If you look on the map at the small Southern county of Hampshire, you will see that the town of Steventon lies hard by Selborne, another name which the naturalist White has made pleasant to the ear.  Throughout her forty-two years of life—­she was born the year of American revolution and died shortly after Scott had begun his Waverley series—­she was a country-woman in the best sense:  a clergyman’s daughter identified with her neighborhood, dignified and private in her manner of existence, her one sensational outing being a four years’ residence in the fashionable watering-place of Bath, where Beau Nash once reigned supreme and in our day, Beaucaire has been made to rebuke Lady Mary Carlisle for her cold patrician pride.  Quiet she lived and died, nor was she reckoned great in letters by her contemporaries.  She wrote on her lap with others in the room, refused to take herself seriously and in no respect was like the authoress who is kodaked at the writing-desk and chronicled in her movements by land and sea.  She was not the least bit “literary.”  Fanny Burney, who had talent to Jane Austen’s genius, was in a blaze of social recognition, a petted darling of the town, where the other walked in rural ways and unnoted of the world, wrote novels that were to make literary history.  Such are the revenges of the whirligig, Time.

Austen’s indestructible reputation is founded on half a dozen pieces of fiction:  the best, and best known, “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice,” although “Mansfield Park,” “Emma,” “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion” (in order of publication but not of actual composition) are all of importance to the understanding and enjoyment of her, and her evenness of performance, on the whole, is remarkable.  The earlier three of these books were written by Miss Austen when a young woman In the twenties, but published much later, and were anonymous—­an indication of her tendency to take her authorship as an aside.  Two of them appeared posthumously.  Curiously, “Northanger Abbey,” that capital hit at the Radcliffe romanticism, and first written of her stories, was disposed of to a publisher when the writer was but three and twenty, yet was not printed until she had passed away nearly twenty years later,—­a sufficient proof of her unpopularity from the mercantile point of view.

Here is one of the paradoxes of literature:  this gentlewoman dabbling in a seemingly amateur fashion in letters, turns out to be the ablest novelist of her sex and race, one of the very few great craftsmen, one may say, since art is no respector of sex.  Jane Austen is the best example in the whole range of English literature of the wisdom of knowing your limitations and cultivating your own special plot of ground.  She offers a permanent rebuke to those who (because of youth or a failure to grasp the meaning of life) fancy that the only thing worth while lies on the other side of the Pyrenees; when all the while at one’s own back-door blooms the miracle.