heir true place as an expression of human life. It is due partly, at
least, to her influence that a multitude of readers were ready to
appreciate Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_, and the powerful and enduring work of
George Eliot.

LIFE. Jane Austen's life gives little opportunity for the biographer,
unless, perchance, he has something of her own power to show the beauty and
charm of commonplace things. She was the seventh child of Rev. George
Austen, rector of Steventon, and was born in the parsonage of the village
in 1775. With her sisters she was educated at home, and passed her life
very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties, to which
love lent the magic lamp that makes all things beautiful. She began to
write at an early age, and seems to have done her work on a little table in
the family sitting room, in the midst of the family life. When a visitor
entered, she would throw a paper or a piece of sewing over her work, and
she modestly refused to be known as the author of novels which we now count
among our treasured possessions. With the publishers she had little
success. _Pride and Prejudice_ went begging, as we have said, for sixteen
years; and _Northanger Abbey_ (1798) was sold for a trivial sum to a
publisher, who laid it aside and forgot it, until the appearance and
moderate success of _Sense and Sensibility_ in 1811. Then, after keeping
the manuscript some fifteen years, he sold it back to the family, who found
another publisher.

An anonymous article in the _Quarterly Review_, following the appearance of
_Emma_ in 1815, full of generous appreciation of the charm of the new
writer, was the beginning of Jane Austen's fame; and it is only within a
few years that we have learned that the friendly and discerning critic was
Walter Scott. He continued to be her admirer until her early death; but
these two, the greatest writers of fiction in their age, were never brought
together. Both were home-loving people, and Miss Austen especially was
averse to publicity and popularity. She died, quietly as she had lived, at
Winchester, in 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. She was a bright,
attractive little woman, whose sunny qualities are unconsciously reflected
in all her books.

WORKS. Very few English writers ever had so narrow a field of work as Jane
Austen. Like the French novelists, whose success seems to lie in choosing
the tiny field that they know best, her works have an exquisite perfection
tha