The easiest and most comfortable opinion is that these juvenile works are, as Lord David Cecil puts it, ‘trifling enough … squibs and skits of the light literature of the day’.13 According to such a view, these slight pieces have a comic charm which is the more engaging because in them we can glimpse early symptoms of the voice and interests of Austen’s maturity. This opinion is certainly not utterly wrong. Undeniably, we do see in these early pieces hints of the novels that we (rather than Jane Austen) cannot help knowing are to come. The silly Camilla Stanley in ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ does seem the prototype of Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. (It is always possible that some very early form of ‘Susan’ /Northanger Abbey predated ‘Catharine’.) The pompous and overbearing Lady Greville in a ‘Collection of Letters’ in Volume the Second misuses her rank to browbeat a poor young woman:

It is not my way to find fault with people because they are poor, for I always think that they are more to be despised and pitied than blamed for it, especially if they cannot help it, but at the same time I must say that in my opinion your old striped Gown would have been quite fine enough for its Wearer…. (p. 151)

Here certainly is a preliminary sketch of Lady Catherine De Bourgh; as Mr Collins says to his female guests, ‘Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved.’14 Lady Greville also summons the poor young lady, Maria, to speak with her at her coach door, so she is ‘obliged to stand there at her Ladyship’s pleasure though the Wind was extremely high and very cold’ (p. 154). As Elizabeth Bennet, summoned by another Maria to see Charlotte Collins held in converse by Lady Catherine’s daughter, exclaims bluntly, ‘She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this wind’ (Pride and Prejudice, 142). Authors tend to be frugal, to recycle their own material. We know that soon after (perhaps even before) the last work of the 1790s had been done on the stories in the three manuscript Volumes, Jane Austen wrote the first version of Sense and Sensibility, presumably as Elinor and Marianne (c. 1795). The first version of Pride and Prejudice was written also in the mid-1790s, a novel called ‘First Impressions’, a work completed in August 1797 and offered to a publisher shortly afterwards.

Yet there are some drawbacks to analysing these works solely in terms of what is to come. Having made our list of resemblances and echoes, we may lay the first writings down—perhaps having missed their important effects. Another mode of approach, also useful, is similarly limited. This is the ‘biographical approach’. Biographers especially are likely to trace in these works some of the personal reactions of the youthful Jane Austen to the life around her. The ‘biographical approach’ readily develops into what might be called the ‘moral approach’. We see—or think we see—what Jane Austen thought of certain types of behaviour, what her moral responses are. The difficulty there is that conclusions are likely to be based on pre-existing perceptions and opinions. Earlier in this century, commentators on these earlier works (and there are not many commentators on them) leaped to the conclusion that Jane Austen is concerned with satirizing the worst excesses of the French Revolution and of sentimental romanticism. She takes it upon herself joyfully to ‘send up’, as we say, the revolutionary spirit of the late 1780s and the 1790s, in mocking characters (such as the ‘hero’ of ‘Love and Friendship’) who revolt against customary obligations and find it necessary on principle to disoblige their fathers. According to a prevailing view, Jane Austen is a sensible conservative, maintaining the value of home, order, and the status quo, seeing what is ridiculous and antipathetic in the new literature of the end of the century. Most of the critics of the mid-twentieth century tended not to take into account the sharply subversive moments in Jane Austen’s early writing. Commentators of the early and mid-twentieth century tended not to be able to see when Austen is attacking truisms of what we may call ‘the Right’—particularly the Whiggish Right. Claudia Johnson, who takes an altogether different view of Austen’s political stance from that espoused by Lord David Cecil, Marilyn Butler, and some others, is able to illuminate the nuanced relations of Austen’s own works to their immediate literary context.15 She has, for instance, pointed out that the aunt of the heroine of ‘Catharine’, the censorious Mrs Percival, absurdly poses a serious argument of her day—an argument put forward by conservative novelists such as Jane West and Hannah More. Mrs Percival roundly states this position:

the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s individuals, and any one who offends in so gross a manner against decorum and propriety is certainly hastening it’s ruin. You have been giving a bad example to the World … (p. 222)

Many English writers of the 1790s or early 1800s, especially those writing for women, held Mrs Percival’s view—that keeping the women tremblingly guarded by an inordinate sense of decorum and a frantic delicacy is the only means of preventing the structure of English society from toppling under the pressure of new revolutionary ideas about the Rights of Man—and of Woman.