Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at the rectory in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. She was the seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen, the parish rector, and Cassandra Leigh Austen. The household was busy, bookish, and financially modest: George Austen supplemented his clerical income by farming and by taking in boys as boarding pupils, so Jane grew up surrounded by lessons, sermons, and an extensive family library that she was free to raid ^[1].

Her closest companion from childhood was her only sister, Cassandra, three years her senior. The two were rarely apart for long and later exchanged the letters that provide much of what is known about Jane's daily life. In 1783 the sisters were sent briefly to be tutored in Oxford and then Southampton, where both fell dangerously ill with typhus; Jane nearly died ^[2]. They later attended the Abbey House School in Reading for about eighteen months before returning home in 1786, after which Jane's education continued informally at Steventon through reading, family theatricals, and her father's encouragement.

She began writing early. Between roughly 1787 and 1793 she filled three notebooks with parodies, sketches, and short fiction now known as the Juvenilia, including the exuberant spoof history "The History of England" and the comic tale "Love and Freindship", its title misspelled in her own hand ^[3]. These pieces, written to amuse her family, already mock the sentimental novels of the day and show the ironic voice that would define her mature work.

During the 1790s Austen moved from parody to full-length fiction. She drafted "Elinor and Marianne", an early version of Sense and Sensibility, around 1795, and in 1796 and 1797 wrote "First Impressions", the book that would become Pride and Prejudice. Her father thought well enough of it to offer the manuscript to the London publisher Thomas Cadell in 1797; Cadell declined it sight unseen ^[1]. A third early novel, later revised as Northanger Abbey, followed in 1798 and 1799.

Her first brush with publication was a false start. In 1803 the publisher Benjamin Crosby bought the manuscript then titled "Susan" (the future Northanger Abbey) for ten pounds but never printed it, and the book sat unpublished for years until the family bought it back ^[2]. For anyone asking who was Jane Austen at the turn of the century, the honest answer was: an unpublished clergyman's daughter writing steadily in a Hampshire rectory.

Upheaval interrupted the writing. In 1800 George Austen decided to retire, and in 1801 the family moved to Bath, a fashionable spa city that Jane seems never to have loved. After her father's death in January 1805, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother lived on reduced means, dependent on the Austen brothers, moving between lodgings in Bath, Southampton, and relatives' houses ^[1]. She produced comparatively little finished work in these unsettled years, though she began and abandoned a novel called "The Watsons" around 1804.

Stability returned in 1809, when her brother Edward, who had been adopted by wealthy relatives named Knight, provided the three women and their friend Martha Lloyd with a cottage in the village of Chawton in Hampshire. There, in the last eight years of her life, Austen revised her early manuscripts and wrote her final three novels, working at a small writing table that survives in the house, now the Jane Austen's House museum ^[4].

Publication finally came in 1811, when Sense and Sensibility appeared in three volumes, published on commission at the author's financial risk and credited only to "A Lady". It sold out its first edition and earned Austen a profit of about 140 pounds ^[2]. Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813, attributed to "the Author of Sense and Sensibility"; she had sold the copyright outright to the publisher Thomas Egerton for 110 pounds, so its brisk sales enriched him rather than her ^[1]. The novel's reception was warm, and Austen privately called it "my own darling Child" in a letter to Cassandra ^[5].

Mansfield Park came out in 1814 and sold out within six months. Emma, published in December 1815 by the prominent London house of John Murray, was dedicated, at royal request relayed through the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke, to the Prince Regent himself, an admirer of her work despite Austen's private distaste for him ^[2]. In an unsigned review in the Quarterly Review, Walter Scott praised Emma's author for a new kind of realism, remarking on her skill in rendering ordinary life ^[1].

Any list of Jane Austen achievements must include her technical innovations as much as the six novels themselves. She refined free indirect discourse, the technique of filtering third-person narration through a character's mind, with a subtlety no English novelist had managed before, and she built plots of remarkable economy around courtship, income, and inheritance among the rural gentry ^[3]. Her irony works at every scale, from the famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice to whole characters, such as Emma Woodhouse, whom Austen reportedly expected no one but herself to much like. Total lifetime earnings from her writing amounted to fewer than 700 pounds, a small sum that gives no hint of the canonical status the books would attain ^[2].

