most of the village residents worked on Edward’s lands and estate. As a dependent, Jane had to live where others chose and travel when others pleased. In 1809, for example, when she wanted to leave her brother’s house during a visit, she had to endure the small humiliation of pleading with him to take her home or being forced to wait until it pleased him to transport her. During this period, in addition, it must have seemed that she was unlikely to either get married or get published.

The first publication was Sense and Sensibility, put out by Thomas Egerton in 1811 but produced at the expense of the author. The profits from the sales of Sense and Sensibility in 1813 gave Austen her first real taste of independence when she received £140 for it from her publisher. Since it was a small success, Egerton bought the copyright outright for Pride and Prejudice, which appeared in 1813. But though the latter went through three editions by 1817, Egerton insisted that Mansfield Park be produced at Austen’s expense. A better, more literary publisher, John Murray, was sought, and he was willing to publish Emma in 1815 for royalties.

Though her early biographers made much of her modesty and lack of ambition, Austen was in truth intensely interested in public reaction, so much so that she kept a notebook in which she copied down written reviews of her work, as well as private opinions, including the advice and preferences of her acquaintances. Austen was not a best-selling novelist, but she was an esteemed one. Though highly praised by Walter Scott and some others in her lifetime, her books did not achieve anywhere near the popularity of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray in the nineteenth century, and the number of her reviewers was small. But Scott’s anonymous review of Emma (1816) had recast Jane Austen’s novels as examples of a new genre, the realist modern novel, favorably contrasting them with old-fashioned melodrama and romance, which taught “the youth of this realm ... the doctrine of selfishness” in pursuing imprudent love.

Early in 1816 Austen began to feel unwell, and though she was able to recover the copyright of Susan and revise the novel as Northanger Abbey, as well as finish Persuasion, she was ill for much of the last year of her life. “Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life,” she wrote in one of her last extant letters (March 23, 1817; see Jane Austen’s Letters). She died, appearing cheerful and busy to the end in her letters, in the midst of working on her unfinished novel Sanditon, while at Winchester, where she had been taken for treatment by a surgeon. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously by Murray together as a four-volume set, with a “Biographical Notice” appended by her brother Henry Austen. Interestingly, Persuasion is the only novel of Austen’s for which we have an original version altered for publication. Its two last chapters were extensively revised and expanded to amend the way in which the hero approaches the heroine to declare his love. Austen’s evident dissatisfaction with the original, more abbreviated conclusion of the novel belies Henry James’s dismissive view of her writing methods as merely “instinctive.”

Soon after her death, Austen’s work entered the debate about what the novel ought to do: Should it imitate social reality, improve morals and convey high thoughts of the philosophical mind, or represent the claims of passion? One contemporary critic noted that just as novels are rarely “improving” enough for readers, the moral of Persuasion, that “young people should always marry according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgement,” was indicative of a low moral tendency in contemporary novel-writing. Sentimental fiction as a woman’s genre was supposed to confine passion within the bounds of strict morality.

Later in the century Charlotte Brontë, like Wordsworth before her, found Austen “shrewd and observant” rather than “profound,” and remarked that “the Passions are perfectly unknown to her.” Brontë, having been accused of immoralism herself, does not ask for moral function, but for passion and philosophy. She describes Austen’s work as “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses” (letter of January 12, 1848; see Wise and Syming ton, eds., The Brontes: Their Friendships, Lives, and