Jane Austen Society of Australia

Jane Austen in Perspective
Introduction | Her family | Education | The Siblings & Cousin Eliza | After Steventon | What was she like? | Her illness and death | Her times: a brief background | Her works | Was she a legend in her lifetime? | In conclusion | Further reading

Was she a legend in her own lifetime? 

Of course she was not. Had she lived, and continued to write, she may have become well-known and even celebrated, but she herself would surely be amazed and certainly amused at the industry which has grown up around not just her works, but her name. She had a modest and growing success in her lifetime and by the end of her life her identity as the author of the novels was known to some. Sense and Sensibility was published at the expense of Henry and Eliza, so that the publisher ran no risks (though it meant that Jane Austen retained the copyright). It was advertised as ‘a new novel by a lady’, that is, it did not have her name on it. By the summer of 1813 it had sold out, giving Jane Austen a profit of £140: for the first time in her life, at the age of 37, she had her own money. 

Sense and Sensibility had good reviews and created a great deal of interest. It was the success of this novel which decided the publisher, Egerton, to buy, for £110, the copyright of her next, Pride and Prejudice, which was marketed as being ‘by the author of Sense and Sensibility’. Mansfield Park was also published by Egerton, and although it sold out, he refused to print a second edition, so that Emma was offered to a new publisher, John Murray, who also brought out a second edition of Mansfield Park. Throughout, Jane Austen carefully preserved her anonymity, but her secret began to leak out; and so it happened that the message was conveyed to her, through contact with the Prince Regent’s librarian, that the prince admired her work, and that she might dedicate her next novel to him. Jane Austen did not admire the Prince Regent, but she of course complied; and so although Emma, when published, still did not bear the author’s name, it did bear the Prince Regent’s, in a dedication: 

from His Royal Highness’s dutiful and obedient and humble servant, The Author.

Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, as already noted, did not appear until after her death. 

There are also of course her letters, which are only however a small proportion of those she wrote in her lifetime. After Jane Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra burned a great many of her letters, presumably considering them too personal or perhaps because of opinions expressed in them which she did not consider should be seen by other eyes than hers. The letters that have survived are usually about domestic, social and family topics, rarely about her writing.

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13 July 2006