her early fiction and the surviving letters has revealed much that does not fit comfortably into her persistently quaint image. The short early pieces she wrote, dedicated to various family members and probably read aloud, are absurd, extravagant, and flippant in tone, rather than modest or prim. They appear to be parodies of forms such as lurid Gothic or weepy sentimental fiction, both extremely widespread in the late eighteenth century. Just as the Brontes’ juvenilia was lurid, melodramatic, and hyperromantic, Jane Austen’s earliest fiction surprises with the antisocial liberties it takes. It is more reminiscent of eighteenth-century models such as Sheridan or Fielding than it is like Victorian moral realism. Though unrefined in more than one sense, those earlier works glow with the “sparkle” Austen referred to in relation to Pride and Prejudice, but without that novel’s serious social and moral values.

The letters, sharp-tongued and acerbic, like the early fiction, shocked and even offended some readers when they were first published. Jane Austen’s nephew, writing in his memoirs before their publication, cautioned that their “materials may be thought inferior” because they “treat only the details of domestic life. They resemble the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand.” But in fact they are filled with harsh, pointed, and dark wit: She calls one person a “queer animal with a white neck”; she writes that she “had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me.” There is nothing of Fanny Price’s or Anne Elliot’s “gentle manner” and “elegant mind” here, nor is there anything like the prissy, quaint, modest, humble Aunt Jane of the myth.

The letters reveal a voice that does not shy away from the harsh realities of sexual and social life: “Another stupid party last night,” she comments to her only sister and beloved confidante, Cassandra. And while at the “stupid party,” she made the following observation:

I am proud to say that I have a very good eye at an Adultress, for tho’ repeatedly assured that another in the same party was the She, I fixed upon the right one from the first.... She is not so pretty as I expected; her face has the same defect of baldness as her sister’s... she was highly rouged, & looked rather quietly and contentedly silly than anything else (letter of May 12, 1801; see Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others).

Nor does she treat the most conventional subjects with any sentimentality. As for motherhood: “Anna has not a chance of escape.... Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty. I am very sorry for her. Mrs. Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children” (letter of March 23, 1817; see Jane Austen’s Letters). It is instructive to remember that her most frequent correspondent, her sister Cassandra, burned all the letters she considered most unsuitable for the public to read, which was the bulk of them. We may therefore safely infer that the ones that have come down to us tend to be the blandest.

In the twentieth century and beyond, scholarly criticism has caught up with this complexity and become complicated and divisive, if not defensive, itself. Virginia Woolf, always a discerning critic, emphasized the difficulty of reading Austen rather than her simplicity. While she has an “unerring heart and unfailing morality,” an “incorruptible conscience,” and “infallible discretion,” Woolf wrote, “Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.” But Austen truly began to be taken seriously as an artist when the renowned British critic F. R. Leavis saw her as a moralist, the innovator of the “great tradition” of the serious modern novel, in contrast to the standard view of her as merely charming. Following publication of the letters and short fiction, a new view of Austen as stringent, angry, even sour, began to emerge in the twentieth century. In this vein, D. W. Harding called her deep use of irony “regulated hatred” as a corrective to the previous emphasis on her saintlike character and supposedly sweet and whimsical humor. Edmund Wilson believed he was giving her the highest compliment when he praised Austen for being unlike other female novelists, with their “projection of their feminine daydreams,” grouping her with those who treat the novel as art, as “the great masculine novelists” do.

But as frequently happens, Austen is