[Austen, Jane] | First edition of Austen's final novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

[Austen, Jane]

Northanger Abbey; and Persuasion; By the Author of "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park," &c. With a Biographical Notice of the Author. In Four Volumes. London: John Murray. Vols. I and II printed by C. Roworth Bull-yard; Vols. III and IV by T. Davison, Lombard Street, Whitefriars, [December 1817] 1818

4 vols., 12mo, (170 x 110 mm). Half-titles (between the preliminary leaves and first page of text in each volume, as issued), paper watermarked "AP | 1816 | 2", early ownership inscription in ink to titles and later embossed library stamps to initial blanks; the title page of vol. I starting to separate at the foot of the gutter, occasional faint spotting, minor marginal chips to one or two corners. Later full olive calf, boards with gilt-stamped fleurons at corners and blind-ruled triple fillet border, gilt-tooled spines in six compartments, each volume with two gilt-lettered red leather spine labels, edges and turn-ins decorated in blind; some faint scuffing and soiling to boards, a few small spots of wear at extremities, spines uniformly toned to a light brown, some unobtrusive restorations, a vertical scratch and small spot of wear in the rear board of volume I.

First editions, published posthumously, of Austen's final works, containing the earliest biography of Jane Austen, and the first time her name appeared in one of her books.

“The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public; and when the public, which has not been insensible to the merits of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, shall be informed that the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave, perhaps a brief account of Jane Austen will be read with a kindlier sentiment than simple curiosity.”

— Biographical Notice of the Author

Jane Austen initially tried to publish her first finished novel, Northanger Abbey, then titled Susan, in 1803. Austen’s elder brother Henry, acting as her agent, sold the manuscript to the bookseller Crosby & Co for £10 but, after advertising the book, they never published it. Finally, thirteen years later in the Spring of 1816, Henry was able to buy back the manuscript. In the “Advertisement by the Authoress to Northanger Abbey,” Austen addresses her novel’s strangely delayed publication history, barely attempting to hide her contempt: “Why the business proceeded no farther, the author has never been able to learn. That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish seems extraordinary.” Once she got her manuscript back, Austen likely reworked parts of the novel, wrote the aforementioned “Advertisement,” and renamed it Catherine, before finally deciding to shelve the project. She died soon after. Six months later, Henry renamed the book Northanger Abbey and published it as the first two volumes in a four-volume set. The story is a romantic bildungsroman, a book about reading, and a satire of the then popular genre of gothic fiction. It centers on a very normal seventeen-year-old girl named Catherine Morland, who has an overactive imagination from reading too many novels, especially gothic fiction and romance novels, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.

The third and fourth volumes in the set contain Persuasion, the final novel by Austen. It was composed over a relatively short timeframe, from 1815 to 1816. In a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, from March of 1817, Austen wrote that she had a novel "which may appear about a twelvemonth hence." After her death at the age of forty-one on 18 July 1817, the novel remained unpublished and untitled. Six months later, Henry named it Persuasion and published it with Northanger Abbey in December of 1817, though the title page gives its date as 1818. In the intervening centuries, these posthumous works—Persuasion in particular—have been the source of much critical attention. Two manuscript chapters of Persuasion hold the unique position of being the only surviving holograph pages of a novel that Austen completed and intended for publication, offering Austen scholars the ability to glimpse her creative process.

Besides adding or changing the books’ titles, Henry Austen is also credited with writing the "Biographical Notice of the Author,” which appears in Volume I of this set. Up until that point, all four of Austen’s novels had been published anonymously. As such, Henry’s biography revealed Jane to her public, naming her and providing her readers with a few basic facts about her life. However, likely in the hopes of protecting her, Henry wrote a sanitized profile of his sister made up of minor facts, vague anecdotes, and a few falsehoods. For example, he writes that, “Everything came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen.” Despite its faults, the “Statement” remains an important source for any author who attempts to write Austen’s biography—a notoriously difficult task due to the scarcity of available information. All things considered, Henry’s biggest lie may have been his statement that, “short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer.”

A complete copy of Austen's final two published works, as issued with all four half titles.

REFERENCES

Gilson A9; Sutherland, Kathryn, Jane Austen's textual Lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. New York: Vintage Books, 2018

PROVENANCE

C. Langston (contemporary signature on title) — A. J. V. Radford (embossed stamp)