Further
information: Timeline
of Jane Austen
Biographical information concerning Jane
Austen is "famously scarce", according to one biographer.[8] Only some personal and family
letters remain (by one estimate only
160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters are extant),[9] and her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were
originally addressed) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept
and censored those she did not destroy.[10] Other letters were destroyed by the
heirs of Admiral Francis
Austen, Jane's
brother.[11] Most of the biographical material
produced for fifty years after Austen's death was written by her relatives and
reflects the family's biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane". Scholars have unearthed
little information since.[12]
Jane Austen's father,
George Austen (1731–1805), and his wife, Cassandra (1739–1827), were members of
substantial gentry families.[13] George was descended from a family
of woollen manufacturers which had risen through the professions to the lower
ranks of the landed gentry.[14] Cassandra was a member of the
prominent Leigh family.[15] From 1765 until 1801, that is, for
much of Jane's life, George Austen served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon,
Hampshire and a
nearby village. From 1773 until 1796, he supplemented this income by farming and
by teaching three or four boys at a time who boarded at his home.[16]
Austen's immediate family
was large: 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, like Jane, died unmarried. Cassandra was
Austen's closest friend and confidante throughout her life.[17] Of her brothers, Austen felt
closest to Henry, who became a banker and, after his bank failed, an Anglican
clergyman. Henry was also his sister's literary agent. His large circle of friends and
acquaintances in London included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters, and
actors: he provided Austen with a view of social worlds not normally visible
from a small parish in rural Hampshire.[18] George was sent to live with a
local family at a young age because, as Austen biographer Le Faye describes it,
he was "mentally abnormal and subject to fits".[19] He may also have been deaf and dumb.[20] Charles and Frank served in the
navy, both rising to the rank of admiral. Edward was brought up by his second
cousin Thomas Knight, eventually inheriting Knight's estate and taking his name.[21]
Austen was born on 16
December 1775 at Steventon rectory and publicly christened on 5 April 1776.[23] After a few months at home, her
mother placed Austen with a woman living in a nearby village who nursed and raised Austen for a year or eighteen
months.[24] In 1783, according to family
tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann
Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls
caught typhus and Jane nearly died.[25] Austen was subsequently educated at
home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in
1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling,
needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. By December 1786, Jane and
Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both
of their daughters to school.[26] Austen acquired the remainder of
her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and
Henry.[27] George Austen apparently gave his
daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of
Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and
provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their
writing and drawing.[28] According to Park Honan, a
biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in "an open,
amused, easy intellectual atmosphere" where the ideas of those with whom
the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and
discussed.[29] After returning from school in
1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her
immediate family environment".[30]
Private theatricals were
also a part of Austen's education. From when she was seven until she was
thirteen, the family and close friends staged a series of plays, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. While the details are unknown, Austen would certainly have joined
in these activities, as a spectator at first and as a participant when she was
older.[31] Most of the plays were comedies,
which suggests one way in which Austen's comedic and satirical gifts were
cultivated.[32]
Perhaps as early as 1787,
Austen began to write poems, stories, and plays for her own and her family's
amusement.[33] 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.[34] There is manuscript evidence that
Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as the period 1809–11, and
that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions
as late as 1814.[35] Among these works are a satirical
novel in letters entitled Love
and Freindship
[sic], in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility,[36] and The
History of England, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolour miniatures by
her sister Cassandra. Austen's "History" parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764).[37] Austen wrote, for example:
"Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction
in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor
Richard the 2nd, to resign it to him, & to retire for the rest of his Life
to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered."[38] Austen's Juvenilia are
often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and
"anarchic"; he compares them to the work of eighteenth-century
novelist Laurence
Sterne and the
twentieth-century comedy group Monty Python.[39]
As Austen grew into
adulthood, she continued to live at her parents' home, carrying out those activities
normal for women of her age and social standing: she practiced the pianoforte, assisted her sister and mother
with supervising servants, and attended female relatives during childbirth and
older relatives on their deathbeds.[40] She sent short pieces of writing to
her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth.[41] Austen was particularly proud of
her accomplishments as a seamstress.[42] She also attended church regularly,
socialized frequently with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her
own composition—aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the
neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper
or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall.[43] Her brother Henry later said that
"Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".[44]
In 1793, Austen began and
then abandoned a short play, later entitled Sir Charles Grandison or the
happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around
1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of
Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.[45] Honan speculates that at some
point not long after writing Love
and Freindship
[sic] in 1789, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her
central effort", that is, to become a professional writer.[46] Whenever she made that decision,
beginning in about 1793, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.[47]
During the period between
1793 and 1795, Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most
ambitious and sophisticated early work.[48] It is unlike any of Austen's other
works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the heroine of the novella as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence
and charm to manipulate, betray, and abuse her victims, whether lovers, friends
or family. Tomalin writes: "Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a
play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration
dramatists who may
have provided some of her inspiration....It stands alone in Austen's work as a
study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater
than those of anyone she encounters."[49]
After finishing Lady Susan, Austen attempted her first
full-length novel—Elinor and Marianne. Her sister Cassandra later
remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told
through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is
no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published
in 1811 as Sense
and Sensibility.[50]
When Austen was twenty, Tom
Lefroy, a nephew of
neighbours, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just
finished a university degree and was moving to London to train as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at
a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's
letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am
almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to
yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and
sitting down together."[52] The Lefroy family intervened and
sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical, as both Lefroy
and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a
great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career.
