1 - The Professional Woman Writer

Summary

You will be glad to hear that every Copy of S[ense] & S[ensibility] is sold & that it has brought me £140 – besides the Copyright, if that sh^d ever be of any value. – I have now therefore written myself into £250. – which only makes me long for more.

These words of Jane Austen to her brother Frank, written on 3 July 1813 (L 217) after she had published two novels, are those of a professional author who is acutely conscious of her sales (as well as the possible future value of her copyright) and eager to increase her profits. Austen’s professionalism here exists in startling contrast to her brother Henry’s earliest biographical accounts of her, accounts that helped to create the longstanding myth of Austen as a genteel amateur, the spinster lady author who sketched her novels in moments of leisure. Henry wrote in his first ‘Biographical Notice’ (printed with Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818):

Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives … She could scarcely believe what she termed her great good fortune when ‘Sense and Sensibility’ produced a clear profit of about £150. Few so gifted were so truly unpretending. She regarded the above sum as a prodigious recompense for that which had cost her nothing … [S]o much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen … in public she turned away from any allusion to the character of an authoress.

(P 329–30)