From the fact that this letter was carefully preserved among Jane's correspondence, from the almost exact coincidence of the dates at which the writer was to leave Southampton, &c., and from the fact that a Mr. Seymour was Henry Austen's man of business, there can be no reasonable doubt that the letter refers to one of Jane Austen's works. It need cause no surprise that she should have written under an assumed name, or that she should have got some one else to write for her in view of the secrecy which she long maintained regarding the authorship of her novels. If we assume, then, that the letter concerns one of Jane Austen's novels--which novel is it? At first sight it might naturally seem to be the story called _Lady Susan_, which was published in the second edition of the _Memoir_; but there are two objections to this: one, that so far from making two volumes, _Lady Susan_ could hardly have made more than one very thin volume; secondly, that _Lady Susan_ is generally looked upon as an early and immature production; and Jane's judgment should have been too good to allow her to desire the publication of an inferior work at a time when she had already completed, in one form or another, three such novels as _Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, and _Northanger Abbey_. If, therefore, it was not _Lady Susan_--What was it? We cannot doubt that it was the novel we now know as _Northanger Abbey_. When that book was prepared for the press in 1816, it contained the following 'advertisement' or prefatory note:-- This little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication. It was disposed of to a bookseller,[203] it was even advertised, and why the business proceeded no further, the author has never been able to learn. So far, this accords closely enough with the history of the MS. _Susan_ as related in the letter to Messrs. Crosby. For other details we must go to the _Memoir_,[204] where we read:-- It [_Northanger Abbey_] was sold in 1803 to a publisher in Bath for ten pounds; but it found so little favour in his eyes that he chose to abide by his first loss rather than risk further expense by publishing such a work. . . . But when four novels of steadily increasing success had given the writer some confidence in herself, she wished to recover the copyright of this early work. One of her brothers undertook the negotiation. He found the purchaser very willing to receive back his money and to resign all claim to the copyright.[205]