If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the
Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again.[53]
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 would later become Pride
and Prejudice);
as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was
working on it and it became an "established favourite".[54] At this time, her father made the
first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen
wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if
he would consider publishing "a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols.
about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina" (First Impressions) at
the author's financial risk. Cadell quickly returned Mr. Austen's letter,
marked "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her
father's efforts.[55] Following the completion of First
Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from
November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person
narration and
produced something close to Sense
and Sensibility.[56]
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.[57] Austen completed her work about a
year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin
Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised
early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being
"in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in
Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in
1816.[58]
In December 1800, Rev.
Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave
Steventon, and move the family to Bath. While retirement and travel were good for the
elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only
home she had ever known. An indication of Austen's state of mind is her lack of
productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to
make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new
novel, The
Watsons, but
there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795-1799.[59] Tomalin suggests this reflected a
deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote
or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few
months after her father died.[60]
In December 1802, Austen
received her only proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and
Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother,
Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither
proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece,
and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a
large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was
aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had
known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical
advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates
located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources,
Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a
permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next
morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.[61] No contemporary letters or diaries
describe how Austen felt about this proposal.[62] In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to
her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship,
telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I
shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, &
not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be
preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection".[63]
In 1804, while living in
Bath, Austen started but did not complete a new novel, The Watsons. The
story centres on an invalid clergyman with little money and his four unmarried
daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh
economic realities of dependent women's lives".[64] Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees,
that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January
1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too
closely for her comfort.[65]
Rev. Austen's final illness
had struck suddenly, leaving him, as Austen reported to her brother Francis,
"quite insensible of his own state", and he died quickly.[66] Jane, Cassandra, and their mother
were left in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and
Francis Austen pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and
sisters.[67] For the next four years, the
family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They lived
part of the time in rented quarters in Bath and then, beginning in
On 5 April 1809, about
three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter
to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if that was
needed to secure immediate publication of the novel, and otherwise requesting
the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied he
had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that
Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find
another publisher. However, Austen did not have the resources to repurchase the
book.[69]
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 that was part of Edward's nearby
estate, Chawton
House. Jane,
Cassandra, and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809.[70] In Chawton, life was quieter
than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not
socialise with the neighbouring gentry and entertained only when family
visited. Austen's niece Anna described the Austen family's life in Chawton:
"It was a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great
readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working
with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."[71] Austen wrote almost daily, but
privately, and seems to have been relieved of some household responsibilities
to give her more opportunity to write.[72] In this setting, she was able to be
productive as a writer once more.[73]
During her time at Chawton,
Jane Austen successfully published four novels, which were generally
well-received. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense
and Sensibility,[E] which appeared in October 1811. Reviews
were favourable and the novel became fashionable among opinion-makers;[74] the edition sold out by mid-1813.[F] Austen's earnings from Sense and
Sensibility provided her with some financial and psychological independence.[75] Egerton then published Pride
and Prejudice,
a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. He advertised the book
widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and
selling well. By October 1813, Egerton was able to begin selling a second
edition.[76] Mansfield
Park was
published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by
reviewers, it was a great success with the public. All copies were sold within
six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her
other novels.[77]
Austen learned that the Prince
Regent admired her
novels and kept a set at each of his residences.[G] In November 1815, the Prince
Regent's librarian invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and
hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disliked the
Prince, she could scarcely refuse the request.[78] She later wrote Plan of a Novel,
according to hints from various quarters, a satiric outline of the
"perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a
future Austen novel.[79]
In mid-1815, Austen moved
her work from Egerton to John
Murray, a better
known London publisher,[H] who published Emma in
December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma
sold well but the new edition of Mansfield Park did not, and this
failure offset most of the profits Austen earned on Emma. These were the
last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.[80]
While Murray prepared Emma
for publication, Austen began to write a new novel she titled The Elliots,
later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in
July
Early in 1816, Jane Austen
began to feel unwell. She ignored her illness at first and continued to work and
to participate in the usual round of family activities. By the middle of that
year, her decline was unmistakable to Austen and to her family, and Austen's
physical condition began a long, slow, and irregular deterioration culminating
in her death the following year.[82] The majority of Austen biographers
rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's tentative 1964 retrospective
diagnosis and list
her cause of death as Addison's
disease. However,
her final illness has also been described as Hodgkin's
lymphoma.[I]
Austen continued to work in
spite of her illness. She became dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots
and rewrote the final two chapters, finishing them on 6
August 1816.[J] In January 1817, Austen began work
on a new novel she called The Brothers, later titled Sanditon upon its first publication in 1925, and
completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably
because her illness prevented her from continuing.[83] Austen made light of her condition
to others, describing it as "Bile" and rheumatism, but as her disease
progressed she experienced increasing difficulty walking or finding the energy
for other activities. By mid-April, Austen was confined to her bed. In May,
their brother Henry escorted Jane and Cassandra to Winchester for medical
treatment. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817. Through his clerical
connections, Henry arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of
the nave of Winchester
Cathedral. 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.[84]
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