The book was Sense and Sensibility, and the pseudonymous author, of course, was Jane Austen, making her publishing debut. Austen had spent more than a decade working on a collection of manuscripts that she was now, seemingly all at once, polishing into impressive final forms. Sense and Sensibility initiated a remarkable five-year run of publishing, arguably unmatched in the history of modern literature, that saw Austen soon after also release Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and then finally, in 1815, Emma. Two years later, she died, all of only forty-one years old.
