an engaged and humanly bonded readership (listening perhaps rather than actually reading) who had traveled every inch of the way with Jane Austen as she had lived her life and discovered her own writerly process. They were, in fact, part of that complicated process; they understood its hesitations and welcomed its revivals. And, more important, they were sympathetic, a readerly perspective that goes beyond being merely encouraging. They may not have been writers themselves, but they understood to a certain extent the gathering and accretion of Jane Austen’s skill with dialogue, with description and with moral exegesis. She was their sister, daughter, friend, neighbor, not some anonymous writer whose works were borrowed or bought; her struggle belonged at least partly to them—certainly it was known to them. Their personal affection for her made them in many ways an ideal audience; their attachment to the novel form, which was still evolving in the early years of the nineteenth century and which would continue to evolve, gave them a particular credibility. They—her friends, her family—were critically alert, and at the same time emotionally attuned. Writing is in the end a solitary pursuit, but Jane Austen’s novels were written and revised in concert with a remarkable communal consultation. This was part of her good luck.

Her bad luck was that she was enclosed all her life by obscurity. Just as she walked behind a wall of shrubbery at Steventon and later at Chawton, she wrote her novels behind a wall of isolation. Sympathetic readers are one thing, but writers are hugely dependent on the shared experiences of other writers. Why otherwise do we have such an empire of writers’ colonies, writers’ unions, writers’ congresses, writers’ guilds? Writers uphold and defend each other with discussion of their difficulties—this has always been the case—and persuade each other that their individual endeavors, which often seem no more substantial than paper airplanes tossed into the uninterested air, are not egotistical projections, not valueless streams of indulgence, but contributions (what a pompous word that seems!) to an ongoing civil discourse. Writers can also, of course, be jealous and destructive of one another’s efforts, but their shared presence, their friendships and correspondence, always serve notice that writing is valued in a community, and is far from the insane and solitary act it may appear to be.

Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh got a number of things wrong in his aunt’s biography, but he understood the ways in which she might have suffered.

Jane Austen lived in entire seclusion from the literary world; neither by correspondence, nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary authors. It is probable that she never was in company with any contemporary authors. It is probable that she never was in company with any persons whose talents or whose celebrity equaled her own; so that her powers never could have been sharpened by collision with superior intellects, nor her imagination aided by their casual suggestions. Whatever she produced was a home-made article.

The term “home-made article” is a phrase of great originality, an inspired piece of terminology. The novel as a home-made article—what does this mean? Art can be described as “making.” We may think of novelists, in post-modernist terms, as workers who are remaking, revising, reinventing, but novelists in Jane Austen’s era were working at an even sterner forge, where the dimensions of fictional belief and disbelief were being examined: How does a writer extract from real life those components that describe and interrogate “life” without pretending to be a replication? How does the writer signal to the reader that a novel’s fictional skin is something other than reportage? By how many degrees is mimetic art separated from the seen, felt, and heard field of our own being? How closely do we desire an overlapping of the real and the projected? Not at all? Or do we want to be persuaded that fictional truth is congruent with what we know, what we have already heard and accepted?

A home-made article, Jane Austen’s nephew had called his aunt’s work. Her novels were conceived and composed in isolation. She invented their characters, their scenes and scenery, and their moral framework.