Austen, Jane 1775-1817
English novelist

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, the sixth of seven children of a country rector; her father was an able scholar and served as her tutor. She spent the first 25 years of her life in Steventon, and the last eight in nearby Chawton (moving to Winchester just a few months before her death), and did almost all of her writing in those two places. During the intervening years in Bath, which appears to have been an unsettled time in her otherwise ordered and rather uneventful life, her writing was more sporadic, and she abandoned an early novel, The Watsons, following the death of her father in 1805. She never married, although she had a number of suitors, and wrote percipiently on the subjects of courtship and marriage in her novels.

She began to write at an early age to amuse her family. By 1790 she had completed a burlesque on popular fiction in the manner of Samuel Richardson, entitled Love and Friendship, and ridiculed the taste for Gothic fiction in her novel Northanger Abbey, which was written at this time, but not published until 1818.

Her characteristic subject was the closely observed and often ironically depicted morals and mores of country life, which she rendered with genius. Her best-known works in this vein are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and the posthumously published Persuasion (1817). Mansfield Park (1814) is a darker and more serious dissection of her chosen fictional territory, and although never as popular, it is arguably her masterpiece.

Modern research has seen the publication of the fragment of an unfinished novel, Sanditon, which she was writing when she died, and some very early pieces, including Lady Susan, a juvenile work in epistolary form. Her own letters, although carefully filleted by her sister Cassandra after her death, are one of the few revealing documentary sources on her life.

Her greatness has been clearer to subsequent generations than to her own, although Sir Walter Scott praised the delicate observation and fine judgement in her work, which she herself characterized as 'the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour'. If she chose a small canvas for her labours, however, she worked upon it with exquisite understanding.

Bibliography: D Le Faye (ed), Jane Austen's Letters (1995); P Honan, Jane Austen: her life (1987); J R Liddell, The Novels of Jane Austen (1974); E Jenkins, Jane Austen: a biography (1938).