Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England, the seventh child and second daughter out of eight. Her father was a rector and encouraged all his children to acquire an education. At 8, Austen and her older sister Cassandra were sent to a boarding school but returned home after four years since the tuition fee became too expensive for the family. Austen continued to study with her father and siblings and used her father’s extensive library.
From a young age, Austen wrote and played in home productions with her siblings. Her father, who supported his daughters’ creativity and interest in writing, provided them with paper, writing, and drawing tools. By age 12, she wrote stories, verses, and poems and began exploring prose, parody, comedy, and novels. Today known as Juvenilia, this early work had accumulated in three manuscript notebooks titled Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third.
At 19, she wrote her first mature work, an epistolary novella called Lady Susan (which became Northanger Abbey). In the next few years, she continued to develop her writing style with the novels Elinor and Marianne (which became Sense and Sensibility) and First Impressions (which became Pride and Prejudice), which got rejected by a publisher in 1797. Four years later, she sold “Susan” for £10, but the publisher never printed it, and only a year before she died, Austen managed to purchase it back.
In 1801, following her father’s retirement, the family moved to Bath. There, she began to work on the novel The Watsons, which she never completed. The relocation and her father’s death in 1805 affected Austen’s spirit and creativity, and she didn’t write for a decade.
After a few years of moving from one place to another, Austen, her sister, and her mother moved to a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, in 1809. The stability and tranquil environment inspired 34 years old Austen to renew her writing, and in the next six years, she was more productive than ever, revisiting her previous novels and writing new ones. In 1811, she anonymously published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility; the author was referred to as “a lady.” In 1813, Pride and Prejudice was published, followed by Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815.
That same year, she began to work on Persuasion, but by the time she finished, her health had declined from what is considered today as Addison’s Disease. Despite her illness, Austen continued to write, and she worked on a new novel titled Sanditon, which remained unfinished as she became too sick to write. She died at the age of 41.
A few months after her death, her brother published Austen’s last two finished novels – Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. He added a Biographical Notice, revealing her name for the first time as the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma.
Both reviewers and readers praised Austen’s novels for their combination of entertainment and morality. In her writing, she withdrew from the romantic melodrama that was common at the time and created a new style of domestic realism. She emphasized women’s dependence on marriage as the only way to secure economic security and social status. She used humor and wit to portray strong female characters, explore gender relations and women’s individualism, and interpret and criticize the gentry class and country life.
All of Austen’s novels, including the three that were published posthumous and the two that she never completed, became classics worldwide and were adapted into hundreds of movies, TV shows, and plays and were the basis of dozens of sequels, prequels, and interpretations.
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