Before Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and “Susan”

With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more spectacular publishing flub than the rejection of Pride and Prejudice in its first version (working title “First Impressions”) in 1797. True, Jane Austen was at that point a complete unknown, and it was ambitious of her father George to offer the manuscript to Thomas Cadell of The Strand, proprietor of one of the fanciest firms in the business. “First Impressions” may have been quite unlike the published text of 1813 (for one thing, it was probably about 20% longer), and of course Pride and Prejudice was not to attain bestseller status until decades later. Even so, Cadell now looks to have been a little hasty. “Declined by return of post,” he scrawled on George Austen’s letter, though at least he took the trouble to archive it. An Austen relative bought the letter back in 1840.

A more complex and mysterious story surrounds Northanger Abbey (“Susan” in its original form), though interesting new evidence continues to emerge. This novel didn’t appear in print until after Austen’s death in 1817, prefaced by a terse notice in which she describes selling the book years earlier, in 1803, to a publisher who advertised it as forthcoming but went no further. “That any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary,” Austen writes with a flourish of acerbic Johnsonese. The paradoxical result—for a work satirizing the vagaries of fashion in everything from Gothic spine-chillers (“Oh! the dreadful black veil!”) to must-have fabrics (“coquelicot ribbons instead of green”)—is that the world represented in Northanger Abbey was already a thing of the past. Explanatory notes are useful for twenty-first century readers but they may even have been useful then.

We learn more from Austen’s surviving letters. The publisher in question was the mid-market London firm of Crosby & Co., whose proprietor, Benjamin Crosby, had published William Godwin’s radical novel Caleb Williams in the 1790s, and was now expanding his fiction list to become the fourth most prolific publisher of novels between 1800 and 1809. Crosby paid £10, as much as a debut author could expect, but this was small potatoes alongside the handsome numbers commanded by big names like Ann Radcliffe (£800 for The Italian in 1797) or Maria Edgeworth (a prodigious £2,100 for Patronage in 1813). Then, as Austen says, he went ahead and advertised “Susan”.

But how seriously—how hard—was Crosby trying? A first advertisement was discovered by the great Austen scholar R.W. Chapman, who in his Clarendon Press edition of 1923 reported, from an obscure 1803 miscellany, a listing of “Susan” as forthcoming alongside several other “New and Useful Books Published by B. Crosby & Co.” That was the sum of knowledge until a Review of English Studies article of 2006, in which Anthony Mandal turned up the first known newspaper ad, in the Dorchester and Sherborne Journal, again listing “Susan” as “In the Press.” A third ad was reported by Margie Burns in the journal Persuasions in 2017: enough to confirm Austen’s belief that Crosby had indeed advertised the work, but all told, there is precious little to show for a century of trying. But then comes a beautiful instance of the way searchable full-text databases can now transform research, eclipsing decades of archival eyestrain with a few well-aimed keystrokes. The tally of known ads for “Susan” now stands at ten, seven of them, all from newspapers, first reported by Burns in a 2021 book. Again, these are all omnibus ads mentioning the forthcoming “Susan” alongside other Crosby wares such as The Mysterious Count, The Dangers of Credulity, and The Three Monks!!!, all of which appeared in 1803. Taken together, they show beyond question that for several months, Crosby genuinely intended to publish “Susan,” and was keen to promote the novel nationwide, beyond his core metropolitan market. One ad was in Austen’s local Hampshire Chronicle; others came out in Derby, Hull, Northampton, and Stamford, as well as in London. Newspaper survival rates are very low; there were no doubt further ads.

What made Crosby change his mind? Several theories have been floated, some of them based on the idea (plausible in itself) that it took Crosby several months to realise what a feisty, barbed satire he had on his hands. For the pioneering feminist Rebecca West in 1932, Northanger Abbey was a work that put “the institutions of society regarding women through the most gruelling criticism they have ever received,” and the last thing Crosby wanted to do was upset the respectable types who bought his books. Then there’s the widely touted theory that, with Gothic fiction prominent in his list, he couldn’t afford to publish a satire ridiculing Gothic fiction.

Over the years, however, Crosby was willing enough to publish oppositional fiction (witness Caleb Williams, a novel so politically charged that its author feared arrest), and he was no less willing to publish spoofs of the Gothic: witness The Three Monks!!!, an arch, mildly risqué tale about absent crusaders, randy friars, and bored ladies who “were always disposed to receive extremely well, the godly men who came to amuse them.” The most persuasive explanation is that of Mandal, who points to Crosby’s escalating business woes at the time of the “Susan” ads. The likelihood is that Austen was just the victim of unlucky timing as Crosby became risk-averse and retrenched for a year or two. His troubles soon eased, but by then, in the fast-moving world of literary fashion, he was looking for new acquisitions; “Susan” was already ancient history.

Austen seems to have waited and waited, but her patience snapped in 1809, the year newspaper ads for another novel titled “Susan” began to appear. Determined by now to retrieve her manuscript and publishing rights, she wrote to Crosby & Co. under the pseudonym Mrs Ashton Dennis, thereby teeing up an eloquent sign-off: “I am Gentlemen &c &c | MAD.” All she received in reply was an unpleasant letter from Crosby’s son, offering to sell back the manuscript but also threatening legal action should she publish elsewhere without paying. In the end, Austen was not to recover the manuscript until 1816, when she set about revising it (renaming her heroine in the process) while more or less simultaneously drafting Persuasion. The novels were posthumously published together as a four-volume set, marked, fortuitously or not, by an almost palindromic structure. Departing from Austen’s trademark rural setting (“such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in”), the framing volumes—the first of Northanger Abbey, the second of Persuasion—turn their satirical gaze instead on shark-infested Bath. With the unfinished Sanditon, they herald the more urban novelist that Austen might have become had she lived.

So, what about the other Susan, the one that made it into print in 1809, concerning a heroine confined on a Hebridean island for part of the action? Austen almost certainly saw the novel advertised (it was, the ads declared, distinguished by its “unity of interest and elegant simplicity”) and she may even have read it. If so, the simplicity would have struck her more than the interest. There were of course plenty of the usual novelistic incidents, as the Monthly Review wearily acknowledged: “a prodigious number of fevers, together with several faintings, two duels, and one or two deaths.” It just didn’t quite seem worth keeping count.

_{Featured Image: ‘Northanger Persuasion Title Page’ by Jane Austen, Lilly Library, Indiana University via Wikimedia Commons. [Public Domain]}