Austen initially sold the novel, then titled Susan, for £10 to a London bookseller, Crosby & Co. in 1803. This publisher did not print the work but held on to the manuscript.[2] Austen reportedly threatened to take her work back from them, but Crosby & Co responded that she would face legal consequences for reclaiming her text.[41] In the spring of 1816, the bookseller sold it back to the novelist's brother, Henry Austen, for the same sum as they had paid for it. There is evidence that Austen further revised the novel in 1816–1817 with the intention of having it published. She rewrote sections, renaming the main character Catherine and using that as her working title.
After her death, Austen's brother Henry gave the novel its final name and arranged for publication of Northanger Abbey in late December 1817 (1818 given on the title page), as the first two volumes of a four-volume set, with a preface for the first time publicly identifying Jane Austen as the author of all her novels. Neither Northanger Abbey nor Persuasion was published under the working title Jane Austen used. Aside from first being published together, the two novels are not connected; later editions were published separately.
