She must have begun to write at an early age.  In later life, she urges an ambitious niece, aged twelve, to give up writing till she is sixteen, adding that “she had herself often wished she had read more and written less in the corresponding years of her life.”  She was only twenty when she began to write First Impressions, the perfect book which was not published till seventeen years later with the title altered to Pride and Prejudice.  She wrote secretly for many years.  Her family knew of it, but the world did not—­not even the servants or the visitors to the house.  She used to hide the little sheets of paper on which she was writing when any one approached.  She had not, apparently, a room to herself, and must have written under constant threat of interruption.  She objected to having a creaking door mended on one occasion, because she knew by it when any one was coming.

She got little encouragement to write. Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher in 1797:  he would not even read it. Northanger Abbey was written in the next two years.  It was not accepted by a publisher, however, till 1803; and he, having paid ten pounds for it, refused to publish it.  One of Miss Austen’s brothers bought back the manuscript at the price at which it had been sold twelve or thirteen years later; but even then it was not published till 1818, when the author was dead.

The first of her books to appear was Sense and Sensibility.  She had begun to write it immediately after finishing Pride and Prejudice.  It was published in 1811, a good many years later, when Miss Austen was thirty-six years old.  The title-page merely said that it was written “By a Lady.”  The author never put her name to any of her books.  For an anonymous first novel, it must be admitted, Sense and Sensibility was not unsuccessful.  It brought Miss Austen L150—­“a prodigious recompense,” she thought, “for that which had cost her nothing.”  The fact, however, that she had not earned more than L700 from her novels by the time of her death shows that she never became a really popular author in her lifetime.

She was rewarded as poorly in credit as in cash, though the Prince Regent became an enthusiastic admirer of her books, and kept a set of them in each of his residences.  It was the Prince Regent’s librarian, the Rev. J.S.  Clarke, who, on becoming chaplain to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, made the suggestion to her that “an historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would just now be very interesting.”  Mr. Collins, had he been able to wean himself from Fordyce’s Sermons so far as to allow himself to take an interest in fiction, could hardly have made a proposal more exquisitely grotesque.  One is glad the proposal was made, however, not only for its own sake, but because it drew an admirable reply from Miss Austen on the nature of her genius.  “I could not sit seriously down,” she declared, “to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and, if it were indispensable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.”