sly fun and good-fellowship of
her stories.

It was in this Steventon rectory, in the family room where the boys
might be building their toy boats, or the parish poor folk complaining
to "passon's madam," or the county ladies paying visits of ceremony, in
monstrous muffs, heelless slippers laced over open-worked silk
stockings, short flounced skirts, and lutestring pelisses trimmed with
"Irish," or where tradesmen might be explaining their delinquencies, or
farmers' wives growing voluble over foxes and young chickens--it was in
the midst of this busy and noisy publicity, where nobody respected her
employment, and where she was interrupted twenty times in an hour, that
the shrewd and smiling social critic managed, before she was
twenty-one, to write her famous 'Pride and Prejudice.' Here too 'Sense
and Sensibility' was finished in 1797, and 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798.
The first of these, submitted to a London publisher, was declined as
unavailable, by return of post. The second, the gay and mocking
'Northanger Abbey,' was sold to a Bath bookseller for L10, and several
years later bought back again, still unpublished, by one of Miss
Austen's brothers. For the third story she seems not even to have sought
a publisher. These three books, all written before she was twenty-five,
were evidently the employment and delight of her leisure. The serious
business of life was that which occupied other pretty girls of her time
and her social position,--dressing, dancing, flirting, learning a new
stitch at the embroidery frame, or a new air on "the instrument"; while
all the time she was observing, with those soft hazel eyes of hers, what
honest Nym calls the "humors" of the world about her. In 1801, the
family removed to Bath, then the most fashionable watering-place in
England. The gay life of the brilliant little city, the etiquette of the
Pump Room and the Assemblies, regulated by the autocratic Beau Nash, the
drives, the routs, the card parties, the toilets, the shops, the Parade,
the general frivolity, pretension, and display of the eighteenth century
Vanity Fair, had already been studied by the good-natured satirist on
occasional visits, and already immortalized in the swiftly changing
comedy scenes of 'Northanger Abbey.' But they tickled her fancy none the
less, now that she lived among them, and she made use of them again in
her later novel, 'Persuasion.'

For a period of eight years, spent in Bath and in Southampton, Miss