Abstract
Most biographers have presented this period of Austen’s life, from 1801 to 1809, as a dark one, personally painful and unproductive creatively. The only writing we have consists of the revised version of Susan, later retitled Northanger Abbey, sold to a publisher in the spring of 1803, and the uncompleted draft of The Watsons, usually dated 1804. Sometime after 1805, Austen made a fair copy of Lady Susan, and she may have written most of the dramatic version of Sir Charles Grandison at this time.1 This literary activity seems minimal by comparison to the drafting of three novels between 1796 and 1799.
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Notes
F. Prevost and F[rancis William] Blagdon, Flowers of Literature for 1801 & 1802; or Characteristic Sketches of Human Nature and Modern Manners, to which are added a General View of Literature (London: Crosby, 1803), 1:464. The published works, listed on the previous page, include reference works and compilations like ‘Crosby’s View of London 1803–4’. ‘Beauties of Dr Moore’, ‘History of Quadrupeds’, ‘Every Man his own Gardner’, as well as five novels: Sophia Woodfall’s Frederick Maltravers, or the Adopted Son (2 vols); Elisabeth Guenard’s The Three Monks!!! (2 vols), translated from the French and published by Crosby in conjunction with J. F. Hughes; Christiana Naubert’s Lindorf and Caroline (3 vols), translated from the German; and two titles that I cannot identify, listed as ‘The Depraved Husband and the Philosophic Wife’ (2 vols) and a Mr Lucas’s ‘Strolling Player’ (3 vols).
Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades1775–1800 (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1977).
See Facts, p. 51, quoted from James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of JA (1871; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 296; among others, see Honan, JA, her Life, p. 215; Life (2), p. 128.
Life (2), p. 156. See also Edward Mogg, Paterson’s Roads (London: Longman et al., 1824) for the carriage route between Alton and Basingstoke, then Basingstoke toward Overton.
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© 1991 Jan Fergus
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Fergus, J. (1991). The Unpublished Author, 1801–1809. In: Jane Austen. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21665-9_4
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