BIOGRAPHY

JANE AUSTEN'S BIOGRAPHY

Jane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from 18^th century neo-classicism to 19^th century romanticism.

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, near Basingstoke, in Hampshire. The seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, she was educated mainly at home and never lived apart from her family. She had a happy childhood amongst all her brothers and the other boys who lodged with the family and whom Mr Austen tutored. Jane was devoted to her older sister, Cassandra-Elizabeth, and eventually wrote enough letters to her to choke a horse. They were inseparable. When Cassandra, age 10, was sent away to school in Oxford, Jane begged to be sent along with her even though she was too young. Mr Austen, however, couldn't really afford their schooling and the girls were back home after less than three years. Apart from this, Jane never lived outside of her family circle again. She ended up very well educated for a female. Her oldest brother James helped her out by organising reading lists for her, and Jane could lay claim to a good knowledge of history as well as a little Latin, Italian and musical training.

To amuse themselves, the children wrote and performed plays and charades, and even as a little girl Jane was encouraged to write. The reading that she did of the books in her father's extensive library provided material for the short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl. It was 1787 when made the decision to devote all her spare time to writing. This early work made three volumes of Juvenilia, and you can see all that satire just dying to come out. At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Friendship and, in 1791, she wrote a parody of Oliver Goldsmith's History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian.

A few years later, when she was only about nineteen, she started work on Lady Susan, an epistolary novel, which was Jane's first attempt at a serious theme. It didn't work well in the format she used, but it was good enough to encourage her to keep going. She began another epistolary novel in 1795, which was titled Elinor and Marianne, and 1796 saw the beginning of First Impressions.

But don't think it was all work for Jane. Like any single young lady back then, Jane enjoy dancing (an activity which features frequently in her novels) and she attended balls in many of the great houses of the neighbourhood. Properly escorted of course, and flirted decorously with eligible young men. Cassandra had become engaged to Tom Fowle, a local clergyman, in 1795. Two yearsed of yellow fever, and Cassandra slid into quiet spinsterhood with her sister.

In August of 1797, Jane submitted Firs Impressions, as it was still known, for publication, and it was turned down firmly. Jane was not surprised or disappointed, she'd only sent it in because her entire family was telling her to. She knew it wasn't any good. She spent the next two years rewriting Elinor and Marianne into Sense and Sensibility and starting work on Susan. In 1800 she took a break and went to visit an in-law.

She loved the country, enjoyed long country walks, and had many Hampshire fri later, Tom's patron, Lord Craven, who had just purchased a colonelcy in the West Indies, asked Tom to go there as his private chaplain, and Tom felt he didn't dare refuse. Unfortunately, Tom diends. It therefore came as a considerable shock when she returned home and her parents suddenly announced in 1801 that the family would be moving away to Bath. Mr Austen gave the Steventon living to his son James and retired to Bath with his wife and two daughters. The next four years were difficult ones for Jane Austen. She disliked the confines of a busy town and missed her Steventon life. Jane soon adjusted to the idea of moving, especially since it was probably meant to improve her parent's health. Somewhere around early 1804, Jane started another novel called The Watsons, but when Jane's father died on 21 January 1805, she set the novel aside in her grief and never returned to it. After her father's death, his widow and daughters also suffered financial difficulties and were forced to rely on the charity of the Austen sons. Jane and her mother were now exceedingly poor. Three of the boys in the family chipped in to arrange an annual income and lodgings for the ladies, but Jane's letters of the time hint that she was depressed at the restrictions of her finances. So it was probably out of desperation that she sent off one of her manuscripts to a publisher.

It was also at this time that, while on holiday in the West Country, Jane fell in love, and when the young man died, she was deeply upset. Also around this time, Jane paid her first visit to the Bigg-Wither family and met the reasonably young, moderately wealthy Harris Bigg-Wither, a landowner and brother to some of her closest friends. About a year later, when Jane visited the family again in early December 1802, Harris proposed to Jane and she accepted. But before you start scratching your head and trying to figure out why she isn't known to posterity as Jane Bigg-Wither, know that Jane changed her mind the very next morning. Now this was really something of scandal. Jane and Cassandra, who was also visiting, fled to their brother James' house (actually their old house) and demanded to be scorted to Bath immediately, where Jane had to lay low until everything blew over.

After the death of Mr Austen, the Austen ladies moved to Southampton to share the home of Jane's naval brother Frank and his wife Mary. There were occasional visits to London, where Jane stayed with her favourite brother Henry, at that time a prosperous banker, and where she enjoyed visits to the theatre and art exhibitions. However, she wrote little in Bath and nothing at all in Southampton. Then, in July 1809, on her brother Edward offering his mother and sisters a permanent home on his Chawton estate, the Austen ladies moved back to their beloved Hampshire countryside. It was a small but comfortable house, with a pretty garden, and most importantly it provided the settled home, which Jane Austen needed in order to write.

In 1810, Sense and Sensibility was accepted for publication but the author would pay publication on commission, meaning the printing costs. Jane, expecting to lose money, only agreed reluctantly, but the novel sold briskly and gave Jane a profit of about 140. Jane, knowing a good thing when she saw it, started work on Mansfield Park and sold Pride and Prejudice for publication in 1812. By the next year, it was the fashionable novel in England, and Mansfield Park was published and selling right along. In November of 1815, Jane discovered she had fans in high places. People had finally realised who she was, thanks to her brother Henry, who had begun sharing her identity with his friends and acquaintances. Their friends and acquaintances, etc until even the Prince Regent, who owned enough copies of each of Jane's novels to stock all his residences, knew who she was. None of the books published in her lifetime had her name on them - they were described as being written "By a lady". He sent Jane, through his chief librarian, royal permission to dedicate any forthcoming novel to His Royal Highness. Jane, like 99% of the British population at the time, greatly disapproved of the Prince Regent and made up her mind to ignore this permission. Fortunately, several of her relatives rightly interpreted this permission as a command, and Emma, published in 1815, was duly dedicated to the spoiled, spendthrift Prince.

Jane's health was beginning to fail by now. In her quest to tie up loose ends, she now repurchased the manuscript of Susan (NorthangerAbbey) from the publishers who'd bought it for 10 back in 1803 and the ignored it. Once the purchase, conducted through an intermediary, was complete, Jane took great pleasure in informing the publishers that the manuscript was by the renowned author of Pride and Prejudice, etc. There is unfortunately no record of the publisher's reactions to this news.

Though she began another novel during a period of remission, in the winter of 1816 called Sanditon, but illness prevented its completion because Jane health was very poor. She probably had the then-unnamed Addison's Disease, which attacks the adrenal glands, a tubercular disease of the kidneys. In April of 1817, Jane quietly made her will, guessing in spite of all the doctor's reassurances that she would not live long, and left everything, except two small bequests, to her beloved Cassandra. By May 18117 she was so ill that she and Cassandra, to be near Jane's physician, rented rooms in Winchester. Tragically, there was then no cure and Jane Austen died in her sister's arms in the early hours of 18 of July 1817. She was 41 years old and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

In December of that year, her chatty brother Henry arranged the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which she'd finished in August 1816, with the first official acknowledgement of Jane's authorship on the tittle page. The heroine of Persuasion, incidentally, was Anne Elliot, who many of her relatives and friends seemed to think was most like Jane herself in temperament.

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