Jane Austen Biography and latest books by Jane Austen

Jane Austen was an English novelist of the early 19th century and the author of the novels, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma et al. Her works of fiction depicting the life of English gentry in those times have captured the minds of readers for around two centuries.

Jane Austen was born on 16th December 1775, to Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Austen (nee Leigh) in Steventon, where George Austen served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon, Hampshire[16] and a nearby village. Austen\'s immediate family was large: six brothers—James, George, Edward, Henry Thomas, Francis William, Charles John—and one sister, Cassandra Elizabeth, who, like Jane, died unmarried. Cassandra was Austen\'s elder sister, closest friend and confidante throughout her life.

Perhaps as early as 1787, Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family\'s amusement. Austen later compiled "fair copies" of 29 of these early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia, containing pieces originally written between 1787 and 1793. She wrote her first novel, Love and Friendship [sic], which was included in Juvenilia.

Between 1793 and 1795, Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. After finishing Lady Susan, Austen attempted her first full-length novel—Elinor and Marianne (this was later made into Sense and Sensibility and published in 1811). Austen began work on a second novel, First Impressions, in 1796 and completed the initial draft in August 1797 when she was only 21 (it later became Pride and Prejudice to be published in 1813). During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel.

In December 1800, Rev. Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to Bath. This affected Jane Austen’s productivity as a writer and she barely wrote or published anything during the period that she stayed there with her family. Following her father’s demise in 1805, Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved to Southampton to stay with Frank Austen and his wife for a while.

Around early 1809, Austen\'s brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village. Here the author, found a place which was closer to her childhood and gave her the space and atmosphere where she could write again with the same passion and zeal. From 1809 to 1816, Jane Austen was at her career’s best, having published all her major works and still writing.  She reworked her novel Elinor and Marianne and published it as Sense and Sensibility in 1811. She had begun work on Mansfield Park earlier in that year. She began changing her second novel First Impressions and it was published as Pride and Prejudice in the year 1813. The second edition of Sense and Sensibility was also released during this time. In early 1814, she began writing Emma, and her novel Mansfield Park was published later in the same year. While Emma was being prepared for publication, Austen began to write a new novel she titled The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan which was to be published as Northanger Abbey.

She fell ill in the beginning of 1816, but continued to work on her novels. She rewrote two chapters of The Elliots and began work on a new novel called The Brothers, which was later titled Sandition.

Jane Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. The cause of her death is unsure, though it’s claimed that it could have been Addison’s disease. Her sister Cassandra and brother Henry, who used to be her literary agent too, arranged with Murray, her publisher, for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set in December 1817.Three years following the publication of that set, none of her works were in print for almost twelve years. In 1832, publisher Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of Austen\'s novels and, beginning in either December 1832 or January 1833, published them in five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley published the first collected edition of Austen\'s works. Since then, Austen\'s novels have been continuously in print.

Austen’s works, though widely read during her time, did not get her fame on account of her publishing her novels anonymously, apparently keeping with the tradition of her times. All of her books till her death were published as being written "by a lady". For her posthumous publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Even the epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen\'s personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation, mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.

Austen’s writing has certain elements that are central to all her works. One was the role of the female protagonist, her characteristics and their struggle to fit into the society’s norms and find their own individuality. She explored gender inequalities, class hierarchy and dynamics of the interactions between people from different classes in the English gentry. This she supplemented with her brilliant use of satire and irony in her sentences juxtaposed with the plot narrative.  Her narrative was imbued with realistic depictions of her times, not in terms of physical descriptions of color, shape or outward appearances of the characters, but with their thought processes, mental states and introspection of the characters. She weaved these in her style of free indirect speech wherein the narrator was expressing the thoughts of the characters, thus assimilating the two as one vehicle of delivery of the story.  Compared to other early 19th-century novels, Austen\'s have little narrative or scenic description—they contain much more dialogue, whether spoken between characters, written as free indirect speech, or represented through letters. This further heightened the experience of the reader in identifying and relating with the characters.

Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, contributed one the public reviews, anonymously. Using the review as a platform from which to defend the then disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen\'s realism. The other important early review of Austen\'s works was published by Richard Whately in 1821. He drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, praising the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Whately and Scott set the tone for almost all subsequent nineteenth-century Austen criticism.

Through the mid-nineteenth century, her novels were admired mainly by members of the literary elite. However, the publication of her nephew\'s A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced her to a far wider public as an appealing personality and kindled popular interest in her works. By the 1940s, Austen had become widely accepted in academia as a "great English writer". The second half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship, which explored many aspects of her novels: artistic, ideological, and historical.

In popular culture, a Janeite fan culture has developed, centered on Austen\'s life, her works and have spawned many sequels, prequels, and adaptations of almost every sort from Hollywood blockbusters to popular TV series.

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