Any discussion of the publishing history of Jane Austen's novels after the writer's death in 1817 must, paradoxically, start with foreign publications issued in her lifetime but apparently unknown to her, since it is with these that we see the development of her wider fame, beginning, perhaps surprisingly, in Geneva.

Pride and Prejudice was first published at the end of January 1813, and a series of connected extracts from this novel in French translation appeared in the issues for July, August, September and October of the Swiss monthly periodical Bibliothèque britannique, published in Geneva, these extracts being the first appearance of any part of Jane Austen's text in a language other than English. Similar extracts from Mansfield Park in French translation appeared in four issues of the same periodical between April and July 1815, while in November 1815 the first complete French translation of Sense and Sensibility was issued in Paris in four volumes by Arthus Bertrand under the title Raison et Sensibilité, ou Les Deux Manières d’Aimer, the text being adapted by Isabelle de Montolieu. In June 1816 a French version of Emma by an unnamed translator was published in Paris by Arthus Bertrand & Cogez, entitled La Nouvelle Emma, ou Les Caractères Anglais du Siècle, also in four volumes, and in September 1816 the first French translation of Mansfield Park appeared in Paris from J. G. Dentu, still in four volumes, the translator being Henri Vilmain and the title Le Parc de Mansfield, ou Les Trois Cousines; also in 1816 the first American edition of Emma was published in two volumes by Mathew Carey of Philadelphia. About half of the first French version of Emma was reissued in the following year, 1817, in Vienna, with the addition of a hasty conclusion. All early translations and American editions must be assumed to have been issued without the knowledge or authority of the novelist or her heirs, since no family reference to them has been traced.