She refused, retaining the rights to Emma, financing the book’s publication at her own expense, and according Murray a ten percent commission for his trouble. From Jane’s letters that fall we know Murray tried to take advantage of her-offering to buy Emma’s copyright only if she sold him the rights to her backlist as well.
And in a poor economy, people were less likely to spend their pence on books. Jane’s previous book, Mansfield Park, hadn’t equaled her early success with Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. He was accustomed to putting out books by sweeping British male authors-Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott being two horses in his stable. She was proofing the typeset pages of her fourth novel, Emma, which was published by John Murray two hundred years ago. Although she was concerned about Henry’s health and that of his bank, Jane was really in London for entirely personal reasons during November and December of 1815. Runs on all three branches of his bank ruined him by the turn of the year, and he was declared a bankrupt.Ģ3 Hans Place, by Laurel Ann Nattress, I’m filling in this backstory for two reasons: It’s the basis of my thirteenth Jane Austen mystery novel, Jane and the Waterloo Map (Soho Crime, February 2, 2016), but it’s also important to understanding, I think, so much of Jane Austen’s work. Henry Austen was a banker and a militia payroll agent.
Wellington had narrowly won the Battle of Waterloo six months before, at enormous human cost to both the Allied and the French forces, but as a result of Napoleon’s fall and the end of hostilities on the Continent and in America, tens of thousands of military men returned to England in want of jobs. He’d lost his wife a few years earlier, and now, as Jane celebrated her fortieth birthday, they were two middle-aged siblings supporting each other through the wretched autumn of 1815. She was there in part because Henry was ailing, and he was her favorite brother. Two hundred years ago this past Christmas, Jane Austen was staying with her brother Henry at his house in Hans Place, London-not far from the present-day Harrods.
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