Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose six completed novels, written in rural Hampshire and in Bath in the decades around 1800, turned the daily lives of the country gentry into some of the most admired fiction in the language. Her books follow young women for whom marriage decided both social standing and financial security, and they are prized for their irony, sharp dialogue and close observation. She published anonymously and won only modest success while alive, but her novels have hardly ever been out of print since the 1830s.

Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, where her father, George Austen, was rector of Steventon and the neighbouring parish of Deane. She grew up in a crowded, lively household with several brothers and an elder sister, Cassandra, who became her closest companion for life.

Apart from short spells with a tutor and at a boarding school in Reading in the mid-1780s, she was educated at home, reading widely in her father's library and joining in family theatricals staged in the rectory barn.

From about the age of eleven she wrote comic stories, plays and parodies to entertain her family, copying them into three notebooks now known as the Juvenilia. In her late teens she produced the short novel in letters Lady Susan, and between 1795 and 1799 she drafted early versions of what would become Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. A London firm turned down First Impressions, the future Pride and Prejudice, by return of post in 1797, and another bought Susan, the future Northanger Abbey, for £10 in 1803 and then failed to print it.

She never married. A flirtation with a young Irishman, Tom Lefroy, ended when his family sent him away in early 1796, and her only known proposal, from Harris Bigg-Wither in December 1802, she accepted and then withdrew the next morning. Her cousin Eliza, whose husband was guillotined in the French Revolution, left her with a lasting horror of it.

At the end of 1800 her father decided to retire and move the family to Bath, where she wrote comparatively little; biographers disagree over whether this reflected unhappiness or simply a busier social life. After her father died in January 1805, the women depended on her brothers and moved between rented homes, including Southampton. In July 1809 her wealthy brother Edward gave them a cottage on his estate at Chawton in Hampshire, and the quieter life there allowed her to revise and finish her work.

Sense and Sensibility appeared in October 1811, credited only to "a Lady", and earned her £140. Pride and Prejudice followed in January 1813, Mansfield Park in May 1814 and Emma in December 1815, all published in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars. Emma was dedicated, reluctantly, to the Prince Regent, an admirer.

She moved away from the sentimental and Gothic fiction of her day, which she mocked in Northanger Abbey, towards a realism of manners, and she was the first English novelist to use free indirect speech extensively, letting a character's thoughts colour the narration while the narrator kept control.

From 1816 her health declined, from an illness later diagnosed by some as Addison's disease and by others as Hodgkin's lymphoma. She finished Persuasion and began Sanditon, but in May 1817 she was taken to Winchester for treatment and died there on 18 July 1817, aged 41. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Persuasion and Northanger Abbey came out together at the end of 1817, with a note by Henry that named her as the author for the first time. A collected edition in 1833 began her steady rise, and her novels later became staples of criticism, film and television. Critics have placed her apart from the sentimental writers and the Romantic novelists of her time, in a line running back to Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Our 1800 and 1815 maps show Britain in her lifetime, the country now called the United Kingdom; her publishers worked in London.