of the courtship. But in the end they were all convinced, and Mr.
Bennet's decisive comment was: "I admire all my three sons-in-law
highly. Wickham, perhaps, is my favourite; but I think I shall like
_your_ husband quite as well as Jane's. If any young men come for Mary
or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure."

* * * * *




Northanger Abbey

"Northanger Abbey" was written in 1798, revised for the press
in 1803, and sold in the same year for £10 to a Bath
bookseller, who held it in such light esteem that, after
allowing it to remain for many years on his shelves, he was
content to sell it back to the novelist's brother, Henry
Austen, for the exact sum which he had paid for it at the
beginning, not knowing that the writer was already the author
of four popular novels. This story--which is, of course, a
skit on the "terror" novel of Mrs. Radcliffe's school--was not
published till after its author's death, when, in 1818, it was
bound up with her last book, "Persuasion."


_I.--A Heroine in the Making_


No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy could have