The novelistic architecture may have been borrowed from the eighteenth-century novelists, but she made it new, clean, and rational, just as though she’d taken a broom to the old fussiness of plot and action. She did all this alone.

“Even during the last two or three years of her life, when her works were rising in the estimation of the public, they did not enlarge the circle of her acquaintance”—so wrote her nephew, who must have guessed what a deprivation this was to his aunt. She would have relished the company of other novelists. And she might have been comforted and encouraged to know something about the universal difficulty of transmuting the real to the fictional. Such shared insights would have softened her gaze and might have widened her level of tolerance. Instead she was forced to go it alone, working out her compromises in the light of her own confined knowledge.

Once settled at Chawton, she went back to her old manuscripts—by then she must have considered them old friends. She even pulled out the notebooks she’d written in her youth and emended a few passages. Contentedly, or so it seems, she unpacked the heaped pages she had written some ten years earlier and began a series of revisions. First Impressions, the family favorite, later known as Pride and Prejudice, was lightly edited during the months following the move to Chawton; Sense and Sensibility may have received more in the way of revision—it was, in any case, the first of the manuscripts she sent to a publisher.

Brother Henry, from London, was advising her to send a copy of Sense and Sensibility to a publisher (Egerton’s of Whitehall) whom he had contacted. She had another look at the novel, and brought one or two minor references up to date: the institution of the twopenny post and the mention of Walter Scott as a reigning literary light. After that the manuscript was dispatched.

Late in the year 1810 she received word that the novel had been accepted for publication. Her jubilation was surely tempered by the fact that the publisher had accepted this first manuscript by an unknown writer “on commission.” This meant that it would be printed at the author’s own expense, and she would be expected to take up the loss if the sale of copies failed to repay the expense of publication.

She was cautious in matters of economy. Her circumstances demanded that she weigh every penny. But, with money borrowed from Henry and Eliza, she seems not to have hesitated for a moment about jumping into the venture. She knew, perhaps, the worth of the manuscript, that it would draw readers as it had delighted her family. And besides, she might not have another chance. This was it.

18

THE DIFFERENCE between a published and unpublished author is enormous, and every novelist in the world would agree: It is a truth universally acknowledged that published authors, even those whose books have not yet appeared before the public, are filled with a new and reckless confidence in their own powers.

Jane Austen, thirty-six years old, traveled to London in March of 1811 so that she could work at correcting the proofs of Sense and Sensibility. The very phrase “correcting proofs” must have excited her imagination. She stayed in the Sloane Street house of Henry and Eliza, who drew her into a whirl of theatergoing and parties, galleries and museums, and modest shopping for printed muslin, which she characterized as “extravagant.” Her letters to Cassandra during the next two months are close to being feverish. She bubbles with happiness, with stray thoughts, with gossip. “I have so many little matters to tell you of, that I cannot wait any longer before I begin to put them down.” Everything she sees delights her. Everyone she meets is sympathetically drawn. At a large and elegant party given by Henry and Eliza, she says, “We were all delight & cordiality of course.”

Cassandra must have written to ask whether, amid all the social comings and goings, she was giving much thought to the publication of Sense and Sensibility. Her tone may well have been scolding, or at least chiding. Jane replied, “No indeed, I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking [sic] child.” And then she adds, as though to placate Cassandra, “I am much obliged to you for your enquiries.” She had by then just two more sheets to correct and was hoping for a June publication.

In fact, it would be late October before the Morning Chronicle announced “a New Novel by a Lady—.” Something like one thousand copies were printed, selling for 15 shillings. An article in the Critical Review (1812) deemed, in a rather low-key voice, that “the incidents are probable, and highly pleasing, and interesting; the conclusion such as the reader must wish it should be, and the whole is just long enough to interest without fatiguing.”

The book sold well. Jane Austen’s anonymity was preserved, even for a time from family members. It is Cassandra, rather than Jane, who seems to have encouraged this secrecy, but the subterfuge was one that both of them enjoyed and that they made into something of a game. James and Mary at Steventon were at last let into the conspiracy, and James, Jane’s least favorite brother, sent her a poem of praise, signed simply “A Friend.” It was written in a disguised hand and ended with the encouraging lines:

O then, gentle lady! Continue to write,
And the sense of your reader t’amuse & delight.

James was often considered the writer of the family, at least by Cassandra, though his verses remained unpublished. But success can breed good will, even in families, and besides, the tables had been turned; now his younger sister Jane was being recognized and, in a strictly anonymous way, celebrated.

The publisher Egerton wrote to say that all the first edition copies had been sold. Tucked into the postscript of a letter to her brother Francis, Jane Austen exclaims, as though she can hardly help herself, “There is to be a 2/d Edition to S&S.