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Jane Austen Society of Australia

Her works

Austen's Illustrated Novels:
Jane had no 'Phiz'

The writing [implement] of Jane Austen - the quill pen

JASA writings on the works of Jane Austen

Jane Austen is known primarily for her six novels, and even of these, she is better known for some than for others. Pride and Prejudice is known by possibly millions, although it is safe to say that a great many of the viewers of the various film versions may never have read the novel they derive from – nor ever intend to read it. (Our survey tells us that even some JASA members are in this category.) And they may not have heard of any of her other novels, except through the titles of movies. Pride and Prejudice seems in fact to have become common property, which perhaps accounts for the tremendous liberties we feel entitled to take with it, as in the most recent film version – rather as we feel entitled to do with Shakespeare’s plays, so perhaps this is the ultimate compliment to her genius.

Besides the known novels, however, Austen wrote one other complete – though rather short – novel, Lady Susan, and two uncompleted novels, The Watsons and Sanditon, as well as quite a large body of juvenilia. The Juvenilia were apparently written when Jane was between the ages of 11 and 17, so roughly from 1787 to 1793. Some of these works are laugh-out-loud funny, and all make for lively reading – don’t be put off by the term ‘juvenilia’ with its suggestion of ‘juvenile’, in the sense of silly and immature. They are the Jane Austen we know and love, in the making. Here, she is finding her style, playing with and usually sending up the conventions and the themes of the novels of her time. Her nephew James Austen-Leigh in his Memoir makes an interesting comment about these works: it seems, he says, as if...

she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought not to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction.¹⁹

The juvenilia contain murders, robberies, elopements, jiltings, madness, swooning and a lot of just very bad behaviour: their characters are rarely constrained by social convention. All the works are informed by sparkling wit, a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, keen observation of human behaviour, and a great gift for satire and parody.

Lady Susan was probably written in 1794 when she was 19 ²⁰, and could be seen as something of a bridge between the Juvenilia and her first mature novel, Sense and Sensibility. A ‘bridge’ in two respects. Firstly, it is a novel written in letters, like those of her literary mentor Samuel Richardson, and many other novels up to this time. Secondly, although the events of the novel describe a realistic scenario, the main character has perhaps more in common with the characters in the juvenile works than with the ‘real’ people who inhabit the later novels. Lady Susan reads as if Jane Austen is trying her hand at a ‘grown-up’ work but cannot yet relinquish the sheer joy of caricature, of painting larger than life, unconstrained by realism. Lady Susan is a monster of duplicity and charm, and runs away with the novel, which lacks the balance of her later works. Jane Austen herself appears to have lost interest in the epistolary style, and perhaps in the novel itself, since the work quite suddenly turns into straight prose, the author stating rather baldly that ‘This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer’. She then quickly ties up all the loose ends and ends her story. Nevertheless, this early novel shows the narrative sureness and the power of compelling the reader that are the hallmark of all Jane Austen’s work. The first two letters hook you in immediately and vividly, leaving just enough unexplained to intrigue you and keep you turning the pages.

Chawton Cottage The six famous works fall into two groups, which we could call the Steventon novels and the Chawton novels. Only four were published in her lifetime. The first three, Elinor and Marianne (which, revised, became Sense and Sensibility), First Impressions (Pride and Prejudice) and Susan (Northanger Abbey) were written between 1795 and 1799, when the family was still living at Steventon, and Jane Austen was aged 19 to 24. She probably wrote Elinor and Marianne in 1795, the year when, in December, she met Tom Lefroy at Ashe Rectory. (We have nothing of these pages, but it would be very interesting to be able to compare them with Lady Susan and with what they became, Sense and Sensibility, to track her development as a writer) The following year, 1796, she started writing First Impressions, completing it the next year. In November 1797 her father offered it to the London publisher Cadell, who rejected it by return post.²¹ It was in that same year, 1797, that Jane Austen began converting Elinor and Marianne (probably written originally in the epistolary, or letter, form) into Sense and Sensibility.

Susan, the novel that was eventually to be called Northanger Abbey, was begun in 1798, when Gothic novels were at the height of their popularity – nine of the twelve Gothic novels published between 1791 and 1798 are actually named in Austen’s novel. She revised, and made a second copy of, Susan in 1802 or early 1803 and her brother Henry through a business associate sold the manuscript to a London publisher, Richard Crosby & Son, for Ł10. He stipulated early publication and Crosby did advertise Susan as being ‘in the press’, but never published it – perhaps, it has been suggested, because Crosby was an enthusiastic publisher of the very Gothic novels satirised in Jane Austen’s novel.²² In 1809, just before she moved to Chawton, Jane Austen wrote under an assumed name to the publisher, attempting to get it published but Crosby was unmoved, merely responding that she could have the manuscript back for what he had paid for it. This was out of the question and so there it remained, for the time being.

In the years between the move to Bath in 1801 and the return to Hampshire – to Chawton and a settled home – in 1809, Jane Austen apparently wrote nothing except her unfinished novel The Watsons, and her revision of Susan. It seems that her unhappiness in Bath made her unable or unwilling to write. We do not know why she never finished The Watsons, either at the time, or later. It is tantalising to read the fragment, for you can only long for more. Its heroine, Emma Watson, is a disappointed heiress: the wealthy aunt who had brought her up and from whom she had expectations, has unexpectedly remarried after the death of her first husband, and gone to live in Ireland. The story opens as Emma Watson returns to her own impoverished family, three more sisters and her widowed father who is a clergyman. He is in poor health and once he dies they will be homeless, so all of them must marry if they are to survive. Jane Austen’s nephew, James Austen-Leigh, suggested that she did not go on with The Watsons because she had set the family too low in the social scale, but Tomalin suggests perhaps a more emotionally likely reason.²³ The Watson sisters’ prospects were perilously close to her own family’s, once her father died – as he did, early in 1805. The novel was abandoned and no other attempted – at least that survives – over the next few years.

The title page of the first edition of Austen's Sense and Sensibility However, once Jane Austen moved to Chawton in mid 1809, she returned to the intense literary occupation, and rapid production, of the Steventon years. She immediately began a final revision of Sense and Sensibility, which was accepted for publication in 1810 and published in October 1811. That same year, she began revising First Impressions into Pride and Prejudice. Through her brother Henry, she sold the copyright of this novel to Egerton in 1812 and it was published in January 1813, when she was already writing Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park was published in May 1814, with Emma already on the way. Emma was completed in March 1815 and published at the end of December that year – when she had already started Persuasion. The following year, 1816, Henry bought back the manuscript of Susan which Jane Austen revised, as well as completing Persuasion. Although she was now feeling very unwell, she began work on Sanditon in January 1817, but could not continue after the middle of March, and so it remained uncompleted on her death in July that year. Like The Watsons, it is a tantalising fragment, but unlike the earlier unfinished novel, it gives little suggestion of how it might have developed, and several of its characters rather than being social types recognisable from her previous works, seem set to be eccentric and/or promisingly silly. Although close to death, Jane Austen still had full possession of her imaginative powers and of her wit and originality of mind. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, as Henry renamed Susan, were published posthumously in early 1818, with a brief biographical note on the author written by him. It was Henry who had acted throughout as Jane Austen’s agent with publishers, and it was in his and Eliza’s house in London that she had the entirely thrilling experience of correcting the proofs of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility.

19. Austen-Leigh Memoir p.43
20. Family Record p.xviii
21. Austen-Leigh Memoir p.132
22. Family Record, p.128
23. Tomalin p.186

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13 July 2006