later be rewritten as Pride and Prejudice.

1798 Poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Cole ridge publish Lyrical Ballads.

1801 Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires. He and his wife and two daughters leave the quiet country life of Steventon and move to the bustling, fashionable town of Bath.

1803 Austen’s novel “Susan” is accepted for publication but does not see the light of day. The manuscript is eventu ally returned by the publisher. It will be revised and re leased posthumously as Northanger Abbey. The United States buys Louisiana from France. Ralph Waldo Emer son is born.

1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Spain de clares war on Britain.

1805 Jane’s father dies. Jane and her mother and sister sub sequently move to Southampton. Sir Walter Scott pub lishes The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

1809 After several years of moving about and short-term stays in various towns, the Austen women settle in Chawton Cottage in Hampshire; in the parlor of this house Austen writes her most famous works. Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are born.

1811 Austen begins Mansfield Park in February. In November Sense and Sensibility is published with the notation “By a Lady”; all of Austen’s subsequent novels are also brought out anonymously. George III is declared in sane, and the Prince of Wales (the future King George IV) becomes regent.

1812 Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm and the first parts of

Lord Byron’s Childe Harold are published. The United States declares war on Great Britain.

1813 Pride and Prejudice is published. Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the Bourbons are restored to power.

1814 Mansfield Park is published.

1815 Napoleon is finally defeated at Waterloo.

1816 Emma is published. Charlotte Brontë is born.

1817 Austen begins the satiric novel Sanditon but puts it aside because of declining health. She dies on July 18 in Win chester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

1818 Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are published under Austen’s brother Henry’s supervision.

Introduction

Northanger Abbey is the ideal introduction to Jane Austen’s novels because in it we see the author defining the parameters of her craft. The text took shape in the fall of 1798 and by 1803 was a manuscript titled “Susan.” Richard Crosby, a London publisher, bought it outright for £10 but for some reason never produced the book. In 1813 Austen bought the manuscript back from Crosby for the same £10 but never published it. In an 1817 letter, she rather flippantly remarks, “Miss Catherine is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out.”

“Miss Catherine” is the “Susan” manuscript, now renamed Catherine. The work appeared only after Austen’s death in 1817, and it was her brother Henry who gave the book its present title when he had it published along with Persuasion in 1818. Austen may have changed the 1803 text when she recovered it a decade later, but we cannot know to what extent because no manuscript exists. But the novel’s austerity compared to her later works—its slim cast of characters, its spirited defense of novel-writing, its tendency toward satire and irony rather than psychological analysis—show a writer at the outset of her career.

The preeminence of satire in eighteenth-century English literature, with such giants as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne, certainly had an influence on Austen. Like them, she deploys ironic and humorous stereotypes in Northanger Abbey, especially when she delineates important secondary figures, usually duplicitous or morally questionable characters, such as Isabella and John Thorpe or General Tilney. Rather than explain their thoughts or motives, Austen theatrically uses their speeches and actions to reveal their shallowness and egoism. Of their inner lives we learn nothing. It is Austen’s heroine, Catherine Morland, who embodies the novelistic spirit: She possesses an evolving personality and matures as if she were real.

But who or, better, what was Richard Crosby, the mysterious man who purchased Austen’s manuscript in 1803? Austen’s biographers and critics refer to him as a publisher, but we must understand that what that word means now and what it meant in 1803, or in 1808 when he called Austen’s bluff about seeking another publisher and offered to sell her manuscript back to her for £10, and when he did in fact sell it back to her in 1813 are vastly different things. Crosby must have realized that a great change had taken place in English publishing. Women authors—Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe among them—had stormed the literary marketplace. Suddenly women were writing books both sexes could enjoy