One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading. _Northanger Abbey_ was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the bulk of _Pride and Prejudice_ (which some hold to be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as _Northanger Abbey_. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of _Camilla_ (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote _Evelina_ was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day. The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high compliment--a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic "Janites" have ventured--inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"