Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh. Her father ran the local parish school and maintained a good library; she was largely self-educated within that house. From adolescence she wrote parodies, plays, and short fictions — the juvenilia preserved in three manuscript volumes — with a satirical sharpness that never left her. The family removed to Bath in 1801 when her father retired, a dislocation she disliked; he died in 1805, leaving the four women of the household with a reduced income and uncertain prospects. After several years of relative instability — Southampton, brief returns to relations — Austen's brother Edward, who had been adopted by wealthy cousins, offered the family Chawton Cottage in Hampshire in 1809. It was there, at a small table in the common sitting room, that she revised and completed the six novels that have never been out of print. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 (published at her own expense as 'By a Lady'), Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1816. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously in December 1817, four months after her death. The novels work through courtship plots to examine the economic reality of women's lives — inheritance law, the marriage market, the thin line between genteel poverty and destitution — with a precision that gives them the quality of social anthropology. Elizabeth Bennet refuses Mr. Collins with a clarity that shocks him; Anne Elliot waits eight years for a man she was persuaded to reject at nineteen and decides she was wrong to have been persuaded. The famous opening of Pride and Prejudice ('It is a truth universally acknowledged...') announces irony as her primary instrument. Austen's technique — free indirect discourse, the close third person that slides without warning between narrator and character — became the dominant mode of the English novel. She was diagnosed with what was likely Addison's disease in 1816 and died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, aged forty-one, in the house she had rented to be close to her doctor. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Her name did not appear on a novel's title page until 1833.
All Figures
Novelist · Author of Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
1,775 CE – 1,817 CE
The Hampshire clergyman's daughter who wrote six novels in secret and redefined English fiction by placing women's inner lives at the center of the social world.
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