Egerton advises it.” A sense of jubilation accompanies this piece of information, and there is the sense, too, that she is trying with all her might to keep a cap on her satisfaction by sprinkling her letters with other more mundane references: deaths, babies, the weather, the scarcity of apples, her mother’s headaches. Her efforts don’t quite succeed. Her joy in publication keeps breaking through. This, it would seem, is what she had always wanted; she may have missed out on marriage and motherhood, and certainly she had been denied the financial means to a life of independence. But she was a writer of genius, as she must have known, and that genius was now, in a very small way, being recognized and applauded. A second sweet source of happiness must have been that her own family—where she was the younger sister, a little eccentric and strange—was made aware of her gifts.

After a period of scant correspondence, there is an out-pouring of letters. It is well known that Cassandra destroyed those letters that she felt reflected poorly on Jane, and perhaps poorly on herself and other family members. What was it in particular that caught Cassandra’s censor’s eye? Immediately before the publication of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s letters were particularly astringent. She niggled at neighbors; her gossip had a poisonous pitch; her last attempt at writing, The Watsons, was a book with a bleak horizon and a host of embittered women. There are only a handful of these surviving letters, and it can be imagined that Cassandra was anxious to extirpate this unattractive side of her sister’s expression. Overnight, with the appearance of Jane Austen’s first published novel and her buoyant new spirit, there are streams of letters sparkling with happiness, animated, determinedly distracted, breathless.

Nevertheless, publication meant having a public self after a life that had been austerely private. Her scale of values, her opinions were now being read by a wide public, and not just received by the family circle. The two selves, public and private, were in danger of flying apart, but her correspondence shows her efforts to hang on to all that was familiar while enjoying the titillation of celebrity.

She had earned, to her great astonishment, well over £100. This was the only money she had ever earned by her pen other than the £10 put forward years earlier for Northanger Abbey, which still lay unpublished. Now she had money for small gifts, mostly for Cassandra, and money to pay for her own travels to London and back.

At once she set about correcting the manuscript for Pride and Prejudice. “I have lopt & cropt so successfully . . . that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S&S.” Pride and Prejudice had always been the family favorite, and she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.” This ebullient faith in her next published novel was unrestrained, and already she was planning a new novel, which, she said, would be about a wholly different subject, ordination. This projected novel was to be Mansfield Park.

Full of new confidence, she was also becoming more critical of her own work. She could afford to be, now that she had readers who admired her and bought her books. Of Pride and Prejudice she said, “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter . . . about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte [sic]—or anything that would form a contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness & Epigrammatism of the general stile.” She doubted, she said, whether Cassandra, with her “starched Notions,” would agree, and it may be she was seeking confirmation. Whether we have Cassandra to thank or Jane Austen’s own sound critical judgment, there was no added material to pad out the novel and provide “shade” and no sideways essays on the matter of composition. Her publisher Egerton offered £110 for the copyright, which meant that this time around Henry was not obliged to advance money for printing costs. The book sold for 18 shillings and was once again published anonymously, advertised as being by the author of Sense and Sensibility. “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,” she wrote Cassandra when a finished copy of Pride and Prejudice arrived at Chawton in late January of 1813. Like all newly published writers, she may have magnified its potential effect. She was pleased Cassandra was away at the time, she said, because “it might be unpleasant to you to be in the Neighbourhood at the first burst of the business.” What business? It is not clear why publication might have embarrassed or discomfited Cassandra; Jane Austen was being disingenuous, or else she was acting out of her lifetime habit of deferring to her older sister.