But between these childish effusions, and the composition of her living works, there intervened another stage of her progress, during which she produced some stories, not without merit, but which she never considered worthy of publication.  During this preparatory period her mind seems to have been working in a very different direction from that into which it ultimately settled.  Instead of presenting faithful copies of nature, these tales were generally burlesques, ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly romances.  Something of this fancy is to be found in ‘Northanger Abbey,’ but she soon left it far behind in her subsequent course.  It would seem as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously considering how she ought not to write before she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction.  The family have, rightly, I think, declined to let these early works be published.  Mr. Shortreed observed very pithily of Walter Scott’s early rambles on the borders, ‘He was makin’ himsell a’ the time; but he didna ken, may be, what he was about till years had passed.  At first he thought of little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun.’  And so, in a humbler way, Jane Austen was ‘makin’ hersell,’ little thinking of future fame, but caring only for ‘the queerness and the fun;’ and it would be as unfair to expose this preliminary process to the world, as it would be to display all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn up.

It was, however, at Steventon that the real foundations of her fame were laid.  There some of her most successful writing was composed at such an early age as to make it surprising that so young a woman could have acquired the insight into character, and the nice observation of manners which they display.  ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ which some consider the most brilliant of her novels, was the first finished, if not the first begun.  She began it in October 1796, before she was twenty-one years old, and completed it in about ten months, in August 1797.  The title then intended for it was ‘First Impressions.’  ‘Sense and Sensibility’ was begun, in its present form, immediately after the completion of the former, in November 1797 but something similar in story and character had been written earlier under the title of ‘Elinor and Marianne;’ and if, as is probable, a good deal of this earlier production was retained, it must form the earliest specimen of her writing that has been given to the world.  ‘Northanger Abbey,’ though not prepared for the press till 1803, was certainly first composed in 1798.