Jane Austen is best known as the author of Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park , Emma , Northanger Abbey , and Persuasion . She wrote as many as 3,000 letters during her lifetime, but only 161 survived (the recipient of these letters, her sister Cassandra, burned the majority of them; this was, ostensibly, to stop anyone from reading Jane's "sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbors and family members").