Here, unapologetically, was the texture of real life on the page; here were men and women whose dilemmas resembled our own. The novel’s invention also coincided, happily, with a new widespread literacy among women, making it the only form in which women participated fully, from the beginning. True, the novel’s instant popularity gave it something of an inferiority complex; the fact that it explored moral issues indirectly, and with shades of human ambiguity, separated it from more formalized, traditional prose. Serialization distorted some early novelistic experiments, and there was a natural—even moral—confusion over the nature of fiction, its viability, its relationship with the authentic world, how it might be framed, and how seriously it might take itself.

Luckily, the Austen family of Steventon embraced the novel form and welcomed it rather uncritically, it seems, especially the sheer entertainment it offered. The small, quiet Steventon society was enlarged and amplified by beings who were both like and unlike themselves. As a child, Jane Austen would have participated in family readings or, at the very least, would have found the latest novels displayed in her parents’ parlor, many of them acquired from a circulating library in nearby Basingstoke. Her father was not inclined toward the role of censor, or perhaps he was preoccupied; in any case, he allowed his daughter to read what she liked. She loved, especially, the work of Samuel Richardson, and particularly a novel titled The History of Sir Charles Grandison, a seven-volume tome—one million words—which is little read today, a grand narrative excursion touching on adultery, drunkenness, rape, eroticism, fortune hunting, and most interestingly, the psychological effect of parents on their children—all of which seem a strong dose of worldliness for a rather protected young clergyman’s daughter who nevertheless swallowed it down eagerly, making herself familiar with each scene, and perhaps thinking of it as a kind of fantasy rather than an imprint of the world’s “reality.” (Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that “reality” was the one word in the English language that always needs a set of quotation marks around it.)

The pomposity and didacticism of Sir Charles Grandison cannot have escaped her, and she would have been provoked to laughter by Richardson’s melodramatic effects. If we grant Jane Austen the least degree of prescience, we may be able to perceive her reading against the Richardson tradition, and unconsciously forming her own idea of the “realistic” novel and of what material she might herself include when her time came. She carried the Richardson influence throughout her writing life, but substituted wit for longwindedness and comedy for sententiousness. Turning away from Richardson’s melodramatic excess, she trimmed and tempered her own episodes, and made certain they stood on legs that were psychologically sound. In Jane Austen’s work there are no creatures resembling Richardson’s thundering villain, Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, but instead the merely weak of heart: Wickham in Pride and Prejudice or Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility or the somewhat feckless but good-hearted Frank Churchill in Emma. In Jane Austen’s novels there are no fainting women such as Richardson’s ridiculous heroine, Harriet Byron. Austen’s women don’t faint unless they have real reason to; Louisa in Persuasion gives way to unconsciousness only when she is genuinely injured jumping from the wall in Lyme. Jane Austen admired the Richardson range, the undoubted energy and invention of the work, but she was able to replace sensation with sense and to avoid the kind of exaggeration that threatens to undermine the whole project of fiction.

Jane Austen’s oldest brother, James, had turned to poetry and essay writing, and edited, for a time, a weekly magazine known as The Loiterer, in which the whole family took a keen interest. It is not surprising then, given her family circumstances, that Jane, early in her teens, should try her hand at writing too. But it is the satirical form of her youthful writing that astonishes us today. We can only guess that parody was the family flavor, and that the Austens were proud citizens of a satirical age.

What makes a child of twelve or thirteen a satirist? (To call her a teenager is to dip a toe in contemporary presumption—the term had not yet been invented, and adolescence carried few of the cultural weights it does today—but we can guess that a passage of biological and intellectual awkwardness has always prevailed to some extent in the species, requiring society’s tact and ultimately its forbearance.) Jane Austen had been nurtured, certainly, in a circle appreciative of burlesque. She was narratively gifted and able to provide the kind of pleasure that was valued by her immediate audience, but she was also a small presence in a large and gifted household. Her desire to claim the attention of her parents and siblings can be assumed. She gave them what they wanted, that which would make them laugh and marvel aloud at her cleverness. Without a doubt, she took her cue from her literary brothers, James and Henry, both satirists, giving support to the dictum that writers are as good as the audience they wish to capture.

She was also awakened by the contemporary romantic novel, being, as we know from her own Northanger Abbey, a reader of romances, the kind of unserious literature that was in her day placed in female hands. Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Smith, though, were among her favorite novelists; they were both intelligent writers, prolific and popular, and their novels can be read even today with interest. Austen also read Dr. Johnson and William Cowper at an early age, and the famously uneven Fanny Burney, but most young women of her time were protected, not to say deflected, from serious works. Readers, however, have always had the power to disrupt the bland surfaces of pedestrian fiction and convert the fluff of romance to something more nourishing. (“If a book is well written, I always find it too short,” Jane Austen said of a Charlotte Smith work.) A deliberate and inventive misreading may have led her toward her vision of what a novel could do and be when fortified with irony and structure.

In the three notebooks of writing that have come down from Jane Austen’s teen years we find a strain of burlesque, absurdly broad at first, and then more and more seen to be refining itself. At thirteen she can be observed rejoicing in her self-created role, the sentimental female who mocks her own sentimentality, invoking clichés that poke their long fingers at the shallowness of clichés. Using the name Sophia Sentiment, she writes to The Loiterer in an explosion of mock exasperation: “Only conceive, in eight papers, not one sentimental story about love and honour and all that.” The “all that” is the telling phrase, for clearly the subtext is “all that rubbish,” or, at another level, “all that matters.” In a similar vein, she informs The Loiterer that, should they publish romantic fiction, “your hero and heroine must possess a great deal of feeling, and have very pretty names.” In her satirical story “Jack and Alice,” she creates a country gentleman who foils the women who pursue him by setting up steel traps around his estate. “Cruel Charles,” one of these women laments, “to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair.” The incongruous linking of hearts and legs, of great feeling and pretty names, shows Jane, the clever child, pulling the rug out from under her own clever feet. It is as though she can’t, for lack of nerve, speak without immediately subverting her own expression, with a need to charm and also to shock.