You will notice that wages differed significantly depending on situation: a housemaid would make less than someone who was self-employed because her job would have included room and board. As the numbers make clear, the disparity between servant wages and the means of their employers was vast.
As an advertisement from the 1811 Edinburgh Annual Register shows, Austen's first novel was priced at 15s for all three volumes (see the entry just above Natural History); since a pound contains 20 shillings, this is about 3/4 of a pound. If a housemaid could expect to make 8£ a year, it is unlikely she would be able to buy the novel outright--but she might be able to borrow it from a circulating library. Even a middle class family's income of 100£/year would leave little room for buying novels at this price point. At 15s, S&S is priced relatively normally for a 3 vol. novel; notice that illustrated natural histories could bring substantially more, which poems (which were usually more like pamphlets) might be only 5 or 6s. This suggests that price is more dependent on how much paper, ink and labor were expended in the printing than on the specific content.
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