good breeding, and healthy fun.  Mrs. Austen was a clever woman, full of epigram and humor in conversation, and rather famous in her own coterie for improvised verses and satirical hits at her friends.  The elder daughter, Cassandra, adored by Jane, who was three years her junior, seems to have had a rare balance and common-sense which exercised great influence over the more brilliant younger sister.  Their mother declared that of the two girls, Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always under her control; and Jane the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded.

[Illustration:  JANE AUSTEN]

From her cradle, Jane Austen was used to hearing agreeable household talk, and the freest personal criticism on the men and women who made up her small, secluded world.  The family circumstances were easy, and the family friendliness unlimited,—­conditions determining, perhaps, the cheerful tone, the unexciting course, the sly fun and good-fellowship of her stories.

It was in this Steventon rectory, in the family room where the boys might be building their toy boats, or the parish poor folk complaining to “passon’s madam,” or the county ladies paying visits of ceremony, in monstrous muffs, heelless slippers laced over open-worked silk stockings, short flounced skirts, and lutestring pelisses trimmed with “Irish,” or where tradesmen might be explaining their delinquencies, or farmers’ wives growing voluble over foxes and young chickens—­it was in the midst of this busy and noisy publicity, where nobody respected her employment, and where she was interrupted twenty times in an hour, that the shrewd and smiling social critic managed, before she was twenty-one, to write her famous ‘Pride and Prejudice.’  Here too ’Sense and Sensibility’ was finished in 1797, and ‘Northanger Abbey’ in 1798.  The first of these, submitted to a London publisher, was declined as unavailable, by return of post.  The second, the gay and mocking ‘Northanger Abbey,’ was sold to a Bath bookseller for L10, and several years later bought back again, still unpublished, by one of Miss Austen’s brothers.  For the third story she seems not even to have sought a publisher.  These three books, all written before she was twenty-five, were evidently the employment and delight of her leisure.  The serious business of life was that which occupied other pretty girls of her time and her social position,—­dressing, dancing, flirting, learning a new stitch at the embroidery frame, or a new air on “the instrument”; while all the time she was observing, with those soft hazel eyes of hers, what honest Nym calls the “humors” of the world about her.  In 1801, the family removed to Bath, then the most fashionable watering-place in England.  The gay life of the brilliant little city, the etiquette of the Pump Room and the Assemblies, regulated by the autocratic Beau Nash, the drives, the routs, the card parties, the toilets, the shops, the Parade, the general frivolity, pretension, and display of the eighteenth century Vanity Fair, had already been studied by the good-natured satirist on occasional visits, and already immortalized in the swiftly changing comedy scenes of ‘Northanger Abbey.’  But they tickled her fancy none the less, now that she lived among them, and she made use of them again in her later novel, ‘Persuasion.’