Here is what The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen says about women and writing (which does agree with Henry's estimation) which I found not to be packed after all! Not every book is packed, I still have stragglers :-B. I've edited this to shorten it as much as possible (and for Copyright infringement reasons :-b). Caroline, as a reminder, I posted this in the Library ages ago. So I don't know if you would want to keep it here? Here you go:

'You will be glad to hear that every Copy of Sense & Sensibility is sold and that it has brought me 140 pounds besides the copyright, if that --- ever be of any value. I have now therefore written myself into 250 pounds - which only makes me long for more.' Jane Austen to her brother Frank, 1813.

Austen's professionalism here exists in startling contrast to her brother Henry's earliest bio accounts of her, accounts that helped to create the longstanding myth of Austen as a genteel amatuer, the spinster lady author who sketched her novels in moments of leisure. Henry's wish to project an image of a ladylike, unmercenary, unprofessional, private, delicate, and domestic author also led him to add to memoirs which were printed in Richard Bentley's edition of Sense & Sensibility, that Austen refused to meet the writer Germaine de Stael, so as to emphasize Austen's ladylike distain for publicity. (which we know this not to be true. Can anyone remember the reason why?).

This distaste did not make her less professional, however. During ptrobably the same visit to London, Sept. 1814, in which she avoided Madame de Stael, she kept a careful eye to business: she was 'in some hope fo getting Egerton's account (for MP.) before I go away - so we will enjoy ouselves as long as we can.'

The imagine that Henry creates - at odds with the evidence that both Austen's letters and her publishing decisions offer of her professionalism - is precisely that one that annoyed Henry James, according to Brian Southam: 'the myth of the inspired amatuer, the homely spinster who put down her knitting needles to take up her pen.' That myth and others like it, have prevented subsequent readers from understadning that, for Austen, being a professional writer was, apart from her family, more important to her than anything else in her life.

ULTURAL OBSTACLES TO AUTHORSHIP
Publishing her own writing could threaten a woman's reputation as well as her social position. For any woman, the faem of authorship could become infamy, and the novels particularly reprehensible, as their famous defence in NA indicated (37-8). Proper women, as henry Austen makes clear, were modest, retiring, essentially domestic and private. Authorship of any kind entailed publicity, thrusting oneself before the public eye - thus loss of femininity. These prejudices led many women besides Austen to publish their first novels annonymously, among them Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliff; they afixed their names to their works only when their excellent reputation as novelists were established. And writing for profit - professional writing - could be even more disreputeable than writing for fame: Henry Austen, in 1818, take care to assert that at first Austen hoped for neither fame nor profit.

Before Austen's birth in 1775, literature had become firmly fixed in the marketplace, to the dismay of many. Alvin Kernan has succinctly summarized the change, 'An older system of polite & courtly letters - primarily oral, aristocratic, amatuer, authoritarian, court-centered - was swept away at this time and gradually replaced by a new print-based, market-centered, democratic literary system.' The public replace the patron as a source of income. But the older aristocratic attitudes that saw print and payment as vulgar were surprisingly persistent among elite women and some men. Most male writers,. however, were happy to be payed for their writing, and once they established themselves in this new literary marketplace, as reveiwers, essayists, and so forth, with few exceptions they tended to discourage competition from women writers. They transferred ( with renewed energy) much of the old aristocratic distain for all print to hack writers - the male denizens of Grub Street - and to women who wrote. Women were attacked for having the temerity to to write without having the necessary learning and taste. Only desperate financial need, preferably to support aged parents, a sick husband, or desitute children could excuse a woman's exposing herself in print to obtain money. Accordingly, women's prefaces often apologized for writing by alluding to distresss of this sort, causing reveiwers to condescend kindly to their work.

A woman might also face legal obstacles if she were married as married women had no legal existence. They could not own property or sign contacts. These women must have a husband sign for them (or some alias being as the husband might refuse or perhaps the husband is unavailable - dissertion, etc.) Unmarried women did not face these restrictions but they lived under the rule of their fathers' authority, and father's (like Frances Burney) might tend to disapprove of their daughters risking their modesty, their reputations, and possibly their marriagability by publishing. By contrast, Austen's father tried to help her publish early P&P (FI), writing to a possible publisher himself.