We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets did for English poetry,—­she refined and simplified it, making it a true reflection of English life.  Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty encouragement in her own generation.  Her greatest novel, Pride and Prejudice, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the famous Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a publisher.  As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was, in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her school.  But there was this difference,—­that Miss Austen had in large measure the saving gift of humor, which Wordsworth sadly lacked.  Maria Edgeworth, at the same time, set a sane and excellent example in her tales of Irish life, The Absentee and Castle Rackrent; and Miss Austen followed up the advantage with at least six works, which have grown steadily in value until we place them gladly in the first rank of our novels of common life.  It is not simply for her exquisite charm, therefore, that we admire her, but also for her influence in bringing our novels back to their true place as an expression of human life.  It is due partly, at least, to her influence that a multitude of readers were ready to appreciate Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, and the powerful and enduring work of George Eliot.

LIFE.  Jane Austen’s life gives little opportunity for the biographer, unless, perchance, he has something of her own power to show the beauty and charm of commonplace things.  She was the seventh child of Rev. George Austen, rector of Steventon, and was born in the parsonage of the village in 1775.  With her sisters she was educated at home, and passed her life very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties, to which love lent the magic lamp that makes all things beautiful.  She began to write at an early age, and seems to have done her work on a little table in the family sitting room, in the midst of the family life.  When a visitor entered, she would throw a paper or a piece of sewing over her work, and she modestly refused to be known as the author of novels which we now count among our treasured possessions.  With the publishers she had little success. Pride and Prejudice went begging, as we have said, for sixteen years; and Northanger Abbey (1798) was sold for a trivial sum to a publisher, who laid it aside and forgot it, until the appearance and moderate success of Sense and Sensibility in 1811.  Then, after keeping the manuscript some fifteen years, he sold it back to the family, who found another publisher.