ll I was sixteen; that she had
herself often wished she had read more, and written less in the
corresponding years of her own life.' As this niece was only twelve
years old at the time of her aunt's death, these words seem to imply that
the juvenile tales to which I have referred had, some of them at least,
been written in her childhood.

But between these childish effusions, and the composition of her living
works, there intervened another stage of her progress, during which she
produced some stories, not without merit, but which she never considered
worthy of publication. During this preparatory period her mind seems to
have been working in a very different direction from that into which it
ultimately settled. Instead of presenting faithful copies of nature,
these tales were generally burlesques, ridiculing the improbable events
and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly
romances. Something of this fancy is to be found in 'Northanger Abbey,'
but she soon left it far behind in her subsequent course. It would seem
as if she were first taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and
curiously considering how she ought _not_ to write before she attempted
to put forth her strength in the right direction. The family have,
rightly, I think, declined to let these early works be published. Mr.
Shortreed observed very pithily of Walter Scott's early rambles on the
borders, 'He was makin' himsell a' the time; but he didna ken, may be,
what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought of little,
I dare say, but the queerness and the fun.' And so, in a humbler way,
Jane Austen was 'makin' hersell,' little thinking of future fame, but
caring only for 'the queerness and the fun;' and it would be as unfair to
expose this preliminary process to the world, as it would be to display
all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn up.

It was, however, at Steventon that the real foundations of her fame were
laid. There some of her most successful writing was composed at such an
early age as to make it surprising that so young a woman could have
acquired the insight into character, and the nice observation of manners
which they display. 'Pride and Prejudice,' which some consider the most
brilliant of her novels, was the first finished, if not the first begun.
She began it in October 1796, before she was twenty-one years old, and
completed it in about ten months, in August