Jane Austen

Born on December 16, 1775, in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children in the household of a Church of England rector. Her father, George Austen, was a scholar who encouraged reading and writing among his children, and the family's lively domestic life, amateur theatricals, voracious reading, spirited conversation, gave her the raw material for all her fiction. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister Cassandra; neither of them married. Austen began writing as a teenager, producing a substantial body of juvenile work, and completed early versions of her major novels before the age of twenty-two, but she was not published until she was thirty-five. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811, credited only to "A Lady." Pride and Prejudice (1813), her most beloved work, followed, along with Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), dedicated to the Prince Regent at his own request. All were published anonymously. Her novels dissected the marriage market of the English landed gentry with a wit, irony, and moral precision that no predecessor had achieved and few successors have matched. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in 1817. In early 1817 she began to suffer from an illness, now thought to be Addison's disease or Hodgkin's lymphoma, though the evidence remains inconclusive, and moved to Winchester to be closer to her doctor. She died there on July 18, 1817, at the age of forty-one, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.