Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose six completed novels of manners, marriage, and social commentary are read more than two centuries after her death and have shaped much of the modern English novel. She was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of an Anglican rector and his wife, and spent most of her life in southern England.

Austen's formal schooling was brief. She and her older sister Cassandra attended boarding schools in Oxford, Southampton, and Reading between 1783 and 1786, but most of her education came from her father's library and the lively intellectual life of the rectory, where she began writing parodies, plays, and verse as a child.

She drafted early versions of three novels in her twenties, but her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, did not appear until 1811, issued anonymously "by a Lady." It was followed by Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815, the last of which she dedicated, at his request, to the Prince Regent.

After moving with her mother and sister to the village of Chawton in 1809, she revised earlier manuscripts and produced new fiction in the years that followed. Two further novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published together in 1817, the year of her death from an unidentified illness at the age of forty-one.

The name Jane is an English form of the medieval French Jehanne, ultimately from the Latin Iohannes and the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious." It became widespread among English speakers from the sixteenth century onward, often given to royal and middle-class daughters alike.