Dear Sir,—Severe illness has confined me to my bed ever since I received yours of ye 15th. I cannot yet hold a pen, and employ an amanuensis. The politeness and perspicuity of your letter equally claim my earliest exertion. Your official opinion of the merits of Emma is very valuable and satisfactory. Though I venture to differ occasionally from your critique, yet I assure you the quantum of your commendation rather exceeds than falls short of the author's expectation and my own. The terms you offer are so very inferior to what we had expected that I am apprehensive of having made some great error in my arithmetical calculation. On the subject of the expence and profit of publishing you must be much better informed than I am, but documents in my possession appear to prove that the sum offered by you for the copyright of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma is not equal to the money which my sister has actually cleared by one very moderate edition of Mansfield Park;—(you yourself expressed astonishment that so small an edition of such a work should have been sent into the world)—and a still smaller one of Sense and Sensibility.
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Henry questions the price for three copyrights
Jane’s brother Henry handles negotiations with John Murray while she prepares Emma for publication. Too ill to write, he dictates his objection to Murray’s offer for three copyrights together: Emma, Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility. He compares the offer with money already earned, rather than agreeing to sell. This is the surviving passage printed in Life and Letters, placed there during Henry’s illness in October 1815; it has no signature or exact day in that edition. Jane’s own later dealings appear in Getting Emma into print.
The printed source places this dictated passage between Jane’s account of Henry’s illness on 18 October and his relapse on 22 October 1815. It supplies neither a dateline nor a closing. Modern scholarship identifies a surviving draft, conventionally dated 20 or 21 October; this is not an exact date written in the text. See Christine Kenyon Jones, pp. 243–245 and Life and Letters, pp. 309–311.
Extract from Life and Letters (1913), p. 310.