[198] _The Wild Irish Girl_, published in 1806.

[199] Mrs. Charles Austen, whose daughter Cassandra was born on December
22, 1808.

[200] Eldest daughter of Jane's brother Edward.

[201] This proved to be Hannah More's _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_,
published in 1808. See next letter.

[202] Messrs. Crosby & Co. of Stationers' Hall Court, London.

[203] Mr. Austin Dobson, in his introduction to _Northanger Abbey_
(Macmillan, 1897), makes the mistake of saying that the 'advertisement'
of the first edition of 1818 tells us that the MS. was disposed of to 'a
Bath bookseller.'

[204] _Memoir_, p. 129.

[205] This implies that (if _Susan_ and _Northanger Abbey_ were the
same) no arrangement was concluded in 1809. Indeed, it does not appear
that the author contemplated a re-purchase at that time; and the
publisher was unwilling to relinquish his rights on any other terms.

[206] Later writers have not even been content to accept the 'publisher
in Bath,' but have found a name and habitation for him. Mr. Peach, in
his _Historic Houses in Bath_, published in 1883 (p. 150 _note_), says:
'The publisher (who purchased _Northanger Abbey_), we believe, was
Bull.' Mr. Oscar Fay Adams, writing in 1891 (_Story of Jane Austen's
Life_, p. 93), becomes more definite in his statement that 'nothing of
hers (Jane Austen's) had yet been published; for although Bull, a
publisher in Old Bond Street [sc. in Bath], had purchased in 1802
[_sic_] the manuscript of _Northanger Abbey_ for the sum of ten pounds,
it was lying untouched--and possibly unread--among his papers, at the
epoch of her leaving Bath.'

It is true that Mr. Dobson, unable to find the authority for Bull's
name, is a little more guarded, when he amusingly writes, in 1897:--

'Even at this distance of time, the genuine devotee of Jane Austen must
be conscious of a futile but irresistible desire to "feel the bumps" of
that Boeotian bookseller of Bath, who, having bought the manuscript of
_Northanger Abbey_ for the base price of ten pounds, refrained from
putting it before the world. . . . Only two suppositions are possible: one,
that Mr. Bull of the Circulating Library at Bath (if Mr. Bull it were)
was constitutionally insensible to the charms of that master-spell which
Mrs. Slipslop calls "ironing"; the other, that he was an impenitent and
irreclaimable adherent of the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_.'

Mr. Meehan, in his _Famous Houses of Bath and District_ (19