Writing Slowly

Jane Austen died in the cathedral city of Winchester on July 18, 1817; she was 41 years old.

Towards the end of her too-short life, in a brief five-year period between 1811 and 1816, she published four great novels. Originally released anonymously to a just a handful of positive reviews and scant financial success, these works are now among the most celebrated in the English language.

Austen didn’t accomplish all she had hoped to. Besides her completed but unpublished novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, she left behind several further manuscripts¹. These included Sanditon, the first 23,000 words of a new novel, which she started in early 1817 when she was already sick, but abandoned due to her declining health, just four months before her death.

Jane Austen’s immense posthumous success is a very far cry from her lived experience as a struggling writer. She died relatively young, of a debilitating illness, in a condition of financial insecurity, with no expectation that any of her life’s work would survive her, let alone enjoy any kind of acclaim. All her work was published anonymously. Her epitaph doesn’t even mention that she was a writer. And within only a few years of her untimely death, all her novels were out of print.

A struggle to publish

It’s hard to believe it now, but in her lifetime Austen struggled to publish any of her work. In 1803 her father had sold the copyright to Northanger Abbey (then called ‘Susan’) for 10 pounds, (this was today’s equivalent of just US$1,300), but the publisher did nothing with it. Having failed to retrieve the copyright in 1809, Austen couldn’t afford the fee until 1816, and though she did finally manage to pay, she didn’t live long enough to find another publisher. She never saw the book in print.

Publishing in the early Nineteenth Century was risky and expensive, so even when they were eventually published Austen’s novels sold for unavoidably high prices and in small print runs. From Sense and Sensibity, her first published novel, she only made 140 pounds (around US$18,000 in today’s money) and she made even less from Pride and Prejudice, her second.

Mansfield Park, Austen’s third published novel, sold quite well despite receiving no reviews at all. Emma was the last novel she saw published. What she made on Emma though, she immediately lost on the second editon of Mansfield Park, which underperformed its first edition.

Identity concealed

It was considered unacceptable for Austen, as a woman, to publish under her own name. This meant Sense and Sensibility was authored “by a lady”, and her subsequent novels “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”.

Because she died too soon, she didn’t live long enough to see her other complete novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in print, though she might have, had she lived just half a year longer. Her brother Henry managed to publish these two novels just six months after her death. It had taken fully fifteen years for Northanger Abbey to see the light of day, and still the title page didn’t mention her name. It was only in the book’s ‘biographical notice’ that her brother finally revealed the author’s identity.

And by the 1820s all six Austen novels were out of print. They were only revived in 1832 by means of a new, cheaper edition. Sanditon, the unfinished novel, remained unpublished for more than a century, right up until 1925.

Growing fame

The Austen flame flickered, but it didn’t quite go out. Her writing always found champions, and especially since the 1880s, the cult of Jane Austen has grown and grown. The critic Leslie Stephen called it ‘Austenolatry’, while author Henry James disapproved of the ‘beguiled infatuation’ Austen’s work seemed to inspire in its devotees. In 1894 the critic George Saintsbury coined the term ‘Janeite’ to refer approvingly to those readers who appreciated Austen. The author Rudyard Kipling was one of them. In Debits and Credits (1926) he wrote²:

Jane lies in Winchester-blessed be her shade! Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made! And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain, Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!

After multiple movies, TV series and the establishment of a firm online ‘fandom’, Jane Austen has become a cultural icon. Having long been a touchstone of debates about feminism and the role of women, her work has also found relevance and controversy in the context of empire, slavery and post-colonialism.

Austen even features on the Bank of England ten pound note where, in a 2017 re-design, she replaced no less a figure than Charles Darwin³.

You can read on every note her ironic comment⁴:

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

The time is short

Jane Austen knew the time to create was short. She didn’t take her life for granted. We know this because she also left behind three prayers⁵. In the first prayer she says:

“May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent.”

And in her third prayer she says:

“Another day is now gone, and added to those, for which we were before accountable.”

She sees the falling of the evening as a “solemn truth”, that should lead us to “feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes”.

As a result, she says, we should “earnestly strive to make a better use of [future time] than we have done of the time past.”

While I think she did pretty well, it seems she thought she could have done better. In reviewing Jane Austen’s life I’m inspired to take my own creative capabilities more seriously. It feels important and meaningful to re-commit to my own writing, and to give an account of how I spend my own days and hours.

That’s because I don’t have much time either. None of us do. Ars longa, vita brevis. And whether we’re published or not, whether or not we find renown in our lifetimes, if ever, we owe it both to the muse and to ourselves to respect our own artistic vision by creating what we can while we can, until we no longer can.

Don’t wait

Nothing is certain. Few if any of us will attain Jane Austen’s fame. As I’ve learned, Jane Austen herself nearly didn’t. But all of us can take stock of the way we use our own precious time, like she did, and as she did, to feel the importance of every day. So:

If you want to write, do it.

If you’ve started but haven’t finished, finish it.

And if you’re stuck and need help, ask for it.

Who knows how much time you have left?

Don’t wait any longer.

See also:

Why I’m writing faster

My range is me

Image source: Public domain/Wikipedia