BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
1811. Sense and Sensibility. [Completed in 1798. Commenced many years earlier in the form of letters, under the title Elinor and Marianne.]
1813. Pride and Prejudice. [Completed in 1797. Originally entitled (in MS.) First Impressions.]
1814. Mansfield Park. [Written in 1811-14.]
1816. Emma. [Written in 1811-16.]
1818. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. [Northanger Abbey (mostly written in 1798) was sold to a Bath bookseller for £10 in 1803. He laid it aside, and it was bought back by Henry Austen, at the same price, after Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had appeared. Persuasion, as originally completed (in 1816) had only eleven chapters, but the author was not satisfied with Chapter X, and replaced it by the present Chapters X and XI. The cancelled chapter is included in Mr. Austen Leigh's memoir. It brings about the re-engagement of Anne and Wentworth in a different, and certainly less admirable, manner.]
1871. Lady Susan, The Watsons, and some extracts from the novel on which Jane was at work until four months before her death. [These are all included in Mr. Austen Leigh's book. The MS. of Lady Susan, written before Jane was of age, was given by Cassandra Austen to her niece Fanny (Lady Knatchbull), who consented to its publication. As for the incomplete novel known as The Watsons, written about 1802, Jane was not responsible for the naming of it, and had laid it aside several years before Mansfield Park was written. The work from which she was compelled by illness to cease in March 1817 had not, in the twelve chapters we possess, reached a point when its plan could be foretold with reasonable confidence.]
1884. Letters of Jane Austen, edited by her great-nephew, the first Lord Brabourne. [These, which, with few exceptions were addressed to Cassandra Austen, belonged to Lady Knatchbull, to whom some of them were written. Many of Jane's letters were destroyed by Cassandra as being too private to pass into other hands.]
Mr. J. E. Austen Leigh's Memoir of his aunt is not only to be highly valued for its biographical details, but for its many anecdotes of Jane Austen, and for the letters which fill a good many gaps in the other published correspondence.
Those to whom the subject of the present volume is fresh, and who care to pursue it, are advised to read the "introductions" contributed to recent editions of Jane Austen's novels by various critics, particularly Mr. Austin Dobson, Professor Saintsbury, and Mr. E. V. Lucas, as well as the Life contributed by Mr. Goldwin Smith to the Great Writers series.
[The dates given on the left hand are those of publication.]