al
blindness of authors to their own best work, which is one of the
commonplaces of literary history. But this is to premise that she
_did_ regard it as her masterpiece, a fact which, apart from this
accident of priority of issue, is, as far as we are aware, nowhere
asserted. A simpler solution is probably that, of the three novels she
had written or sketched by 1811, _Pride and Prejudice_ was languishing
under the stigma of having been refused by one bookseller without the
formality of inspection, while _Northanger Abbey_ was lying _perdu_ in
another bookseller's drawer at Bath. In these circumstances it is
intelligible that she should turn to _Sense and Sensibility_, when, at
length--upon the occasion of a visit to her brother in London in the
spring of 1811--Mr. T. Egerton of the 'Military Library,' Whitehall,
dawned upon the horizon as a practicable publisher.

By the time _Sense and Sensibility_ left the press, Miss Austen was
again domiciled at Chawton Cottage. For those accustomed to the
swarming reviews of our day, with their Babel of notices, it may seem
strange that there should be no record of the effect produced, seeing
that, as already stated, the book sold well enough to enable its
putter-forth to hand over to its author what Mr. Gargery, in _Great
Expectations_, would have described as 'a cool L150.' Surely Mr.
Egerton, who had visited Miss Austen at Sloane Street, must have later
conveyed to her some intelligence of the way in which her work had
been welcomed by the public. But if he did, it is no longer
discoverable. Mr. Austen Leigh, her first and best biographer, could
find no account either of the publication or of the author's feelings
thereupon. As far as it is possible to judge, the critical verdicts
she obtained were mainly derived from her own relatives and intimate
friends, and some of these latter--if one may trust a little anthology
which she herself collected, and from which Mr. Austen Leigh prints
extracts--must have been more often exasperating than sympathetic. The
long chorus of intelligent approval by which she was afterwards
greeted did not begin to be really audible before her death, and her
'fit audience' during her lifetime must have been emphatically 'few,'
Of two criticisms which came out in the _Quarterly_ early in the
century, she could only have seen one, that of 1815; the other, by
Archbishop Whately, the first which treated her in earnest, did not
appear until she had been t