The Date of First Composition of Elinor & Marianne

As a followup to my recent post about Jane Austen

tracking the six-month time frame of the transition

of her own real life exile from Steventon to Bath 

from November, 1800 to May, 1801, in the six month

time frame of the transition of Marianne Dashwood's

 fictional exile from Norland to Barton Cottage.... 

 http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/half-years-residence-in-her-family.html ...

I have had an interesting off-shoot discussion with 

one of the commenters at my blog (who goes by the

 moniker "Lit-Lass") about the timing of the composition

 of Sense & Sensibility, which I thought was worth its

own blog post.  

Lit-Lass wrote: "According to my notes from Tomalin's

 bio and Joan K. Ray's timeline [JA] wrote [Elinor &

 Marianne] in 1795 and Cassandra remembered it read

 to the family by '76. Of course she did a great deal of 

revising later. ] 

I then replied as follows: "...our discussion here has led

 me to an intriguing new hypothesis, i.e., that perhaps

 Cassandra was being less than honest when she reported

 those dates of earliest writing of E&M---we have

 independent third party verification of early drafts

 of P&P and Northanger Abbey (Susan, but we only

 have Cassandra's word for the early version of E&M. 

And why would Cassandra want the world to think 

that S&S was first written in the 1790's? Because then

 nobody would think that the "Massacre of Steventon"

 in 1800-1801 was being depicted!"  

Am I correct in my recollection that Cassandra's 

recollection, long after JA's death, is the only basis

 for the pre-1800 composition of S&S in epistolary

 form under title "Elinor & Marianne"?  

When you think about it, if JA really did write Elinor

 & Marianne in 1796, why didn't Revd. Austen submit

 it, along with P&P, for publication in 1798? Why was 

Elinor & Marianne kept on the shelf, never mentioned

 in any of JA's many surviving letters from 1796-1800?

 Why are there so many echoes of P&P and NA in JA's

 1796-1799 letters, but no echoes of S&S that I can recall

 in those same early surviving letters? There's something

 fishy about it all, and realizing how closely the events of 

1800-1801 are tracked in the first Volume of S&S makes

 me wonder if CEA was being a politician when she

"recollected" Elinor & Marianne's early composition, 

as a way of deflecting attention by James Austen's children

 to the disturbing innuendo of the first volume of S&S vis

 a vis James &Mary Austen.  

Cheers, ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter