Jane Austen's First Publication: Sophia Sentiment Revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACTJane Austen's first publication was, the author believes, a letter signed Sophia Sentiment, which appeared in March 1789 in the ninth issue of the Oxford periodical The Loiterer, edited by her elder brother James. In the author’s edition of Austen's juvenilia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, he considered, with due caution, the arguments for and against ascribing this letter to Austen. In the present essay, he takes a less diffident approach, outlining how Austen came to write a short but characteristically witty and irreverent piece that would be her first appearance in print. Sophia Sentiment's three-paragraph letter is a teasing reproach to “the Author of the Loiterer” for having produced a journal that neglects women's interests. Austen creates a parody of the voracious but indiscriminate female reader. Sophia Sentiment is, she boasts, a “great reader” who has got through “some hundred volumes of Novels and Plays”, as well as “all the entertaining papers of our most celebrated periodical writers”. The ninth issue of The Loiterer was the first to be sold by booksellers in Bath and Reading, as well as Oxford, London and Birmingham, giving Jane Austen, if she was indeed “Sophia Sentiment”, her print debut in five English towns.