of feeling, qualifying her
equally to advise, assist, or amuse. She was, in fact, as ready to
comfort the unhappy, or to nurse the sick, as she was to laugh and jest
with the lighthearted. Two of her nieces were grown up, and one of them
was married, before she was taken away from them. As their minds became
more matured, they were admitted into closer intimacy with her, and
learned more of her graver thoughts; they know what a sympathising friend
and judicious adviser they found her to be in many little difficulties
and doubts of early womanhood.

I do not venture to speak of her religious principles: that is a subject
on which she herself was more inclined to _think_ and _act_ than to
_talk_, and I shall imitate her reserve; satisfied to have shown how much
of Christian love and humility abounded in her heart, without presuming
to lay bare the roots whence those graces grew. Some little insight,
however, into these deeper recesses of the heart must be given, when we
come to speak of her death.

CHAPTER VI.

_Habits of Composition resumed after a long interval--First
publication--The interest taken by the Author in the success of her
Works_.

It may seem extraordinary that Jane Austen should have written so little
during the years that elapsed between leaving Steventon and settling at
Chawton; especially when this cessation from work is contrasted with her
literary activity both before and after that period. It might rather
have been expected that fresh scenes and new acquaintance would have
called forth her powers; while the quiet life which the family led both
at Bath and Southampton must have afforded abundant leisure for
composition; but so it was that nothing which I know of, certainly
nothing which the public have seen, was completed in either of those
places. I can only state the fact, without assigning any cause for it;
but as soon as she was fixed in her second home, she resumed the habits
of composition which had been formed in her first, and continued them to
the end of her life. The first year of her residence at Chawton seems to
have been devoted to revising and preparing for the press 'Sense and
Sensibility,' and 'Pride and Prejudice'; but between February 1811 and
August 1816, she began and completed 'Mansfield Park,' 'Emma,' and
'Persuasion,' so that the last five years of her life produced the same
number of novels with those which had been written in her early youth.
How she was ab