Editing Jane Austen (section)

===Early manuscripts (1796–1798)===
After finishing ''Lady Susan'', Austen began her first full-length novel ''Elinor and Marianne''. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as ''[[Sense and Sensibility]]''.<ref>Sutherland (2005), 16–18; LeFaye (2014), xviii; Tomalin (1997), 107, 120, 154, 208.</ref>

Austen began a second novel, ''First Impressions'' (later published as ''[[Pride and Prejudice]]''), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite".<ref>Le Faye (2004), 100, 114.</ref> At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to [[Thomas Cadell (publisher)|Thomas Cadell]], an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing ''First Impressions''. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts.<ref>Le Faye (2004), 104; Sutherland (2005), 17, 21; quotations from Tomalin (1997), 120–122.</ref> Following the completion of ''First Impressions'', Austen returned to ''Elinor and Marianne'' and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the [[Epistolary novel|epistolary]] format in favour of [[Third-person narrative|third-person narration]] and produced something close to ''Sense and Sensibility''.<ref>Le Faye (2014), xviii–xiv; Fergus (2005), 7; Sutherland (2005), 16–18, 21; Tomalin (1997), 120–121; Honan (1987), 122–124.</ref> In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), [[Eliza de Feuillide]], a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen.<ref name="King page 2">King, Noel "Jane Austen in France"  ''Nineteenth-Century Fiction'', Vol. 8, No. 1, June 1953 p. 2.</ref> The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the [[French Revolution]] that lasted for the rest of her life.<ref name="King page 2"/>

During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of ''Elinor and Marianne'', Austen began writing a third novel with the working title ''Susan''—later ''[[Northanger Abbey]]''—a satire on the popular [[Gothic fiction|Gothic novel]].<ref>Litz (1965), 59–60.</ref> Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered ''Susan'' to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more.<ref>Tomalin (1997), 182.</ref> The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.<ref>Le Faye (2014), xx–xxi, xxvi; Fergus (2005), 8–9; Sutherland (2005), 16, 18–19, 20–22; Tomalin (1997), 199, 254.</ref>
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