Miss Austen took care to conceal her identity. To Cassandra she compared her feelings about seeing her work in print with those of a mother with a suckling child. The Lady in question was obliged to cover any losses, but in fact she cleared £140 from the first edition, equivalent to £9,000 or more today. Revised once more in 1809-10, Elinor and Marianne came out at last in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility, ‘a novel in three volumes, By a Lady’, published in London by Thomas Egerton. The family moved back to Hampshire in 1809 and settled in Chawton, near Alton, in the house which is now the Jane Austen’s House Museum. In 1801 the Austens moved to Bath where Jane’s output fell off, whether because the move made her happy or unhappy is unclear. She drastically altered Elinor and Marianne in 1797-98. Late in 1797 her father offered it to a London publisher, who sent it straight back by return post without bothering to read it. According to her sister Cassandra, Jane had written the first version of a novel she called Elinor and Marianne by 1796 and she began First Impressions (later Pride and Prejudice) in October that year. The anarchic, boisterous humour of some of the early work has been compared to Monty Python. The youngest of seven children of a Hampshire clergy-man, George Austen, she wrote stories and poems from her childhood on and read them aloud to her family, who enjoyed them, as well as plays that the family acted out.

Jane Austen was 35 when her first published novel appeared and had less than six years left to live.

Jane austen by a lady