The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.
§ 1. Early tales
T
There was nothing of the literary woman in the external affairs of her life and its conduct. Born on 16 December, 1775, at Steventon in Hampshire, of which her father was rector, and dying at Winchester on 18 July, 1817, she passed the intervening years almost entirely in the country. She lived with her family in Bath from 1801 to 1806, and at Southampton from 1806 to 1809. Later, she paid occasional visits to London where she went not a little to the play; but she never moved in “literary circles,” was never “lionised” and never drew much advantage from personal contact with other people of intellect. The moment of her greatest worldly exaltation occurred, probably, on 13 November, 1815, when, by order of the prince regent, his librarian, J.S. Clarke, showed her over the library of Carlton house, and intimated that she might dedicate her next novel to his royal highness. A few months later, Clarke, now chaplain and private English secretary to prince Leopold of Coburg, wrote to her suggesting that another novel should be dedicated to the prince, and adding that “any historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg, would just now be very interesting.” Jane Austen replied:
Jane Austen was not a great or an adventurous reader. She told her younger days. She appears to have read what people in general were reading. Her admiration for Crabbe inspired a characteristically playful jest about her intending to become his wife; Richardson she studied closely. For the most part, she read, like other people, the current novels and poems. But, whatever she read, she turned to accoun—largely, it must be admitted, through her shrewd sense of humour. The aim of making fun of other novels underlay the first work which she completed and sold, Northanger Abbey; and burlesque and parody appear to have been the motives of most of the stories which she wrote while she was a young girl. They are extant in manuscript; and we are told that they
The transition from these earliest efforts to her published work may be found in an unfinished story, which the author refrained from making public, but which was printed by J. E. Austen-Leigh in the second edition (1871) of his Memoir of Jane Austen. Somewhere, so far as can be ascertained, between 1792 and 1796, when Jane Austen was between seventeen and twentyone years old, she wrote this fragment, Lady Susan. The influence of Richardson upon its form is clear; the tale is written in letters. Possibly, too, Fanny Burney’s Evelina may have provided a hint for the situation of a young girl, Frederica. The chief character, Lady Susan Vernon, is a finished and impressive study of a very wicked woman—a cruel and utterly selfish schemer. Jane Austen left the tale unfinished, possibly because she found that Lady Susan was too wicked to be consonant with her own powers of character-drawing; possibly, because she felt hampered (brilliant letter-writer though she was in her own person, and in the persons of her creation) by the epistolary form. In either case, we see at work that severe artistic self-judgment which is one of the chief causes of her power. About the same time, she completed Elinor and Marianne, a first sketch for Sense and Sensibility, which, like Lady Susan, was written in letters. The author did not offer it for publication, and never afterwards attempted the epistolary form of novel.