Jane Austen
The English novelist Jane Austen was born
December 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children, in the Parsonage
House of Steventon, Hampshire, where she spent her first
twenty-five years. During her brief lifetime Austen witnessed
political unrest, revolution, war, and industrialization, yet these
momentous events are not the central subjects of her finely focused
novels. Rather, Austen wrote of her immediate experience: the
microcosm of the country gentry and its class-conscious insularity.
Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, was the erudite country
rector of Steventon, and her mother, Cassandra (née Leigh), was
descended from an aristocratic line of learned clergymen. By no
means wealthy, the Austens nonetheless enjoyed a comfortable,
socially respectable life, and greatly prized their children’s
education.
Jane and her beloved elder (and only) sister,
Cassandra, were schooled in Southampton and Reading for a short
period, but most of their education took place at home. Private
theatrical performances in the barn at Steventon complemented
Jane’s studies of French, Italian, history, music, and
eighteenth-century fiction. An avid reader from earliest childhood,
Jane began writing at age twelve, no doubt encouraged by her
cultured and affectionate family. Indeed, family and writing were
her great loves; despite a fleeting engagement in 1802, Austen
never married. Her first two novels, “Elinor and Marianne” and
“First Impressions,” were written while at Steventon but never
published in their original form.
Following her father’s retirement, Jane moved in
1801 with her parents and sister to Bath. That popular watering
hole, removed from the country life Jane preferred, presented the
sociable young novelist with a wealth of observations and
experience that would later emerge in her novels. Austen moved to
Southampton with her mother and sister after the death of her
father in 1805. Several years later the three women settled in
Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, where Austen resided until the end of
her life. She relished her return to the countryside and, with it,
a renewed artistic vigor that led to the revision of her early
novels. Sense and Sensibility, a reworking of “Elinor and
Marianne,” was published in 1811, followed by Pride and
Prejudice, a reworking of “First Impressions,” two years
later.
Austen completed four more novels (Mansfield
Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion) in the
Chawton sitting room. Productive and discreet, she insisted that
her work be kept secret from anyone outside the family. All of her
novels were published anonymously, including the posthumous
release, thanks to her brother Henry, of Northanger Abbey
and Persuasion.
The last years of Austen’s life were relatively
quiet and comfortable. Her final, unfinished work, Sanditon,
was put aside in the spring of 1817, when her health sharply
declined and she was taken to Winchester for medical treatment of
what appears to have been Addison’s disease or a form of lymphoma.
Jane Austen died there on July 18, 1817, and is buried in
Winchester Cathedral.