Born: Dec 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire, England
Died: July 18, 1817, Winchester, Hampshire
Jane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from the 18th-century neo-classicism to the 19th-century romanticism.
Austen was born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector. She was educated at home and never lived apart from her family, in which she was the seventh of eight children. The Austens moved from Steventon in 1801, living thereafter in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family. Some of her youthful efforts, written as early as 1790, were published in Love and Freindship and Other Early Works (1922).
Jane Austen’s six complete adult novels were written in two distinct periods. Those of her first period (1796-1798) took more than 15 years to find a publisher. During this time she wrote Sense and Sensibility (1811), the story of two sisters and their love affairs; Pride and Prejudice (1813), the most popular of her novels, dealing with the five Bennett sisters and their search for suitable husbands; and Northanger Abbey (1818), a satire on the highly popular Gothic romances of the late 18th century.
Austen’s second period of productivity began in 1811 after the publication of Sense and Sensibility. Following 12 disappointing and unproductive years, she produced in quick succession her last three novels: Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). All three deal with the romantic entanglements of their strongly characterized heroines.
Several incomplete works were published long after Austen’s death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), and Plan of a Novel (1926). Her correspondence has also been published (Letters, 1932; revised edition 1952).
The works of Jane Austen, well received from their publication onward, are very different in style from the romanticism favoured by her contemporaries. With trenchant observation and in meticulous detail, she presented the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Her characteristic theme was that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character displayed by the people of her novels are corrected when, through tribulation, lessons are learnt. Even the most minor characters are vividly particularized in Austen’s lucid style. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behaviour, Austen has been regarded by many critics as one of the greatest of all novelists.
