reader) was in its first shape written very early, somewhere about 1796,

when Miss Austen was barely twenty-one; though it was revised and

finished at Chawton some fifteen years later, and was not published till

1813, only four years before her death. I do not know whether, in{xi} this

combination of the fresh and vigorous projection of youth, and the

critical revision of middle life, there may be traced the distinct

superiority in point of construction, which, as it seems to me, it

possesses over all the others. The plot, though not elaborate, is almost

regular enough for Fielding; hardly a character, hardly an incident

could be retrenched without loss to the story. The elopement of Lydia

and Wickham is not, like that of Crawford and Mrs. Rushworth, a coup de

théâtre; it connects itself in the strictest way with the course of the

story earlier, and brings about the denouement with complete propriety.

All the minor passages—the loves of Jane and Bingley, the advent of Mr.

Collins, the visit to Hunsford, the Derbyshire tour—fit in after the

same unostentatious, but masterly fashion. There is no attempt at the

hide-and-seek, in-and-out business, which in the transactions between

Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax contributes no doubt a good deal to the

intrigue of Emma, but contributes it in a fashion which I do not think

the best feature of that otherwise admirable book. Although Miss Austen

always liked something of the misunderstanding kind, which afforded her

opportunities for the display of the peculiar and incomparable talent to

be noticed presently, she has been satisfied here with the perfectly

natural occasions provided by the false account of Darcy’s conduct given

by Wickham, and by the awkwardness (arising with equal naturalness) from

the gradual transformation of Elizabeth’s own feelings from positive

aversion to actual love. I do not know whether the all-grasping hand of