Jane Austen Part III

Austen began to get her work published but she did so under the name “A Lady”... because as a gentlewoman it was not considered proper for her to use her name or to be involved in a commercial undertaking. 
However while she was pleased to retain anonymity, she was also gratified that her works made her a little money.   Her brother Henry, who had become a banker, had had his bank fail and was in debt and the rest of the family were not that well off.  So she was happy to be able to earn something to give her a small income of her own.
She wrote that she liked praise for her work but she also liked the earning power.   She had 4 of her novels published in her lifetime and they were admired and reasonably popular.  They were Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma and Mansfield Park.  
Mansfield Park was not so well liked as the others, being darker in tone and somewhat “Victorian” and moralistic and did not sell as well as Emma.   The Prince Regent admired her writing and kept copies of her works in all his homes.   Austen was pressured to dedicate Emma to him... which she did not want to do, because she disapproved of “Prinny” and his selfish extravagant and immoral behaviour.

However she agreed to dedicate the book, but then continued with her writing.  Her brother had purchased back the copyright of “Susan” which was the original name for “Northanger Abbey”.  The book had been bought some years earlier by a publisher but had never been published.   Austen had been looking at it, and planned to revise it and have it published but she was short of ready money -due to the family's financial problems.  Many of the Austens had lost money with the collapse of Henry's Bank... And she was beginning to have health problems.
She began to feel unwell in 1816, possibly with Addison’s Disease.  She tried to ignore her growing ill health; she had always made fun of hypochondriacs.. such as Mary Musgrove or Mrs Bennet...
 She was working on what would later be “Persuasion”, but which she called “The Elliots”.   It was her last novel and was much more sentimental and emotional than her earlier works.  Her heroine Anne Elliott, having accepted “prudent” advice about marriage had broken her engagement to Frederick Wentworth.  Then years later, Anne meets him again and they fall in love again.  Austen was increasingly weak and ill, but she continued to write her novel and even revised the ending, because she was not happy with it. She was depressed and ill, when her uncle who was a rich man, died and left all of his fortune to his wife...bypassing Austen and other relations who had hoped for some kind of legacy, she suffered a relapse.

She finished Persuasion in 1816  and began to write another novel.. Sanditon.  In it, she wrote about a spa town for invalids, mocking hypochondria, in spite of her own increasing weakness.  She moved to Winchester to have better medical care... but her illness got worse and she died at the age of 41, in 1817.