Austen, Jane

Austen, Jane (1775–1817), born in the rectory at Steventon, Hampshire, of which her father was rector. She was the sixth child in a family of seven. Her life is notable for its lack of events; she did not marry, although she had several suitors. Any references there may have been to private intimacies or griefs were excised from Jane's letters by her sister Cassandra, after Jane's death, but the letters retain flashes of sharp wit and occasional coarseness that have startled some of her admirers. Her correspondents include Cassandra, her friend Martha Lloyd, and her nieces and nephews, to whom she confided her views on the novel (to Anna Austen, 9 Sept. 1814), ‘3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’. In 1801 the family moved to Bath, in 1806, after Mr Austen's death, to Southampton, and in 1809 to Chawton, again in Hampshire; for a few weeks before her death Jane lodged in Winchester, where she died of Addison's disease. The novels were written between the activities of family life, and the last three (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion) are known to have been written in the busy family parlour at Chawton.

The Juvenilia, Love and Friendship, A History of England, A Collection of Letters, and Lesley Castle, were written in her early teens and they are already incisive and elegantly expressed. Lady Susan is also an early work. Of the major novels, Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, Emma in 1816, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion posthumously in 1818. They were, however, begun or completed in a different order. The youthful sketch Elinor and Marianne (1795–6) was in 1797–8 re-written as Sense and Sensibility; it was followed in 1797 by First Impressions which was later re-created and renamed Pride and Prejudice. Northanger Abbey, written in 1798–9, was in 1803 sold to the publishers Crosby and Sons for £10 but not published until 1818. Her unfinished novel The Watsons, probably begun in 1804, was abandoned in 1805, on her father's death. Mansfield Park was begun at Chawton in 1811, Emma in 1814, Persuasion in 1815; and in 1817, the year of her death, the unfinished Sanditon.

The novels were generally well received; the prince regent kept a set of them in each of his residences, and Sir W. Scott praised her work in the Quarterly Review in 1815; he later wrote of ‘that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting’. There were, however, dissentient voices; C. Brontë and E. B. Browning found her limited, and it was not until the publication of J. E. Austen Leigh's Memoir in 1870 that a Jane Austen cult began to develop. There are biographies by C. Tomalin and David Nokes, both 1997.