Jane Austen

Life

Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, where her father was the rector. She was the seventh of eight children in a close, bookish family; her brothers went into the church, the navy, and banking, and her sister Cassandra remained her lifelong companion. Austen was educated mostly at home and began writing comic pieces for her family as a teenager. Early versions of what became Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey were drafted in the late 1790s.

In 1801 her father retired and the family moved to Bath, a period in which she wrote little. After his death in 1805 she, her mother, and Cassandra lived in reduced circumstances until 1809, when her brother Edward provided them with a cottage at Chawton in Hampshire. There she revised her early manuscripts and wrote her later novels. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815, all published anonymously, the first as “By a Lady” and the rest as by the author of the preceding book.

She fell ill in 1816 and died in Winchester in July 1817, aged forty-one. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together at the end of that year, with a note by her brother Henry that revealed her name to the public for the first time.

Literary significance

Austen’s six novels are set among the landed gentry of southern England and concern courtship, money, and the small moral decisions of daily life. Their reputation rests on the precision of her irony, the control of her plots, and her development of free indirect style, a technique for presenting a character’s thoughts within the narrator’s voice that later novelists adopted widely. She was respected but not famous in her lifetime; her standing grew through the nineteenth century, and she is now among the most read and most adapted English novelists.

Where to start

Emma is her most technically accomplished novel and a good choice for readers who already know Pride and Prejudice. Those new to Austen may prefer the shorter and faster Pride and Prejudice.