Read Jane Austen

Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, the second youngest of eight children of George Austen, a well-to-do local rector, and his wife. Jane was mostly tutored at home, although she and her beloved sister Cassandra were sent away briefly to boarding schools – which they did not enjoy. As a young woman she enjoyed walking in the countryside, dancing and going to balls – pursuits favoured by many of her heroines. The Austens were a keen literary family; Jane was a voracious reader who wrote from an early age, with much encouragement from her father. She was close to all her siblings, in particular her sister. That closeness was increased when Cassandra’s fiance Tom died in the West Indies in 1798. When she was twenty-six, Jane’s father retired, her oldest brother James took over his parish, and Jane moved from Steventon to Bath with her parents and sister. The death of her father in 1805 caused financial difficulties for his widow, which meant that she, Jane and Cassandra had to leave Bath. They spent the next few years on the move, never really settling anywhere, and it is not quite clear why Jane’s brothers – especially Edward, who was by then a wealthy landowner – did not provide more satisfactorily for their mother and sisters.

However, after four years, Edward offered them a house on his estate in Chawton, where Jane lived happily for the last years of her life. Neither she nor Cassandra ever married, although Jane had several flirtations, most notably around 1796, with a young Irishman, Tom Lefroy. It is thought their elders did not approve of the match, and he was sent away. Many years later, he admitted he had been in love with her. In 1802, when she was staying with old family friends, Jane accepted a proposal from the son and heir, only to change her mind the next morning because she did not love him. Both she and her sister were, however, devoted aunts to their brothers’ many offspring.

In the late 1790s, Jane had written or begun three novels, but finally at home in the tiny parlour at Chawton she redrafted Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice and completed Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, which was written as her health failed her. She moved to Winchester for treatment, but died of tubercular disease of the kidneys in July 1817, aged 41, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. She died before finishing her seventh novel, Sanditon. Her works were read and celebrated in her own time though she was published anonymously; the Prince Regent even requested that she dedicate Emma to him. Sir Walter Scott wrote of her after her death: ‘That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with’. But the Victorian passion for the Gothic and dramatic meant that the romance, sharp humour and delicate beauty of Jane Austen’s novels fell out of favour for several years. The small canvas on which she worked was not in fashion – people wanted high drama and the extraordinary, not the ordinary rendered magical. In the late 1870s however, the publication of her nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s affectionate Memoir of his aunt enjoyed considerable success, leading to a revival in her popularity which has continued today. Jane Austen wrote six novels, four of which were published in her lifetime. A span of six years saw the publication of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817). These last two novels were published posthumously, with a brief note by Henry Austen about his beloved sister, making her authorship public for the first time. As he wrote, ‘she never uttered either a hasty, a silly, or a severe expression. In short, her temper was as polished as her wit.’