Jane Austen

Jane Austen (Steventon, Hampshire, 1775 – Winchester, 1817) was an English novelist of the Georgian era, and today one of the central figures of English-language fiction. She wrote novels of manners about the country gentry and the landed middle classes of the late eighteenth century. Her irony and realism place her at the threshold between the sentimental novel and the realist fiction of the nineteenth century. She matters because she turned domestic life and marriage into a sharp way of examining social and moral questions, and her precision still draws readers from very different periods.

She was born at the rectory in Steventon, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, served as the local Anglican clergyman. She was the seventh child in a large family of eight siblings, and several of her brothers later went into the army or the navy. That closeness to military life shows up in her later pages. Her sister Cassandra was her closest confidante throughout her life, and their letters, many of which survive, are now the main source for her daily routine. Her formal education was brief and largely domestic, and she learned mostly by reading: her father owned a considerable library, and the family openly admitted to enjoying novels. Among her models were Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, from whom she took the title of Pride and Prejudice.

From a young age she wrote pieces for the amusement of the family, later gathered as her Juvenilia, and around 1795 she began drafting early versions of her novels. Her romantic life was discreet. She had a brief attachment to Thomas Lefroy that came to nothing for financial reasons, and in 1802 she accepted and then withdrew from a marriage proposal the following day. After her father died in 1805, she, her mother and her sister were left in a precarious financial position, depending largely on her brothers. In 1809 they settled at Chawton, in a house offered by her brother Edward, and there she returned to writing with greater regularity.

Publication was slow and largely anonymous. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. These novels enjoyed moderate success and did not bring her public fame during her lifetime. Her style combines precise dialogue, social observation and an irony that exposes the contradictions of her characters without lapsing into sermon. Her recurring themes are the economic weight of marriage, the education of women, the gap between appearance and character, and the morality of good conduct. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously, and she left Sanditon unfinished.

Her reputation grew gradually. After her novels were reissued in 1833, and with the memoir written by her nephew in 1869, they became a regular part of reading life. Today she is regarded as a landmark of English realism, and her influence extends to the novel of manners, the romantic comedy and countless film and television adaptations. That long afterlife explains why her name is linked as much to social criticism as to the pleasure of reading.