This innovative new study re-examines the origins of Jane Austen's early fiction beginning in the 1790s and offers a reappraisal of Jane Austen and the development of her fictional heroines. This study focuses on the immediate predecessors of Jane Austen such as Charlotte Smith and others who were involved in recasting women's roles in English literature. While Austen's later artistic career consisted of refining and perfecting the models developed of her juvenile fiction, her early attempts to create a prototype that would give voice to her novelistic creativity is examined in Magee's new research. Since her prototypical heroine controls both her artistic and her thematic portraits of her mature heroines, this study will be of great interest to all involved in Austen research as well as the development of the English novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.