an_ could hardly have
made more than one very thin volume; secondly, that _Lady Susan_ is
generally looked upon as an early and immature production; and Jane's
judgment should have been too good to allow her to desire the
publication of an inferior work at a time when she had already
completed, in one form or another, three such novels as _Sense and
Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, and _Northanger Abbey_. If,
therefore, it was not _Lady Susan_--What was it? We cannot doubt that it
was the novel we now know as _Northanger Abbey_. When that book was
prepared for the press in 1816, it contained the following
'advertisement' or prefatory note:--

This little work was finished in the year 1803,
and intended for immediate publication. It was
disposed of to a bookseller,[203] it was even
advertised, and why the business proceeded no
further, the author has never been able to learn.

So far, this accords closely enough with the history of the MS. _Susan_
as related in the letter to Messrs. Crosby. For other details we must go
to the _Memoir_,[204] where we read:--

It [_Northanger Abbey_] was sold in 1803 to a
publisher in Bath for ten pounds; but it found so
little favour in his eyes that he chose to abide
by his first loss rather than risk further expense
by publishing such a work. . . . But when four novels
of steadily increasing success had given the
writer some confidence in herself, she wished to
recover the copyright of this early work. One of
her brothers undertook the negotiation. He found
the purchaser very willing to receive back his
money and to resign all claim to the
copyright.[205]

This, too, accords closely enough with the history of the MS. _Susan_,
with the exception of one expression--namely, 'publisher in Bath'; but
probably the writer of the _Memoir_ here made a slip, acting on the very
natural inference that a book in the main written about Bath, by a
writer at that time living in Bath, would naturally have been offered to
a publisher in that town.

We are, indeed, confronted by two alternatives: either that Jane Austen,
in the year 1803, sold two MSS. for the sum of ten pounds each--one
named _Susan_, to a London publisher, which has disappeared altogether,
unless it is the same as the sketch _Lady Susan_ (which, as we have