Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The first 25 years of her life Austen spent in Hampshire. On his father's retirement the family moved to Bath.
Austen started to write for family amusement as a child. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. After the death of her father in 1805 she lived with her mother and sister in Southampton and moved in 1809 to a large cottage in the village of Chawton.
There she started to write her major works, among them SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters Marianne and Elinor and their marriages, THE PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, describing the clash between Elisabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich a aristocratic landowner, who ultimately are united, MANSFIELD PARK, EMMA, written in comic tone and telling the story of Emma Woodhouse, who finds her destiny in marriage, and PERSUASION. Austen's fiction is characterized byt its focus on middle-class provincial life and humour. She restricted her material to a narrow range of society and events, which seems to have been dictated more by artistic considerations than her own middle-class life circles.
Of her six great novels, four were published anonymously during her lifetime and it was only after Austen's death that her brother Henry made her authorship public. At her death on July 18, 1817 in Winchester Austen was writing the unfinished SANDITON. - Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Although her novels did not gain huge popularity in her own day, Emma was reviewed favourably by Sir Walter Scott. LADY SUSAN and THE WATSONS were not published until they appeared in the second edition of J.E. Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen (1871). Unfinished SANDITON was published in 1925.
For further reading: Memoirs by J.E. Austen-Leigh (1870); Jane Austen and Her Art by M. Lascalles (1941); The Language of Jane Austen by N. Page (1972); The Critical Heritage, ed. by B. Southam (1987); Jane Austen by Claudia L. Johnson (1990); Erotic Faith by Robert M. Polhemus (1990); Jane Austen's Novels by Roger Gard (1992); Critical Essays of Jane Austen, ed. by Laura Mooneyham (1998); Jane Austen by Deirdre Le Faye (1998)
Museum: Jane Austen's House, Chawton, Alton, GU34 ISD. - Austen wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion while living in this house.
Emma - a novel begun in January 1814 and completed in March next years. Published in three volumes in 1815. The protagonist, Emma Woodhouse, is wealthy, pretty, self-satisfied young woman. She is left alone with her hypocondrial father. Her governess, Miss Taylor, marries a neighbour, Mr. Weston, and blind to her own feelings, he indulges herself with meddlesome and unsuccessful attempts at matchmaking among her friends and neighbours. She makes a protégée of Harriet Smith, an illegitimate girl of no social status and tries to manipulate a marriage between Harriet and Mr. Elton, a young clergyman, who has set his sight on Emma herself. Emma has feelings about Mr. Weston's son. When Harriet becomes interested George Knightley, a neighboring squire who had been her mentor and friend, Emma examines her own conduct. She has always regarded Knightley as hers, and finally finds her destiny in marriage with him. Harriet, who is left to decide for herself, marries Robert Martin, a young farmer.
SEE ALSO: J.F. Cooper
Selected novels: