nicled in
her movements by land and sea. She was not the least bit
"literary." Fanny Burney, who had talent to Jane Austen's
genius, was in a blaze of social recognition, a petted darling
of the town, where the other walked in rural ways and unnoted of
the world, wrote novels that were to make literary history. Such
are the revenges of the whirligig, Time.

Austen's indestructible reputation is founded on half a dozen
pieces of fiction: the best, and best known, "Sense and
Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," although "Mansfield
Park," "Emma," "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" (in order of
publication but not of actual composition) are all of importance
to the understanding and enjoyment of her, and her evenness of
performance, on the whole, is remarkable. The earlier three of
these books were written by Miss Austen when a young woman In
the twenties, but published much later, and were anonymous--an
indication of her tendency to take her authorship as an aside.
Two of them appeared posthumously. Curiously, "Northanger
Abbey," that capital hit at the Radcliffe romanticism, and first
written of her stories, was disposed of to a publisher when the
writer was but three and twenty, yet was not printed until she
had passed away nearly twenty years later,--a sufficient proof
of her unpopularity from the mercantile point of view.

Here is one of the paradoxes of literature: this gentlewoman
dabbling in a seemingly amateur fashion in letters, turns out to
be the ablest novelist of her sex and race, one of the very few
great craftsmen, one may say, since art is no respector of sex.
Jane Austen is the best example in the whole range of English
literature of the wisdom of knowing your limitations and
cultivating your own special plot of ground. She offers a
permanent rebuke to those who (because of youth or a failure to
grasp the meaning of life) fancy that the only thing worth while
lies on the other side of the Pyrenees; when all the while at
one's own back-door blooms the miracle. She had a clear-eyed
comprehension of her own restrictions; and possessed that power
of self-criticism which some truly great authors lack. She has
herself given us the aptest comment ever made on her books:
speaking of the "little bit of ivory two inches wide on which
she worked with a brush so fine as to produce little effect
after much labor";--a judgment hardly fair as to the interest
she arouses, but nevertheless absolutely descriptive o