Austen never married, and the marriage plots she wrote were shaped by choices she faced herself. In December 1795 and January 1796 she enjoyed a flirtation with Tom Lefroy, a young Irishman visiting relatives near Steventon; her surviving letters mention dancing and sitting with him, but his family, aware that neither party had money, removed him, and he later became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland ^[5]. The episode has been much embroidered by later biographers and filmmakers, though the documentary record is thin.

Her one known proposal of marriage came on December 2, 1802, from Harris Bigg-Wither, the awkward younger brother of family friends and heir to a substantial Hampshire estate. Austen accepted him that evening and withdrew her acceptance the next morning, choosing uncertain dependence over a comfortable establishment with a man she did not love ^[1]. Cassandra later destroyed or censored many of Jane's letters, so the inner history of these decisions is largely lost.

Family anchored her world. Her six brothers ranged from clergymen (James and Henry, the latter also a banker who acted as her literary agent) to naval officers: Francis and Charles both eventually rose to the rank of admiral, and their careers fed the naval detail in Mansfield Park and Persuasion ^[2]. Nieces and nephews remembered a witty, affectionate aunt who told them stories and advised the eldest, Anna and James Edward, on their own attempts at fiction. At home she guarded her authorship closely, and family tradition holds that she wrote in the general sitting room, alert to a creaking door that warned of visitors ^[6].

The Chawton years were Austen's most productive, but they ended abruptly. She completed Persuasion in August 1816 while already unwell, and in January 1817 began a new novel set in a speculative seaside resort, now known as Sanditon, abandoning it after twelve chapters in March as her strength failed ^[1]. Her symptoms included fatigue, fever, skin discoloration, and back pain. Retrospective diagnoses have proposed Addison's disease, first suggested by the physician Zachary Cope in 1964, as well as Hodgkin lymphoma and other conditions, but no diagnosis can be confirmed ^[2].

In May 1817 Cassandra took her to Winchester, sixteen miles away, to be treated by the surgeon Giles King Lyford. The sisters lodged at 8 College Street, near the cathedral. Jane Austen died there in the early hours of July 18, 1817, at the age of 41, with Cassandra beside her ^[1]. She was buried in the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral; the gravestone praises her character and "the extraordinary endowments of her mind" without mentioning that she wrote novels, an omission later corrected by a brass tablet and a memorial window ^[4].

That December her brother Henry arranged the joint publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, prefaced by a "Biographical Notice of the Author" that revealed her name to the public for the first time ^[2]. Her will, leaving nearly everything to Cassandra, was proved in London; her literary estate at death was small, and her fame at that point was smaller still.

Austen's reputation grew slowly, then enormously. Her novels sold modestly for decades until her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869, which introduced her to a wide Victorian readership and prompted the first popular editions of her work ^[6]. Serious critical standing followed: R. W. Chapman's scholarly edition of the novels in 1923 was among the first such treatments of any English novelist, and twentieth-century critics from F. R. Leavis onward placed her at the head of the great tradition of English fiction ^[3]. Devoted readers acquired a nickname, "Janeites", a term popularized after George Saintsbury used it in an 1894 preface and Rudyard Kipling built a 1924 short story around it.

Her cultural presence now extends far beyond the page. Screen adaptations arrive steadily, from the 1940 Hollywood Pride and Prejudice to the BBC's 1995 serial and the 1996 film of Emma, alongside reworkings such as Clueless (1995) and Bridget Jones's Diary ^[2]. The Jane Austen Society of North America counts thousands of members, Chawton cottage and the Jane Austen Centre in Bath draw visitors from around the world, and in 2017 the Bank of England placed her portrait on the ten pound note, marking the bicentenary of her death ^[7].

Among the most striking Jane Austen facts is the scale of the mismatch between her lifetime obscurity and her present standing: a writer who published six novels anonymously and earned under 700 pounds is now translated into dozens of languages, taught on every continent, and reread for pleasure as much as for study. Any Jane Austen biography ends with the same observation her admirers keep making: the books, built from three or four families in a country village, as she once described her ideal material to a niece, still feel current because they examine vanity, money, self-deception, and love with an exactness that has not dated ^[5].