Jane Austen’s remarks about her contemporaries Mary Brunton and Jane West are characteristically double-edged, and in both cases tinged with admiration and professional jealousy. Self Control, not Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, was, as Anthony Mandal reminds us, the runaway success of 1811, while ‘good Mrs. West’s’ Letters to a Young Lady, published in the same year, immediately went through four editions in 1811 alone. In the competitive literary marketplace of the 1810s, Austen’s success was much more modest. Perhaps the more overtly didactic work of West and Brunton had a more immediate and obvious appeal to the readership; perhaps their publishers simply did a better job at marketing their works. In West’s case, of course, she was already a known name by 1811, in the genres of both conduct literature and the novel, and that, in itself, might have been enough to guarantee greater success than could be expected for the debut novel of an anonymous Hampshire lady. But the key point to note is that all three writers were competing for a share of the same market and readership, and that they were benefiting from a particular kind of anti-Jacobin public feeling that, by the 1810s, had come to associate sensibility and emotional freedom with the French Revolution and its terrifying aftermath, and reason, sense and emotional regulation with its opposition.