Northanger Abbey /

In 1798, when she was just twenty-three years old, Jane Austen began writing Susan, which was' later retitled Northanger Abbey. Though it was the first of the three fulllength novels that she drafted in the 1790s, it was the last to published. Sense and Sensibility was the first to see print, in 1811, with Pride and Prejudice following soon thereafter, in 1813. These three novels, with which Austenbegan her career, include all of the elements that would come to characterize her writing---romantic plot, social satire, and psychological insight.~While she refined these elements in her later novels, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, the early works represent her initial, and some argue most uninhibited, response to the culture in which she lived. Indeed, it may have been the very boldness of Austen's first novel that kept NorthangerAbbey from being published until after her death.