About Jane

Portrait of Jane Austen
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, the seventh of the eight children born to George and Cassandra Austen, and the second of only two girls; her sister Cassandra, to whom she was very close, being two years older. Jane, like Elizabeth Bennet, was a gentleman’s daughter. Her father was the Rector of Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, and her mother a member of the Leigh family, which had both intellectual and aristocratic connections. Jane had little formal schooling but her family was a literate and a literary one, and Jane read widely within her father’s extensive library. It was at Steventon that she began her writing life, from an early age penning the many pieces now collected as her Juvenilia, then writing the early drafts of three of her novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

Cawton Cottage
In the last year of her life Jane became ill with what is now thought to be Addison’s Disease, or perhaps a type of cancer, and in May 1817, accompanied by Cassandra, she travelled to Winchester for medical treatment. She died in the early hours of Friday, 18 July 1817 and is buried in the cathedral at Winchester, where her gravestone carries no mention of her works.
Only four of Austen’s novels were published during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously at the end of 1817, by her brother Henry Austen (who also chose the names by which we know them). For this publication Henry wrote a ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, which was the first formal announcement of Austen’s authorship. Austen also left two earlier compositions: a novella called Lady Susan, and a novel that she did not complete, The Watsons. It was written in 1804 and is the only literary record of the years between Steventon and Chawton, a period in which Austen appears to have written little or nothing else. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, of which 12 chapters survive.