Austen's "first author cited" words fall mainly into two categories: (1) a few words denoting domestic items, such as door-bell and sponge-cake; (2) a great many words that are regular derivatives of existing English words and therefore not necessarily new at the time of "first use" at all — they are simply word forms that are within the productive vocabulary of any accomplished native speaker and that rise to consciousness when there is a need for them: words like
in-between,
smarten up,
spoilt (as an adjective),
sympathizer, and
unfastidious (all of which make their first appearance in
Emma, which we're reading now). We think it is this class of words that is revealing about Austen as a writer: she didn't so much push the boundaries of English as fill in some of its empty corners in writing, confidently placing the right word in the place where it belonged, even if no one had done it before.