Free Jane Austen by Elizabeth Jenkins

as a real comfort to me in my old age when Cassandra is gone into Shropshire and Jane the Lord knows where."
    The Shropshire living for Thomas Fowle was looked upon almost as a certainty, but it was not yet vacant, and in the meantime, Lord Craven, anxious to do something for his cousin, took him as chaplain to his own regiment, which had been ordered to the West Indies. The parting between Thomas Fowle and Cassandra was in one sense not so painful as it would be today, despite the fact that sea voyages then were so lengthy and posts uncertain; for lovers unless very much favored by circumstances were frequently as much cut off from each other within the confines of England as they would feel today if they were in separate countries. Long absences, still longer engagements, might be avoided, but they had often to be borne; but such a nature as Cassandra's
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    looked forward to the future and, however irksome she found the present, she would not let her friends feel depressed on her account.
    Mrs. Austen had no idea of what Jane's destination was to be, and Jane at present had a preoccupation quite other than marriage. First Impressions was finished in 1797, her twenty-second year. Before its actual publication sixteen years later she renamed it Pride and Prejudice , and she rewrote it to such an extent that it is impossible to say how little or how much of the final story was found in the original. But now that it was finished in its first form she did what she had always done with her writings, and showed it to her father.
    Whatever it was that met the Reverend George Austen's eye in the three volumes of exquisitely regular and legible handwriting, he thought very well of it. He was prepared to be pleased, naturally; she had afforded him too much amusement from childhood for him not to have a high expectation of it now; but he was not the sort of man to be blinded by fatherly partiality, and he would have been very chary of anything's being published, even anonymously, that was not likely to do her justice. As it was, he had no hesitation in thinking that it should be offered to a publisher; he wrote to Cadell, saying: "I have in my possession a manuscript novel, comprising 3 vols., about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina ." His letter indicated that if Messrs. Cadell thought well of the novel, it could be published at the author's own expense (in other words, at his), and he ended by saying: "Should you give any encouragement, I will send you the work."
    Messrs. Cadell declined to inspect the work, by return of post.
    Though they acted stupidly and carelessly, and, for themselves, most unfortunately, they acted altogether in the interests of English literature. However good First Impressions
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    may have been, and however readily they themselves might have
    offered to publish it had they taken the trouble of reading it, it cannot be supposed to have been more than a sketch or foretaste of the brilliant perfection of Pride and Prejudice , which had behind it sixteen maturing years in the mind of an unequalled artist, and came forth at last not only with the solid excellence it had acquired in the process, but with as much shining in it of the morn and liquid dew of youth as if it had been the author's earliest work.
    But at the moment of receiving a disappointment one cannot comfort oneself with feeling that sixteen years hence it may turn out to have been all for the best. It is impossible that she should not have been disappointed, though it is characteristic of her and of her family that there is no record of her saying so. What is most striking in the affair is the influence she allowed it to have over her. After all, her novel had not been condemned; it had never been looked at. The only
    person who had read it and was competent to criticize it was the Rev.
    George Austen, and he had thought it good. No one whose first
    object in life was to attract the public notice would have been satisfied with such a