Jane Austen

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist. She wrote many books of romantic fiction about the gentry. Her works made her one of the most famous and beloved writers in English literature. She is one of the great masters of the English novel.
Austen's works criticized sentimental novels in the late 18th century, and are part of the change to nineteenth-century realism. She wrote about typical people in everyday life. This gave the English novel its first distinctly modern character. Austen's stories are often comic, but they also show how women depended on marriage for social standing and economic security. Her works are also about moral problems.
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke. Educated mostly by her father and older brothers, and also by her own reading, she lived with her family at Steventon. They moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After he died in 1805, she moved around with her mother. In 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. She died there on 18 July 1817.
Jane Austen was very modest about her own genius. She once famously described her work as "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor". When she was a girl she wrote stories. Her works were printed only after much revision. Only four of her novels were printed while she was alive. They were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were printed in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen. Persuasion was written shortly before her death. She also wrote two earlier works, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. She had been working on a new novel, Sanditon, but she died before she could finish it. She is now a well known great writer.
Biography
Biographical facts about Jane Austen are "famously scarce" (few). Only a few letters remain (it is estimated that only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters survive). Her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were written) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept. The letters she did not destroy she censored. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographies written about her for 50 years after she died was by her relatives, who often described her as "good quiet Aunt Jane". Scholars have not been able to find much information after that.
Family
Austen's parents, George Austen (1731-1805), and his wife, Cassandra (1739-1827), were both part of the gentry. Cassandra was a part of the important Leigh family. George Austen, however, was of a lower class of society. He had first met Cassandra at Oxford, while she was meeting her uncle Theophilus. George and Cassandra married on 26 April 1764 at Walcot Church in Bath.
Austen had a large family. She had six brothers--James (1765-1819), George (1766-1838), Edward (1767-1852), Henry Thomas (1771-1850), Francis William (Frank) (1774-1865), Charles John (1779-1852)--and one sister, Cassandra Elizabeth (1773-1845), who died without marrying. Jane deeply loved Cassandra, and they were both best friends. Of her brothers, Austen was most close to Henry, who helped spread and influence her writing. "Oh, what a Henry!" she once wrote. George was almost ten years older than Jane. He suffered from fits and was not able to develop normally. His father wrote of him, "We have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child". He may also have been deaf and mute. Jane knew sign language (she mentioned talking "with my fingers" in a letter) and could have communicated with him. Charles and Frank served in the navy. Edward was adopted by his fourth cousin, Thomas Knight. He became "Edward Knight" instead of Edward Austen in 1812.
Early life and education
Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon rectory. She was christened at home and then, as the Book of Common Prayer directs, brought to church for the baptism to be certified in public on 5 April 1776. A few months after she was born, her mother hired a woman named Elizabeth Littlewood to nurse her. Littlewood took care of Austen for about a year. According to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Crawley in 1783. They moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane almost died. After that, Austen was educated at home until she went to boarding school with Cassandra early in 1785. She learned some French, spelling, needlework, dancing,music, and probably drama. In the winter of 1786, Jane and Cassandra went back home.
Austen also learned much by reading books. Her father and brothers helped choose the books she read. George Austen seemed to have let his daughters read the books in his large library freely. He also allowed Austen's experiments in writing, and gave her costly paper and other writing materials.
Jane Austen and her family also enjoyed acting out plays privately. Most of the plays were comedies. This might have been a way for Austen's comedic and satirical talents to develop.
Early writings
Perhaps from as early as 1787, Austen began writing poems, short stories, and plays for fun. Austen later put together "fair copies" of 29 of these early works into three notebooks. They are now called the Juvenilia. It has pieces which were first written down between 1787 and 1793. Jane Austen had arranged her writing during this time into three volumes, namely Volume the First, Volume the Second and Volume the Third. There is some proof that Austen continued to work on these pieces later in life. Her nephew and niece, James Edward and Anna Austen, may have made further additions to her work in around 1814. In these works were included Love and Friendship which was completed in 1790 and Lesley Castle which was completed in 1792. In Love and Friendship, she laughed at popular sentimental novels. She also wrote The History of England, which had 13 watercolour pictures by her sister Cassandra inside it.
Death
Jane Austen started to feel increasingly unwell during 1816, which was the year when her novel 'Persuasion' was published. On 24 May 1817, she moved to Winchester in search for a cure to her illness. She died on 18 July 1817, aged 41. Although there is no conclusive evidence to prove the cause of her death, it seems likely that it was Addison's disease that killed her. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral on 24 July 1817.
Related pages
Reception history of Jane Austen
References
Bibliography
Primary works
Austen, Jane. Catharine and Other Writings. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. .
Austen, Jane. The History of England. Ed. David Starkey. Icon Books, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. .
Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. Jane Austen's Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. .
Secondary works
Biographies
Austen, Henry Thomas. "Biographical Notice of the Author". Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. London: John Murray, 1817.
Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 1926. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Austen-Leigh, William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913.
Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1991. .
Honan, Park. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. .
Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: A Family Record. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. .
Nokes, David. Jane Austen: A Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. .
Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. .
Essay collections
Alexander, Christine and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. .
Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. .
Grey, J. David, ed. The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1986. .
Lynch, Deidre, ed. Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. .
Southam, B. C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812-1870. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. .
Southam, B. C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870-1940. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. .
Todd, Janet, ed. Jane Austen in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. .
Watt, Ian, ed. Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. .
Monographs and articles
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. .
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. .
Byrne, Paula. Jane Austen and the Theatre. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. .
Collins, Irene. Jane Austen and the Clergy. London: The Hambledon Press, 1994. .
Devlin, D.D. Jane Austen and Education. London: Macmillan, 1975. .
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. .
Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1983. .
Ferguson, Moira. "Mansfield Park, Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender". Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991): 118-39.
Galperin, William. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. .
Gay, Penny. Jane Austen and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. .
Gubar, Susan and Sandra Gilbert. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. .
Harding, D.W., "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen". Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Jenkyns, Richard. A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. .
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. .
Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. Brighton: Harvester, 1983. .
Koppel, Gene. The Religious Dimension in Jane Austen's Novels. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Lascelles, Mary. Jane Austen and Her Art. Original publication 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.
Litz, A. Walton. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. .
MacDonagh, Oliver. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. .
Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. .
Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.
Page, Norman. The Language of Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. .
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. .
Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. .
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. .
Todd, Janet. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. .
Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. .
Wiltshire, John. Recreating Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. .
Wiltshire, John. Jane Austen and the Body: The Picture of Health. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. .
Other websites
Online works
1775 births
1817 deaths
Disease-related deaths in Hampshire
English novelists
Writers from Hampshire