Hampshire, 1797

“YOU HAVE RISEN EARLY, sister,” said Cassandra as she stepped into the dressing room to find Jane at her writing table, working away by candlelight in the predawn of a December day.

“I find it peaceful to write while others sleep,” said Jane.

She had hardly been away from her writing table for the past few weeks. Since her visit to Mr. Mansfield’s grave, his voice had been driving her. All thoughts of Mr. Cadell’s rejection were now forgotten, and Jane focused only on those words she had recalled so clearly in the churchyard at Busbury: “Promise me that, until we meet again, you will not cease to write.” As she worked, she heard, too, Mr. Mansfield’s voice from an earlier occasion—the day she had finished reading him Elinor and Marianne. “It might,” he had said, “benefit from being written as a conventional narrative.” It was, in fact, this task upon which Jane had focused all her efforts in the weeks since her visit to Busbury. She found that with Mr. Mansfield’s encouragement the work seemed easy. Elinor and Marianne and the rest of the Dashwoods now occupied almost her every waking thought. With the Christmas theatricals, balls, and visits from family all on the horizon, she knew she would need to set aside her work soon, but that thought only drove her to rise earlier and stay up later than anyone else in the household.

“Is it still the revision of Elinor and Marianne that occupies you so?” said her sister. “I do hope you will share the new version with the family.”

Jane laid down her quill and looked up at the smiling face of her sister in the candlelight. “I fear I have neglected you these past few weeks, my dear Cassandra,” she said. “I am not a good sister when a story has hold of me like this.”

“Nothing could keep you from being the most wonderful of sisters,” said Cassandra, “least of all your commitment to a talent given to you by God.”

“Your patience is a gift to me,” said Jane, rising from her chair and crossing to embrace her sister. “Now I must tell you that, while I shall certainly fulfill your wishes and read from my novel when our family is gathered together, I shall not read from the pages of Elinor and Marianne.”

“Indeed,” said Cassandra with a little yelp of excitement. “Is there a new story on your table?”

“Not a new story,” said Jane, “for the Dashwoods still fill my time. But a friend has suggested that a change of title would not be unwise and I have finally hit on one that I find satisfactory.”

“And who is this friend with whom you discuss your work away from your own sister?” teased Cassandra.

“I should have said a late friend,” said Jane quietly.

“Oh, Jane, I am sorry. It was Mr. Mansfield, was it not?”

“Indeed,” said Jane, “and though he is no longer with us, it was Mr. Mansfield who gave me the idea for the new title. I was thinking of him this morning as I prepared to write about Willoughby’s carrying Marianne in from the storm. The two of us made quite a pair—Mr. Mansfield and myself. I with the impetuous eagerness of youth and he with the level head of life experience.”

“I cannot think you impetuous, good sister.”

“Nor did I think myself so at the time,” said Jane, laughing at the recollection of how she had denied this very fault to Mr. Mansfield on their first meeting. “But it is good that the wisdom of a little more maturity has shown me to have been so, for it was the contrast between those two remembered characters—old Mr. Mansfield and young Miss Austen—which gave me the idea for my new title.”

“Well, tease me no longer, sister. What is this title?”

“I think,” said Jane, “of calling the novel Sense and Sensibility.”

—

ALMOST AS SOON AS she had finished Sense and Sensibility, Jane turned her thoughts to the other project she and Mr. Mansfield had discussed: a mock gothic novel that would poke fun at books such as The Mysteries of Udolpho. Her father, who detested the genre, took special delight in the story.

“What will Mrs. Radcliffe think?” he said, rubbing his hands together and smiling one evening as the party were settling in the sitting room to listen to Jane read from her story.

“Indeed, Father, I do not wish to cause offense to Mrs. Radcliffe or to any author. But of course if my stories remain forever within the confines of this rectory, I suppose I need not worry about causing offense to the great writers of the land.”

“Your stories will one day burst the bounds of Steventon,” said her father, “never you fear. And I should pay dearly to see the look on Mrs. Radcliffe’s face when she reads this one. Now, I believe we had reached chapter six and you had promised us a conversation about reading between Susan and Isabella.”

Jane settled in her chair and began to read the scene in which her heroine, whom she called Susan Moreland—though she was by no means certain that she should keep that name—was discussing the plot of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novel Udolpho with her friend, the shallow and self-serving Isabella Thorpe.

“When you have finished Udolpho,” said Susan, “we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“And are they horrid?” said Isabella. “Are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.”

“But you must name them!” said Mr. Austen, interrupting Jane’s narrative. “Do not leave us hanging. What deliciously horrid books await Miss Thorpe? For myself, I should put Castle of Wolfenbach on her reading list.”

“Orphan of the Rhine,” chimed in Cassandra.

“Oh and you must include Necromancer of the Black Forest,” said Mrs. Austen. “For I have never read a more horrid book.”

“And Midnight Bell, and Mysterious Warnings,” went on Mr. Austen.

“Very well,” said Jane, holding up a hand. Interruptions from her readers were not unusual, but this one had been particularly enthusiastic. “I shall provide the particulars of Miss Thorpe’s reading, but now may I proceed with the story?”

“You may,” said her father, settling back into his chair with a smile. “And do let it be horrid.”

Jane called the new story simply Susan. It was not that she disliked the title Mr. Mansfield had suggested; rather, she felt that her unfinished novel was not deserving of his title. As she worked through the autumn of 1798 crafting the adventures of her heroine and bringing her ever closer to that edifice where her fate would be decided, Jane wondered if she would be able to make of them a work that could live up to the title Northanger Abbey.