Born: Steventon, Hampshire, England
Date: December 16,1775 
Died: Winchester, England 
Date: July 18, 1817 

Principal Works

NOVELS: Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Mansfeld Park, 1814; Emma, 1815 (dated 1816); Persuasion, together with Northanger Abbey 1818.
 

The seventh of eight children of a rural clergyman respected for his learning and literary taste, Jane Austen was born at Steventon, Hampshire, on December 16, 1775, was the second daughter in a vigorous, able, and affectionate family. Two of her brothers followed their father to Oxford and into the Church, and two others rose to be admirals in the Navy. Except for brief schooling in Oxford Southampton, and Reading, which ended at the age of nine, she was educated at home, where she learned French, a smattering of Italian, some history and, in addition to Shakespeare and Milton, gained a thorough acquaintance with the essayists, novelists, and poets of the eighteenth century.

Always somewhat shy but lively and witty, Jane Austen developed into a young lady of cultivated manners and pleasing appearance, who at balls and assemblies enjoyed her share of masculine attention. A brief but genuine romance with a young man whose identity is uncertain ended suddenly with his death. When she was nearly twenty-seven, she accepted, and the next day rejected, the proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither, a friend of long standing, whom she realized she did not love.

Aside from writing, Jane Austen devoted her life to domestic duties and household affections, and especially to being the companion and confidante of numerous nieces and nephews, who found her unfailingly kind, sympathetic and amusing.

Having spent the first twenty five years of her life in the rectory at Steventon, she removed in 1801, upon her father's retirement, with her parents and sister Cassandra to Bath. After her father's death in 1805 and a sojourn of three years in Southampton, she settled with her mother and sister in a cottage belonging to her brother Edward at Chawton, Hampshire, where she resided until two months before her death. Here, working mainly in the general sitting room, she composed the final drafts of all her major works, hurriedly slipping the srnall sheets under the blotting paper if a visitor or servant appeared. In 1816 her health began to fail; and in May, 1817, she and Cassandra moved to Winchester for adequate medical attention. Despite weakness and pain, she remained cheerful to the end. Dying peacefully on July l8, 1817, aged forty-one, she was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Jane Austen's novels, the first published when she was thirty-five and followed by five others in as many years, were the final fruits of an early and painstaking apprenticeship to literature. Three srnall volumes of juvenilia, Volume the First (1933), Love and Friendship (1922), and Volume the Third (1951), written by the time she was eighteen years old and bearing witness to her youthful talent for mimicry and burlesque, also contain her first serious piece, "Catharine, or the Bower," probably a literary ancestor of Northanger Abbey. Her first completed novel, First Impressions (the lost original of Pride and Prejudice) begun in October, 1796, and finished in August, 1797, her father offered to a publisher without success. In November, 1797, she started Sense and Sensibility and in that year and the next wrote Northanger Abbey, a revised Version of which, entitled Susan, she sold in 1803 for ten pounds to the publisher Crosby, who advertised but failed to publish it; finally retrieved in 1816, an amended text appeared posthumously in 1818. The Watsons (1871, 1927), a fragmentary progenitor of Emma, and Lady Susan (1871, 1925), a biting epistolary satire, probably the gem of Mansfeld Park, have survived in manuscripts written on paper watermarked 1803 and 1805 respectively. Extensively revised or rewritten in 1809-1811, Sense and Sensibility was published on October 31, 1811. Favourably received, the edition sold out in less than two years and brought its author one hundred forty pounds. Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813, Mansfeld Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815 (dated 1816). Persuasion was issued with Northanger Abbey in 1818, and by that date Sense and Sensibility and Mansfeld Park had reached a second edition, Pride and Prejudice a third. She was engaged upon the rough draft of the early chapters of a new novel, Sanditon (1925), only a few weeks before she died.

Far ahead of her time in the techniques of narration, especially in the control of point of view, Jane Austen, through her fidelity to life, her delineation of character, and her ironic insight, produced sophisticated comedy unsurpassed in the English novel: Entertainment, however; was not her sole concern. Primarily a moral writer striving to establish criteria of sound judgement and right conduct in human relationships, she includes the related virtues of self-awareness and unselfishness.

Northanger Abbey, the earliest of the major novels in chronological order of composition, while revealing its kinship to the juvenilia by depending for much of its humor upon burlesque of the Gothic novel, offers much more than mere parody. The educator of its callow heroine, Catherine Morland, by examples of the discrepancy beetween appearance and reality, typifies Jane Austen's method and illustrates her penchant for proportion and symmetry in both literature and life. Although Sense and Sensibility also contains an element of literary satire -upon the current novel of feeling- it is essentially a paradigm of the proper balance beetween self-control and emotion. Pride and Prejudice the most scintillating of her novels and long the popular favorite among them, provides in Elisabeth Bennet one of the most delightful heroines of fiction. She and Darcy eventually overcome first impressions (note the original title) distorted on both sides by pride and prejudice. With its high proportion of dialogue and wit the ironic commentary shifted from the author to a character within the story. (Mr. Bennet), this book represents the apex of her dramatic act. Convinced that Pride and Prejudice was too playfu, she tended to the opposite extreme with Mansfeld Park, where her irony is chastened and her censure of wordly values borders on didacticism. Emma, Jane Austen's rnasterpiece and profoundest moral comedy, is a study in the self-delusions of vanity. Unified in time (a cycle of one year) and place (Highbury and its environs), the beautifully concentric action revolves, as the title implies, around a dominant heroine, who, having every advantage in life, is a victim only of herself. Per suasion more patently infused with emotion than is customary with Jane Austen, but saved from sentimentality by the full play of her wit, examines, through the person of Anne Elliot, aged twenty-seven, the author's only mature heroine, the confincing claims of prudence and true love.

Jane Austen's style -unadorned, concise, flexible, and animated- is the ideal instrument for her art. Her dialogue, without resort to slang or obvious tags, shows a precise ear for individual and revealing rhythms of speech. Her ironic and technical skill have established her reputation with modern critics, but the deftness with which she pleases and instructs has endeared her works to generations of readers.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES: The definitive edition is The Novels of Jane Austen, edited by R. W. Chapman, 5 vols., 1933 (3rd ed.), with a sixth volume added in 1954. The Standard biography is W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh's Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, 1913. This work Supplements J. E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870-1871 (reissued 1926). A Companion volume to the biography is M. A. Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen, 1920. Other biographical and critical studies include Geraldine Mitton, Jane Austen and Her Times, 1905; E. W. Cornish, Jane Austen, 1913; R. B. Johnson, Jane Austen: Her Life Her Work, Her Family, and Her Critics, 1930; Lord David Cecil, Jane Austen, 1935; Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art, 1939; R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen and Southampton, 1949; Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen, 1952; Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, 1952; and A. M. Wright, Jane Austen's Novels, 1953.

A most useful book of Austen studies is R. W. Chapman's Jane Austen: Facts and Problems, 1949. In Speaking of Jane Austen, 1944, and More Talk of Jane Austen, 1949, Sheila Kay-Smith and G. B. Stern present lively, appreciative table-talk on Jane Austen and her art. Recent studies include Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art, 1963; Jan Watt, ed., Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963; and A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, 1965.