Author · 2 works
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of the eight children of the rector George Austen and Cassandra Leigh. She grew up among her father's books and the novels read aloud in the evenings. The short burlesques she wrote as a girl to amuse the family were her first attempts; her sister Cassandra remained her closest confidante for life.
In her twenties she wrote the first version of what would become Pride and Prejudice; the manuscript her father offered to a publisher was refused unread. In 1801 the family moved to Bath. A year later she accepted an evening proposal of marriage from a wealthy man she had known for years and withdrew her consent the next morning. Her father's death in 1805 left her, her mother and her sister dependent on the support of relatives.
In 1809 her brother Edward opened a house at Chawton to them, and steady work became possible at last. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, credited only to “A Lady” and printed at her own expense. Pride and Prejudice followed two years later, then Mansfield Park. Emma, published at the end of 1815, was dedicated to the Prince Regent; Walter Scott praised it in an unsigned review.
She wrote the narrow world of country houses with an irony that slips into her characters' minds, turning the novel away from extraordinary events and towards the observation of daily life. Her name never appeared on any of her books in her lifetime. When the illness that began in 1816 worsened she went to Winchester for treatment and died there on 18 July 1817, aged forty-one; she was buried in the cathedral. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey came out after her death, her name disclosed at last.
Austen wrote in an England shadowed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; two of her brothers served in the navy. It was the age of rising Romantic poetry, of Gothic terror and novels of sentiment. She kept outside those fashions and chose a realism trained on the marriages, inheritances and landholdings of the country gentry. A woman's claim to the pen and to property was still disputed, and she published her books without her name.
