For a period of eight years, spent in Bath and in Southampton, Miss Austen wrote nothing save some fragments of ‘Lady Susan’ and ’The Watsons,’ neither of them of great importance.  In 1809 the lessened household, composed of the mother and her two daughters only, removed to the village of Chawton, on the estate of Mrs. Austen’s third son; and here, in a rustic cottage, now become a place of pilgrimage, Jane Austen again took up her pen.  She rewrote ‘Pride and Prejudice.’  She revised ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ and between February 1811 and August 1816 she completed ‘Mansfield Park,’ ‘Emma,’ and ‘Persuasion.’  At Chawton, as at Steventon, she had no study, and her stories were written on a little mahogany desk near a window in the family sitting-room, where she must often have been interrupted by the prototypes of her Mrs. Allen, Mrs. Bennet, Miss Bates, Mr. Collins, or Mrs. Norris.  When at last she began to publish, her stories appeared in rapid succession:  ’Sense and Sensibility’ in 1811; ‘Pride and Prejudice’ early in 1813; ’Mansfield Park’ in 1814; ‘Emma’ in 1816; ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’ in 1818, the year following her death.  In January 1813 she wrote to her beloved Cassandra:—­“I want to tell you that I have got my own darling child ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from London.  We fairly set at it and read half the first volume to Miss B. She was amused, poor soul! ... but she really does seem to admire Elizabeth.  I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”  A month later she wrote:—­“Upon the whole, however, I am quite vain enough, and well satisfied enough.  The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling:  it wants shade; it wants to be stretched out here and there with a long chapter of sense, if it could be had; if not, of solemn, specious nonsense, about something unconnected with the story; an essay on writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Bonaparte, or something that would form a contrast, and bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness and epigrammatism of the general style!”

Thus she who laughed at everybody else laughed at herself, and set her critical instinct to estimate her own capacity.  To Mr. Clarke, the librarian of Carlton House, who had requested her to “delineate a clergyman” of earnestness, enthusiasm, and learning, she replied:—­“I am quite honored by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note.  But I assure you I am not.  The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary....  I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”  And when the same remarkable bibliophile suggested to her, on the approach of the marriage of the Princess Charlotte