ism—she is miserably afraid the bad weather will keep her indoors. "The storm was so violent," we are told, "that Augusta often feared she could not go out at the appointed time. Frequently did she throw up the sash, and view with anxious looks the convulsed elements. At half past five the weather cleared, and Augusta felt a fearful joy."
It might have been supposed that the gay, good-humored satire of "Northanger Abbey" would have laughed these tragic absurdities from the land. But Miss Austen alone, of all the great novelists of England, won less than her due share of profit and renown. Her sisters in the field were loaded down with honors. When the excellent Mrs. Opie became a Friend, and refused to write any more fiction, except, indeed, those moral but unlikely tales about the awful consequences of lying, her contemporaries spoke gravely of the genius she had sacrificed at the shrine of religion. Charlotte Bronté's masterpiece gained instant recognition throughout the length and breadth of England. Of George Eliot's sustained success there is no need to speak. But Jane Austen, whose incomparable art is now the
