Jane Austen During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish "Sense and Sensibility", which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except "Pride and Prejudice", was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to
Jane Austen The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. The first examination came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley. In his essay, Bradley groups Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic books devoted to Austen in France was "Jane Austen" by Paul and Kate Rague published in 1914, where the Ragues set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published "Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres",